Editors' Rating
| Design |  |
6.0 |
| Features |  |
8.0 |
| Performance |  |
7.0 |
Published: 21 Oct 2008
The G1 offers support for several email account types. As a Google product, Google Mail, of course, gets top billing, but you can also configure the smartphone to access POP3 and IMAP4. There's full HTML support, so you'll be able to view photos and graphics along with the text. You'll have access to all of your folders and any action that you perform on the smartphone, such as deleting an email, will be reflected in your real account. To the delight of many, we're sure, you get copy-and-paste capabilities, and there's an attachment viewer to open Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents — but note that you can't edit said files (the iPhone is also view-only). We successfully set up our review unit with both our Google Mail and Yahoo accounts simply by entering our log-in ID and password. Our Google Mail contacts seamlessly transferred to the G1, and mobile email delivery was sometimes faster than on our PC, but attachments took a while to download.
There's bad news for business users in that Microsoft Exchange Server support will be lacking at launch, so there's no synchronisation with your Outlook email, Calendar, Contacts and so forth. You can check Outlook email via OWA (Outlook Web Access), but we would have liked full support from the outset. We think this is a pretty glaring omission. We assume all parties involved would want to attract both consumers and business users, and given the inclusion of a full QWERTY keyboard, the G1 would make a good messaging-centric device for mobile professionals. However, without that Exchange support, it could be a turn-off for a lot of business customers.
The G1 comes preloaded with four instant-messaging clients, including Google Talk, AIM, Windows Live and Yahoo Messenger. You can keep IM chats in the background while working in other applications. The smartphone also offers threaded text messaging and multimedia messaging.
The T-Mobile G1 offers basic PIM (personal information management) and productivity tools. You get Calendar, Contacts, a calculator and an alarm clock. The advantage of the T-Mobile G1 is that Contacts, Calendar and Google Mail are updated over the air, so you don't have to synch up with your computer every day. Aside from the email attachment viewer, Google Docs is supported for view only, but we couldn't access a shared Google spreadsheet. Again, the T-Mobile G1 might not be the best choice for corporate users given that you can't really edit Office documents. We're sure as the Android Market expands more productivity applications will become available.
The G1 offers assisted GPS and network-assisted location. Of course, Google Maps is preloaded on the device with standard map, satellite and traffic views.
While Apple had the unenviable task of incorporating a full-blown iPod-like music player into the iPhone, the T-Mobile G1 is made to be more mobile phone than music player. That said, the music player on the G1 is robust for what it is, and will satisfy most casual listeners. Songs are organised by Artists, Albums, Songs and Playlists, as you would expect. You get the typical music player functions like shuffle, repeat and the ability to create playlists on the fly. And even though there's no CoverFlow, you can still view album art in a list format. We especially liked the ability to instantly convert any song to a ringtone directly from the music player by hitting the 'Use as ringtone' button.
You can upload any of your own music files into the G1. The G1 supports MP3, M4A, AMR, WMA, MIDI, WAV and Ogg Vorbis formats, and has 192MB RAM and 256MB ROM. As we mentioned, the G1 comes with a 1GB microSD card, which comes preloaded with 11 songs. The expansion slot can support up to 8GB cards.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about the G1 music player is hardware related. The G1 doesn't have stereo Bluetooth, and it doesn't have a 3.5-mm headset jack. These are absolutely glaring omissions in our opinion, and it certainly means the G1 is not meant to be a music player replacement.
The T-Mobile G1 features a microSD expansion slot on the left side, which supports cards up to 8GB.
The T-Mobile G1 includes a dedicated YouTube application. The clips took quite a while to load via 3G, and quality wasn't the greatest. Although images and audio were synchronised, it was quite blurry, but we were also watching a low-res version since we were using T-Mobile's network instead of Wi-Fi. The screen orientation will go from portrait to landscape mode for videos.
Previous
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
