Editors' Rating
| Design |  |
6.0 |
| Features |  |
8.0 |
| Performance |  |
7.0 |
Published: 21 Oct 2008
The first smartphone to run the Google Android operating system, the T-Mobile G1 delivers a lot of the basic core functions and of course, tight integration with Google's products, including Google Mail, Google Maps and Google Calendar. Wireless options and multimedia capabilities are also well represented on the G1, but there are also some glaring omissions and restrictions that need to be called out.
The quad-band GSM T-Mobile G1 offers a speakerphone, voice dialling, conference calling and speed dial. There's no support for visual voice mail, but one convenience is that if you have a Google Mail account, all your contacts will automatically be synchronised to the phone book. Each entry has room for multiple phone numbers, email addresses, IM handles, postal address and more. For caller ID purposes, you can assign a photo to a contact as well as a group ID and one of 33 polyphonic ringtones. There's even a setting to send a contact's phone call directly to voice mail every time.
Bluetooth is onboard, but the supported profiles are limited to wireless headsets and hands-free kits. However, as with the iPhone 3G, there's no love for stereo Bluetooth or tethering, so you can't use it as a modem for your notebook. We can live without the latter, but if we can't get a 3.5mm headphone jack, we'd at least like stereo Bluetooth support.
The T-Mobile G1 is a 3G smartphone with HSDPA support providing download speeds of up to 7.2Mbps with a suitable signal. Where HSDPA or 3G coverage isn't available, the connection will drop down to GPRS.
As an alternative to 3G, the G1 has integrated Wi-Fi and it can seamlessly transfer between 3G and accessible Wi-Fi networks. In fact, the smartphone's YouTube application will only present videos in high resolution when you're using Wi-Fi; it plays the low-res version when using the cellular network in order to optimise the load times. There's an application in the Android Market called iSkoot for Skype, which allows you to make Skype calls via the phone's radio rather than Wi-Fi, but we imagine there will be VoIP clients added to the database.
There's also a wireless manager under the Settings menu where you can turn on and off all the radios and set up connections. To save battery life, you can turn off 3G and revert to the GPRS network a good idea if you don't need to surf the web or download apps or music.
The T-Mobile G1 uses Webkit as the basis for its browser, which is also the core of the Safari browser found on the iPhone. It uses full HTML browsing, has Java support and lets you surf almost every web site except those that use Flash. You can pan across the screen by using your finger, and even though you can't zoom in via pinching as you can on the iPhone, you can bring up on-screen zoom controls at the bottom of the display. Similar to the iPhone, you can also double-tap on a Web page to zoom in on a particular section.
Of course, you're not limited to the touch-screen when navigating the browser in fact, we preferred to use the trackball to scroll around pages at times. You can also tab between multiple browser windows, and we like the fact that the browser settings are easily accessible via the browser menu itself. With the iPhone, you have to dig into the Settings menu to find the Safari settings. As with the iPhone, you can view the browser in both portrait and landscape modes.
But there are a few glitches with the G1 browser that keep it from being a totally seamless experience. For example, we didn't like that we had to go in and out of the browser menu to do basic browser navigation such as Back and Forward. Yes, there are keyboard shortcuts for these functions, but we don't want to have to remember shortcuts all the time. And even though we like having the physical QWERTY keyboard, an on-screen keyboard would make it easier to enter text when holding the phone in portrait mode. The G1's smaller display makes browsing a bit more troublesome than on the iPhone, since you need to scroll around a lot more.
Although the interface for the browser leaves a bit to be desired, we like the number of customisable settings available. These include text size, the ability to block pop-up windows, the option of turning off image loading, the option of autofitting the pages to the screen, the capability to enable or disable JavaScript, the option of not accepting cookies and, of course, the option to clear out the cache, history, cookies and passwords. Perhaps the most intriguing browser option is that you can enable 'Gears', which are potential future applications that can extend the browser functionality. What this means is that Google might develop a way for you to take some of your web stuff offline imagine being able to edit your Google Docs without an internet connection, for example, and then sync it back online when you do have a signal. This isn't available yet, but it certainly has potential.
In a move to compete against the iPhone's built-in App Store, Google has also come up with a mobile application store of its own, called Android Market. Since the Android Market is so new, it's hard to compare the applications available with the ones on the iPhone. However, we think it shows plenty of promise. Already there are applications like ShopSavvy that lets you scan bar codes for comparison shopping, and BreadCrumz, which allows you to create routes for your friends using photos as visual aids. We'll update this section as the Android Market develops.
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