A full review of Google’s Android G1 Phone

The T-Mobile G1 Google smartphone, designed by Google and made by HTC, remains firmly in the shadow of the iPhone—for now. The phone, which goes on sale next week in the US and next month in Britain, was released too early. The HTC hardware and Android OS that powers it lack the polish and depth of even the iPhone 1.0 in most respects. It’s not a bad phone, but the software and hardware needed more time in the oven to bring them to a golden brown crispness.

The G1 would come off much better if it wasn’t competing with the 3G iPhone and iPhone OS 2.1. Admittedly, it’s not clear that Google would have been able to sign up carriers back when the original iPhone was released back in the pre-3G and pre-App Store days, back when Google assembled the three dozen firms that form the Open Handset Alliance, without the iPhone as leverage. While Android’s development predates the release of the original iPhone, phones based on the OS will be pushed onto the market in part because of Apple’s exclusive carrier deals; carriers left out need an alternative.

The G1 is burdened with a lot of issues that have little to do with the phone itself, but we’ll see if we can get past that to explore the general inadequacy of the phone.

The hardware
You notice the G1’s ordinariness as soon as you unpack the phone, which comes wrapped in a small, neatly designed box. The cables are the kind you find accompanying any phone, which somehow makes the G1 appear bland even before use.

Android’s Maps program integrates multiple Google Maps views, and uses the GPS receiver for position.

The G1 guides you through a simple and well-designed setup process for creating accounts and filling in basic parameters. Oddly, despite the inclusion of a WiFi radio, there’s no option to add existing WiFi accounts during setup. Instead, the phone defaults to using T-Mobile’s limited 3G network, available in a few dozen cities right now. (Both data plans for the G1 include unlimited T-Mobile HotSpot use, which includes several thousand locations in the US)

Previews of the phone, produced by reviewers at national publications (like Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal) led me to expect a somewhat better piece of gear than what the G1 turned out to be. The G1 has a slightly rubberized case that’s comfortable in the hand, but the fit and finish isn’t all there.

The phone’s slide-out keyboard doesn’t have a smooth motion—it slams into place. The display portion wobbles slightly and doesn’t lock solidly into open or closed positions. The bottom portion of the phone, when in closed portrait mode, has a slight raise and tilt, and feels exactly right. HTC crammed five buttons and a trackball nubbin into that area.

When butterflied open, the raised and tilted portion winds up on the right side of the keyboard, and irritates while you type. The keyboard is quite nice, with all the letters and numbers available, along with keys for period and the @-sign, plus a dedicated Google search key. It’s quite similar to a one-letter-per-key BlackBerry.

Ports and buttons seem to be scattered around the phone, based on where they happen to fit, rather than having been placed through a well-thought-out design; HTC may have based this on a previous model to produce it so fast. Owners of HTC phones may be used to having volume up/down buttons in a reasonable place (the upper left side of the phone in portrait mode), but the compact USB jack is at the bottom, the camera button at the lower right, and the microSD slot cover is partly hidden when the phone isn’t opened.

There’s no standard headphone jack either, although the unit comes with a set of uncomfortable microphone/earbuds that use HTC’s proprietary USB audio connector to hook into the phone. An ungainly USB-to-2.5mm adapter is available, but not included.

The earbuds have good audio quality when listening to music. There’s a large rectangular bolus in the cable with a thumbnail for adjusting volume, a button for controlling call and music behavior, and a built-in microphone.

In use, the G1 doesn’t feel overly large unless you’re holding an iPhone in the other hand. But the slide-open keyboard makes the G1 more practical for large quantities of typing. As a 100wpm touch-typist, I’m still uncomfortable with the iPhone’s glass keyboard; I could type well on the G1 keyboard immediately.

A built-in speaker produces decent sound and can pump out at extremely high volume. The speaker is on the back, so it’s easy to muffle if you’re playing back YouTube or using it as a speaker phone when resting it on a table.

The out-of-the-box brightness was far too dim, obviously set to about 35 percent of maximum to preserve battery life. At its full brightness, video playback from YouTube was far more attractive.

The built-in three-megapixel camera produces extremely sharp, high-quality photos, even at a range of a few inches. Its auto-focus and exposure adjustments are fantastic. A third-party bar-code scanner had no trouble instantly recognizing and decoding a photo of a UPC printed on a book, for instance. However, the best hardware feature of a smartphone should not be its camera.

