Two Months with the T-Mobile (HTC) G1 "Google Phone"

I've now had my G1 for a couple of months and I thought now would be a good time to add a thorough review of the unit.

Overall, I'm pleased with the G1. Before deciding to take the leap and re-up my contract with T-Mobile, I spent a long time playing with iPhones and G1s as I wanted to try to make sure I was making the right decision. While the iPhones are very cool phones (some people go so far as to call them the "Jesus Phone," the main deciding factor for me was overall price (the "total cost of ownership").

First off, T-Mobile offered me a really good deal on the G1 in exchange for signing up for another 2 year contract with them. As a plus for staying with them, they offered me a $49 unlimited voice plan (they call it their "loyalty plan"). T-Mobile's unlimited 3G data package is priced at $25 per monthm, including 400 messages, so for ~$64/month I get unlimited voice and 3G data. The same package on AT&T would run you about $129 a month (at least at the time I was comparing plans)! I have been really pleased with T-Mobile's customer support over the past five years, so staying with TMO was a big plus in my book as well.

Right out of the box, the G1 was really easy to set up. The G1 runs an operating system by Google called "Android", and as you might expect, it has tight integration with the various Google applications (calendar, email, and contacts). When you first power up the G1, it asks you to sign in with your Google account (or create one if you don't already have one). Once I had signed it, the G1 automagically synced all of the information from my Google account to my phone -- in about five minutes flat. It was almost a religious experience being able to have a fully populated, usable phone five minutes after first powering it up. The Google integration works very well -- changes on the phone are pushed to Google and vice versa, pretty close to real-time.

Once I had the basics populated in the phone, I began to explore the Android Market. The Market is a place where software developers can provide their products either for free or for a fee, similar to Apple's iPhone Market. The Android market has hundreds, perhaps thousands of free apps available, and many of them are useful and fully functional. To date I have probably downloaded 50 free apps and I have paid for 3 or 4. The apps I've paid for include TouchDown, an app that allows me to access my company's Exchange email/calendar/contacts and Documents to Go, which allows you to create, edit and view Microsoft Word and Excel documents. Both are very useful apps and well worth the money.

Speaking of storage, the G1 has a MicroSD memory card slot that supports up to 16GB of storage. Unfortunately you can't store apps on the SD card, but you can store music, video, and photographs, plus certain apps can use SD for storage. The G1 comes with about 70MB of internal memory, and all loaded apps have to fit in that storage. Fortunately most apps are pretty small (like 512MB) and only a few exceed 1 or 2 MB, so you can cram a lot of apps into the phone's internal memory. I probably have 1000 songs and 20 videos on my phone and I still have half of the SD card available.

One really nice feature of the G1 is the screen. I watch video virtually every morning on the train ride in to work, and the G1's screen is gorgeous for watching video. The phone also includes YouTube, which can be watched "over the air" if you have a 3G or WiFi connection. Most video files do require transcoding (I use a utility called "Super Converter"), as the G1's screen resolution is smaller than most video files. This process is necessary for virtually any portable device to play video, BTW, and once you figure it out it's pretty simple. I'll write another blog entry later on describing the process in detail.

The G1 has a great physical keyboard, which was a big plus for me. I've been a Blackberry user for years and can't imagine using a phone without a real keyboard. Watching some of my friends try to use their iPhone virtual keyboards, coupled with my own experience with playing with various iPhones, only reinforced that impression. The keyboard does add some thickness to the unit over the iPhone, but it's worth it IMO. The G1's keyboard is so complete that there are only six characters that aren't accessible through a physical key, and I've gotten proficient enough on it that I'll bet I can manage 30 words a minute.

TMO is supposedly coming out with a "G2" in a few months that will have a touchscreen keyboard, and I expect that unit will be comparable in size to the iPhone. The keyboard is really easy to type on -- probably the best mobile keyboard I've ever used, and I've used lots of Blackberries and Palm devices over the years. Speaking of virtual keyboards, there is an operating system update (code named "Cupcake") rolling out starting this week that will update the G1 to add a virtual keyboard -- so it will have the best of both worlds!

One of the key considerations when buying a phone is how well it works as a phone (duh). I am pleased to report that the G1's phone works well. It has a pretty sensitive radio that is good at locking on to signal. The TMO coverage at my home is not wonderful, so it's a great place to test the sensitivity of various phones. The G1 performs quite well at my home and exhibits some of the best sensitivity that I've seen from any GSM phone, including the Blackberry Curve that I was using prior to the G1. One small problem at my home, incidentally: TMO hasn't finished building out their 3G network in Denver yet, and as such their 3G coverage ends about a mile from my house. I have high hopes that they will continue the rollout and that I will have 3G at my home in the near future. Fortunately, the G1 can also use WiFi for data connections, so I can just use that when I'm at home.

Speaking of 3G, T-Mobile's 3G network, when you're in a coverage area, works well. In downtown Denver, where my office is located, I routinely measure bandwidth in the 300kbps range. On a trip to Boston a month ago I measured over 600kbps! I'm not sure why Denver would be that much slower, but compared to the ~56kbps EDGE connections I was used to, even the slowest 3G connection is blazing fast.

The G1 has a really good Web browser, and couple that with the 3G network (or use WiFi) and you'll find that there are many times that you don't need to pull out a laptop to find things on the 'Net. As one might expect, the G1 has great search capabilities including a dedicated search button and the ability to perform voice search, both on the phone (contacts mostly) and on the Internet. For example, you can hold down the 'send' button, which invokes the voice search, and say 'movie theaters near 80128' -- and the phone will return a list of movie theaters. Very cool.

Other fun features of the G1 include a decent 3 megapixel camera with a real lens that actually focuses (although no flash). There are some innovative applications that use the camera to scan bar codes and then perform a Google search on the Internet to find the best price for the item. One of these applications, called ShopSavvy, saved me $250 when shopping for new drawer pulls for my kitchen. A home improvement store had the pulls for about $3.50 (plus tax), and I was able to scan the barcode and found the pulls on Amazon for $1.25. Amazing. There are tons of other apps available that do other cool things -- not a day goes by when I don't discover something new about the phone.

The main thing I don't like about the G1 (which is also the chief complaint of most iPhone users) is the battery life. If you use the phone minimally (eg no WiFi, GPS) you can get about 16 hours on a charge, although my average is more like about 12. One big difference with the G1, however, is that you can buy a spare battery for it and slip it in when you need extra juice. The iPhone's battery is sealed and non-interchangeable. For me, it's not a huge deal as I spend most of my time at my desk anyway, and I just plug the phone in halfway through the day to make sure I have enough juice for the rest of the day. You can also buy a replacement battery for about $50 that adds about 5mm to the thickness of the phone and gives you enough juice to make it through a day (maybe two).

Overall, I'm pleased with my decision to purchase the G1 and I'm glad I purchased it. T-Mobile's rate plans and five star customer service were a big consideration in my decision to stay with them, as I've been a TMO customer for 5 years and am very happy with them. I hope this review has been helpful!