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A Google Phone

As have many geeks, I’ve been considering the iPhone, but I’ve been really happy with T-Mobile as a company — they’re willing to unlock my phones, they don’t mind if I change my contract often, and I generally just haven’t had issues, including plenty of international travel.  Considering I’m running four lines on my account, and I pretty much live on my mobile for work and home, it’s a pretty important issue for me.

So, I decided to give their new Google Phone, the G1, a try.  They’re supposed to be pretty comparable — similar sizes, touchscreen, app stores, large popular companies behind them, blah blah.

I’m not that far into toying with it (about 8 hours), but so far, I’m leaning heavily toward buying a set of iPhones for the lines I’m on.  I’ll be pretty upset about it, since I hate the locked App store and I hate that I can’t unlock my phone for international travel and the like, and of course, I could always just stick with a schmoe phone that didn’t do cool things like have a GPS.

Anyway, the reasons I’m leaning away from the G1 are:

  • The app store is either a joke, or not launched yet (apparently the official launch date isn’t for two days, so maybe…).  For instance, locale is supposed to be the hotness, won awards, all that — not avaialble.  Heck, there are only about 15 apps on the whole store, which is crazy.
  • I can’t tell whether the touchscreen requires pressure or not, or really, how it works.  It feels very non-deterministic.
  • I spent about ten minutes today trying to make a NYTimes popup thing disappear.  Really.  I’d scroll, it would scroll.  I don’t know if this would happen on the iPhone, too, but I wanted to shoot someone, or even worse, make the person who’s to blame figure it out.  Talk about torture.
  • It just generally seems hard to get around — unintuitive, at least.  The six buttons don’t seem related in a clear way, the menu button is silly, the trackball seems like wearing suspenders with a belt — either you trust your touchscreen or you don’t — and I can never quite figure out if I’ve got navigational context or not.
  • There’s clearly an operating system on this thing, and it clearly has a theory of organization, but I’ve no idea what it is. Why is there a desktop?  Why is it different from the main app window?  Are there other folders?
  • I was able to hack my computer to sync contacts to Google and then to the phone, but for some stupid reason it skipped the most important contacts of all — mine and my wife’s.  And my only iSync device was my phone, which is now gone, and stupid iSync doesn’t treat Google as a separate device, so now I can’t trigger a sync without setting my old phone back up.  This is Apple’s fault, but it still makes the phone less good.
  • If there’s a speed dial, I can’t find it.  It might not be necessary, given voice dial (which I haven’t tried yet) and actually ok contact search, but still…
  • As already commented, it’s annoying constantly flipping between keyboard and no keyboard, and even worse, you can’t even go into landscape without opening the keyboard, which is silly.
  • Half the time the GPS thinks I’m three blocks from my house, but the other half of the time it’s perfectly correct.
  • No clear idea of how to configure apps, and most apps have about 1/10 the number of settings I’d expect.  There’s a big settings app, with lots of random settings, and each app can have settings, but they aren’t divided consistently or intelligently.

I think those are my main complaints so far, at least the ones big enough to make me want to bitch about the phone as opposed to just niggles.  The phone feels a lot more like a lump than the iphone does, and I despair of comfortably sitting either in my pocket for long periods of time (especially doing things like sitting on my couch with a computer on my lap, as I’m doing now).

As expected, it looks like the battery is charge-once-a-day, but so’s the iPhone, and any ‘net-using phone, as far as I can tell.

Some positive notes on the phone:

  • The tactile feel of the phone is good — non-slip, comfortable, etc.
  • I like the slide-out action of the keyboard, in a “cool gadget’ kind of way.
  • The screen is nice and bright, and attractive.
  • The phone is pretty cool, but that’s coming from someone with a heinous Moto W490.

I’d like to say there’s more about the phone I like, but… Maybe it will get a lot better as it gets updates and the app store actually launches, but I’ve only got 14 days to make a decision, and so far, not so much.

I’ll do my best to post an update once it’s been a bit.

Posted: October 21st, 2008 under Geek.
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  • A Google Phone

    October 21, 2008 at 2:04 am

    [...] Random Feed wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptAs have many geeks, I’ve been considering the iPhone, ...

  • The Madstop » I’m keeping my Google Phone

    November 1, 2008 at 4:34 am

    [...] I’ve had my gPhone (aka Android phone aka T-Mobile HTC G1) for about ten days, and after using it ...

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