Fundamentally, the main reasons I’m keeping it are that I couldn’t see a huge differentiator pushing me toward the iPhone, I didn’t really want to switch from TMobile to ATT (TMobile will unlock my phones for me and has said they don’t mind tethering apps), and I like the more open nature of the gPhone.  Assuming someone actually makes a tethering app at some point, it could save me and everyone at my company about $60/month, since we’d otherwise need to buy a separate device to get constant ‘net access for our laptops.

Here are some things I particularly like about the gPhone:

• The Status bar: I really like this.  I like one place for notifications and information, and a single consistent interface for all of them, along with my ability to either answer them or ignore them.
• The Dialer Application: I think this is great.  I don’t know that it’s a ton different from the iPhone’s, but I really liked this version.  I liked the previous calls list, the favorites list, and easy searching for contacts.
• The mid-call menu: I didn’t get a chance to try this out on the iPhone, but I loved this on the gPhone.  Press the menu button and you can enable/disable your bluetooth headset, switch calls, put someone on hold, and more.  Call switching and conference calling was astoundingly faster than doing so with any other phone I’ve had, which is pretty awesome considering how often I make conferences calls between myself, Andrew, and Teyo.
• Task switching: You can hold the ‘home’ button down for a second or so to get a list of the last six applications you’ve used, and you can switch right to the application without having to go to the home screen.  On the iPhone, you always have to go to the home screen to get to another application.  Welcome to 1987, people — this is MacOS 6, but with no excuse.  Android also has a Task Switcher application that just switches across all installed applications; it mostly sucks, but it’s encouraging that task switching is one of the first problems attacked in the OS.
• Notification lights: This seems like a small thing, but the phone has three small, colored LEDs; a green LED for message notification, a red light for low-battery, and an orange light for charging.  I really like these — they’re small enough that they don’t stab you like so many LEDs do these days, and they provide a great, simple way to know what’s going on with your phone, without having random vibrations every who-knows-how often.  I was using a friend’s iPhone, and it literally vibrated every three or four minutes without any indication why.  I’m assuming it was a notification I was supposed to track down, but there was no way to figure it out without going to the home screen and searching for red numers.
• Home screen vs. App Management: Android has a home screen with three panes, and you can arrange them however you want — apps, links to URLs, etc.  It also has an applications tab pull with every app on the system, arranged heirarchically.  This is great because you can set up a subset of your applications on the home screen, arranged how you want, and then you can peruse the whole app list alphabetically.  The iPhone, on the other hand, only has the home screen — you add more apps, and it adds more panes.  You apparently can’t change the four “most common” apps on the bottom, and there’s apparently no easy way to browse the apps alphabetically.

The combination of app management and task switching go a long ways toward making this phone feel more like a real operating system on a phone, rather than the iPhone which feels more like a phone trying to be a real operating system.  It’s weird, because I know the iPhone has a real OS under there somewhere; it’s just not acting like one.

I kinda like the keyboard, although I don’t know if it’s that big of a difference for me (I’m hopefully never going to be much of an emailer with my phone), and I like how responsive the phone is.

There are some things I really don’t like about it, though.  Browsing is a generally crappy experience — the zoom thingie completely blows, in that it inconsistently accepts touches and it’s just a crappy interface in general, and it’s also not-quite-impossible to actually click the links you want.  However, using apps like  Google Reader works fine, and I expect it will only get better.  And, again, this isn’t what I mainly expect to use the phone for.  It’s fine for stop-gap, like sitting in the Doctor’s office waiting room; it’s just not something I’d want to do a ten day trip with.

I’m pretty concerned about the durability of the hardware; I could already store my credit cards between the sliding screen and the keyboard.  Hopefully I’ll be able to replace the phone as necessary for the first year, and by then I hope they’ve got it figured out.

I do really wish the phone supported multi-touch, and with it the multi-finger gestures like the iPhone pinch.

I also wish there were just a Quicksilver-like interface for the whole phone — give me a single gesture to bring up Quicksilver, and I’ll never go to the home screen again.

An Aside

This is neither iPhone nor Android, but it must be said.  What is up with how unimaginative people are being with the touchscreen support?  Why is it that the only way to interact with either of these things is directly touching visible objects, or a traditional keyboard?  Where are my full-screen gestures that I can define, where are my accelerometer-based navigation, where, basically, is anything that really takes advantage of the form factor and touchscreen to be different?

The gPhone has pretty cool gesture recognition for unlocking — you get a grid of nine dots and have to make a specific gesture to unlock the phone.  Why can’t this same theme be used for, well, everything?  I’d like global gesture support for shortcuts to my most common applications, for instance — a Z to open one app, a loop to open another.  I haven’t seen a single situation where I need to drag in multiple directions without lifting my finger, so I don’t see what it would interfere with.

Both of these phones basically suck for context and task management.  Each phone has a “back” button, where the iPhone’s is on-screen and the gPhone’s is physical.  What?  A back button?  Back buttons suck in browsers, why would anyone ever think they make sense as the primary navigational paradigm in, well, anything, ever?  Sure, if you’re stuck in a completely linear world, sure, but on a phone where I regularly use 5-10 applications a day, and could conceivably use 20 or more, a back button just doesn’t suffice.

It bugs the hell out of me that people aren’t taking the Wii as their example — do something different, something weird.  If people aren’t laughing at your ideas, then you’re not trying hard enough.

Cheers.

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.