T-Mobile G1 in Smartphones

The most intensely anticipated phone this year has finally arrived. It's T-Mobile's G1, sporting Google's brand spanking new open-source Android operating system, and it's the most interesting development in mobile phones since the appearance of the first iPhone a year ago.

The Android interface

First impressions are good. When you first take the G1 out of the box and turn it on, you'll have it set up and synchronised with your Gmail email, contacts and calendar in just a minute or two. It's so incredibly straightforward even a novice could do it. Emails are pushed to the phone by default, so you're alerted as they arrive.

This simplicity extends to the rest of the interface. Commonly-used shortcuts, a clock and 'widgets' feature prominently on the customisable home screen, while other applications are a mere finger drag away. As with the iPhone, icons can be placed not only on the main home screen but also a pair of supplementary ones to the left and right. Simply sweep your finger across the screen to the left or right to get access these.

At the top of the screen is the always-present notifications bar. A bit like Windows Mobile, this is where the battery life indicator sits, the signal strength bars and also other notifications such as downloads. In a neat touch, you can 'pull' this down for more information, too.

At the bottom is a pull-up menu with all the phone's programs on it - they're organised in a simple grid that can be dragged up and down with a finger - while hitting the G1's menu button just below the screen pops up a menu offering context-sensitive options.

Just browsing

Browsing the web is a joyously intuitive process and the onboard web browser works extremely well, rendering all the websites we visited accurately, reliably and quickly. Navigating around pages is simple - just drag your finger to pan or use the device's trackball to flick between links on a page. The latter is surprisingly nippy and intuitive.

Despite the 480 x 320 resolution, the screen feels cramped, which means you have to do a fair bit of zooming in and out, which isn't ideal, and the zoom tools aren't brilliant - you have to tap an icon at the bottom of the screen to get up close or zoom out. It's nowhere near as good as Opera Mobile 9.5's double tap to zoom or the iPhone's pinch gestures. There's a handy magnifying glass tool that allows you to read text and headlines while zoomed right back from the page, but it still can't quite match its main rivals.

Other annoyances include an inability to select text in the address bar, which means copying and pasting URLs is a pain, and a refusal to download some file types. We tried to download a Librivox audio book recording - just an MP3 file - and were informed, rather unhelpfully, that the download had simply failed.

Email

Simple email works well. You get push with Gmail, plus standard scheduled retrieval for third party POP3 and IMAP accounts. It's best to use the G1 with the former, however; this preserves all the cool features of Gmail, from threaded conversations, through labels and stars, to the powerful search utility.

The contacts tool works just as neatly - our test account had well over 500 entries in it and we were able to navigate from top to bottom of this list with one sweep of the finger.

Again, though, there are some minor irritations. Switch to the dialler screen and start tapping away on the numeric pad and, unlike the Windows Mobile phones here and the BlackBerry handsets, suggested contacts don't appear as you type.