A photo taken with the G1’s camera.

The phone comes with a 1 GB microSD card installed, which is used by default to store photos, music, and other items. Plugging the phone into a computer via USB mounts the card, and its contents can be copied without special software. This is a meager amount of storage compared with the iPhone’s base 8 and 16GB models, but a 4GB microSD card can be had for as little as $14; T-Mobile maybe should have opted to eat a few dollars and include that amount of storage.

Although I didn’t have a G1 for long enough to test its battery performance during long phone calls or other typical drains, but the battery life seemed adequate. The unit lasted about a day with heavy data use, downloads, and video playback from YouTube, although that was with the inadequate default brightness.

Google G1 Android mobile phone: review

I had feared that this compromise would result in a chunky, bulky, pocket-bulging device, but I’m pleased to report that the G1 is actually…well, rather nice.

While it’s not a patch on the sleek lines and precise styling of Apple’s iPhone, the G1 doesn’t disgrace itself in the looks department. It has just a few buttons ranged beneath the 3.2in screen, including call answer and hang-up buttons, back and home buttons, and a menu button.

Interestingly, there’s also a BlackBerry-style trackball just in case you don’t fancy prodding the touchscreen to access applications. UK customers will be able to take their pick from black and white handsets, and I personally preferred the white version, which had an almost pearlised finish.

While, despite its best efforts, the G1 still falls short, aesthetically at least, of the iPhone, it goes toe-to-toe with Apple’s all-conquering mobile device when it comes to features.

As you would expect from Google, web browsing is a breeze. There’s one-touch access to a Google web search bar, simply by sliding a finger across the phone’s screen from right to left, as well as whenever your in the browser.

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And while the G1 lacks Apple’s patented”multi-touch” technology – which allows users to make pinching and expanding gestures with their fingers to zoom in and out of web pages and photos on the iPhone’s screen – the G1 retaliates with some tricks of its own, easily enabling users to magnify areas of a website at the touch of a button.

The G1, like the iPhone, lacks support for Flash videos – the sort of video clips we use on our Telegraph website, for instance – because of the type of processor chip used in the phone. And despite having a three-megapixel camera (still a paltry amount considering that Samsung recently launched an eight-megapixel cameraphone, but still a whole megapixel better than the iPhone, nonetheless), the G1, like the iPhone, can’t record videos.

The Android development team hinted that this might be something added in future versions of the device, but building video-capture straight into the handset at launch would have struck the iPhone a blow, and Google has failed to capitalise on that opportunity.

Annoyingly, the G1 lacks a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, so I’m afraid you can forget about using your hideously expensive Bose noise-cancelling headphones with it – you’re stuck with HTC’s proprietary earphones.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that you’ll be able to not only listen to music on the G1, but buy music on the phone too. That’s because Google has signed a deal with Amazon to provide G1 users with one-click access to the Amazon MP3 store. The store is currently only available in the US, but rumours have been building for a while that it would be rolled out in the UK by the end of this year, and that would certainly tally nicely with the G1’s November launch date.

“Our goal is certainly to make music services available in all regions,” said Andy Rubin, Google’s senior director of mobile platforms. He was also keen to emphasise Android’s scalability and flexibility, calling it a future-proof platform. That’s because users of the G1, and other future Android handsets, will not only benefit from frequent improvements to the phone’s operating system, but also from the ability to add extra programs and software to the device by downloading applications from the Android Market.

This online superstore of additional content is the result of Google’s decision to make Android”open source”, which means anyone can write software for the platform for free.

Although the Android Market is still in the beta, or test, stage, there’s already a healthy selection of really excellent applications that suggest a great deal of innovation in this platform in future.

Early standouts include BreadCrumbz, a mapping program that overlays a route map, say, to a favourite picnic spot or scenic walk, with real photos taken by other users. Ecorio, another application, will calculate the carbon footprint of a journey you’re planning, and suggest other, more environmentally friendly modes of transport.

But my personal favourite was ShopSavvy, a price comparison engine. You use the G1’s camera to take a photo of a barcode on, say, a book or CD; the ShopSavvy software then translates that into a universal code, and runs a web search to find the cheapest place to buy that item. It can find the cheapest online stores, as well as give you a list, unprompted, of shops in your area selling that item, by using the G1’s built-in GPS.