After a minor delay in the postal system due to a few inches of snow falling here and there, I recently became the proud owner of a shiney new G1.
I had been looking for a new handset since late last year. Of course there was the IPhone, but it always seemed like form over function; Blackberrys – well I think I missed that wave, and Nokia handsets are just all a much of a muchness these days. The G1 had caught my gaze but the mixed reviews over the hardware had initially put me off – but after some thinking, it wasn’t really the handset that attracted me – it was the operating system – Android.
Back in October when I switched hosting, I moved the email provider for geekcubed.org over to Google Apps – I had worked with my ex employer to set it up for them and I was thoroughly impressed – it completely removes the load on a sys admin for starters, and delivers a 100% polished experience for end users. The G1 requires you to use (or register) a gmail account to get started – as soon as I read that I could use my domain based account, I was sold …
So, with the phone unboxed and charging up, I completed to setup using my geekcubed.org account – 30 seconds later, all my emails, and more importantly, all my contacts, magically appeared on my handset – super! It’s only been five days, but I’ve already become totally acustomed to it – the faint chirp of an email coming in (or a new tweet for that matter, thanks to a wonderful app from the Market Place – Twidroid)
All well and good, but to keep the Ying and Yang in order, I have to list a few of the niggles:
- Battery – It is pretty poor – but it is getting better. The first day saw it only last 8 hours – but then I hardly put it down and spent most of the day performing a long-overdue clear out of my newly synchronised address book. There are some reports that the battery needs “conditioning” with a few charge-discharge cycles, and it looks at though that’s the case.
- Instant Messaging app – for some reason unbeknown to the rest of us, T-Mobile in the UK have decided to remove all the instant-messaging protocols from the built in app except the Google messenger – which is pretty shabby – there are, of course, 3rd party apps in the Market but they don’t integrate with the address book (which bizaarly still registers MSN accounts as valid IM shortcuts, even though they don’t work)
- Camera – a few years ago, 3MP wasn’t bad for a dedicated digital camera, let alone a phone. In my mind, the G1 as a camera comes third behind it being PDA and phone (not sure which of those is first yet) – yes it lacks a flash (but then most mobile flashes are crap anyway) and there are no manual controls – but that could / should be fixed by a firmware update.
I think I’ll leave it there for now – I’ll let the dust continue to settle for a while before re-evaluating whether the G1 (or, lets be honest, Android), is as good as it initially appears to be.
