After months of hype, we’ve finally laid hands and eyes on the most hotly-anticipated mobile phone launch since the first iPhone came out.

As you’ll probably know by now, unless you’ve been living in a particularly dark and damp cave over the past few months and weeks, the T-Mobile G1 is the first handset to sport Google’s Android mobile operating system. And, after a brief tete-a-tete with the phone this morning, we’re ready to report our first impressions. So how does it stack up?

 

The software

Android has been designed primarily to rival the iPhone’s touchscreen interface and first impressions are that it does a good job. On the G1’s 3.2in 320 x 480 pixel screen, all the menu options and interface baubles are large and finger-sized, and move around with iPhone-like momentum animations.

The home screen consists of a Clock display occupying the main part of the screen and a list of icons for launching applications resides below. Running along the top of the screen is a thin status notifications bar, which can be dragged down and up when needed – new emails, missed calls and download progress are all listed here. At the bottom, a pop-up menu bar can be launched with finger buttons for launching further applications.

Swipe your finger sideways and more application launchers appear. Web browsing is provided by a Google Chrome-lookalike mobile browser and it’s pretty effective. During the brief period I had with it I managed to view our very own PC Pro website, the BBC home page and I logged into Zoho Writer successfully and made a quick document edit. Impressive, but there’s no Flash support as yet.

It renders web pages in full and panning around is as graceful as it is on the iPhone – you just touch your finger to the screen and drag pages around. Zooming in and out is easy, either via an ingenious magnifying glass mode, or through the use of simple zoom in and out controls. There’s also a recent pages view, which displays a kind of history in a scrollable grid, and you can also have several pages open simultaneously. All of this is pretty responsive, but there’s nothing to match the pinch zoom in and out control you get on the iPhone.

For email, the phone supports what’s akin to push email on Gmail accounts. It synchronised with your email constantly in the background and notifies you whenever new messages arrive. You can also set it up with other POP3 and IMAP accounts, but T-Mobile was unable to confirm whether or not this ‘push’ feature would work with non-Gmail services.

What’s neat here is that the phone sychronises over the air not only with Gmail, but also Google Calendar, and Contacts, meaning you not only have instant access to your phone numbers but also everyone you’ve ever sent an email to using your Gmail accout. Other Google tools on the phone include Talk for IM (VoIP isn’t enabled) and Maps. There’s also a YouTube application.

Extra software can be accessed via the Android Market and, to showcase this open-source application resource, our sample G1 had a few interesting tools preinstalled. One was a frivolous way of showing off the phone’s accelerometer, another showcased the built-in digital compass and a third used the 3.2-megapixel camera to capture barcodes and run quick price comparisons online.

What isn’t so clever is that there’s no way to create and edit documents or even view basic attachments such as PDF and .doc files. Surprisingly, the full version of Google Docs didn’t appear to be supported – I got a message saying the browser wasn’t supported when I tried to log into my account. And you won’t be able to sync with Outlook either. For that sort of functionality you’ll have to wait and see what the Android Market – Google’s rather more open equivalent of the iPhone’s App Store – brings.

The hardware

The G1 didn’t look like much when I saw the first grainy videos of the device, and when we got the chance to play with it I wan’t any more impressed. It’s fat at 17.1mm, and its plastic, rubberised finish is nowhere near as alluring as the iPhone’s glossy, shiny Magpie-tempting piece of technological jewellery.

In fact, whatever colour you go for – T-Mobile demonstrated all black and all white models – I’d go so far as to say that it’s downright ugly, and the slightly angled button bar at the bottom of the screen doesn’t help. That’s surprising for a phone so firmly targeted at consumers.

What’s also surprising is that there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack – audio is piped out via a mini-USB socket. This is madness for a handset pitched as a rival to the iPhone.

Nonetheless, once I’d had a play with it, I found it a practical enough. The screen slides up, out and to the right with a pleasingly solid action and the five row keyboard underneath is very easy to get used to. It reminds me of the keyboard on the old Sidekick with its rounded buttons – a much underrated messaging phone.

It’s a busier-looking device than the iPhone, too. Below the screen is a row of physical controls: there are two buttons for starting and ending calls, two for back and home keys, plus another for popping up the context-sensitive menu. Interestingly there’s also a BlackBerry-esque clickable trackball, which worked really well – a snappy alternative for navigating fiddly web forms.

And inside the G1, there’s all of the hardware you’d expect from an HTC-manufactured device. You get fast mobile broadband in the shape of HSDPA, Wi-Fi for use with hotspots or at home, GPS, an accelerometer and a digital compass – the first time I’ve seen this feature in a phone. The battery life from the phone’s 1,150mAh lithium ion cell is a claimed 130 hours for standby and five hours talktime and storage comes courtesy of a 2MB microSD card that’s included in the box with the phone.

Time to buy?

The G1 is due to hit the shops in November, and T-Mobile will initially be offering it for free on a £40 contract with unlimited (subject, of course, to fair use policy) web access. But to be honest, I wonder how many people will take them up on this offer when an iPhone can be had for £100 on a £35 per month contract.

Because, despite the hype and the excitment, I have to say I’m a little underwhelmed by the G1. Though it’s a practical device that seems to work pretty well, and the operating system looks promising, I can’t shake the feeling that Google’s Android deserved a whole lot more.

Tags: Android, G1, Google, htc, iphone, T-Mobile

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Hardware, Just in. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.