T-Mobile G1
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Contents |
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Introduction
As many of you may know, T-Mobile was the first carrier in the USA to release HTC's first phone (the HTC Wallaby) which was also the first full touch screen smart phone available in North America. It was running Windows Mobile, then known as Pocket PC Phone Edition and, at the time, was the most powerful Smartphone around. That was six years ago.
Now, T-Mobile has released HTC's first phone that does not run Windows Mobile. The G1 runs the Open Handset Alliance and Google's first attempt at a Smartphone operating system called Android. The following review will primarily look at the G1's offering from the perspective of a heavy user of Windows Mobile. Read on for the revealing review!
Review Date: November 7, 2008
Pics
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| With full brightness on, the screen is still fairly usable outdoors during the day. There is no automatic brightness control. | The screen slides out in a loud arching motion to reveal the hardware keyboard. This is the only way you can enter text on the device. |
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| There's an Amazon MP3 application where you can browse, preview, purchase and download DRM-free music. This is a nice feature and I wish there was an application like this for Windows Mobile. | There are some issues with the "Market" application as well. |
Conclusion/ Overall Impression
It's pretty easy to see right away that Android and the T-Mobile G1 are not targeted at all towards any type of power user or business smartphone user. It is squarely targeted to the consumer. This is obvious by the lack of high-end software capabilities, lack of business related features, lack of security, and the plethora of consumer-oriented applications in the Android Market store. The T-Mobile G1 and Android in general seem to be designed to get the iPhone-hype crowd on the mobile internet and more-specifically, onto Google's services.
Many people think that Android's promise is in its open-sourceness and programmers' ability to do "anything" to the operating system and applications running on it. Well, maybe so, but so far I see a lot of very buggy, unimpressive applications in the Android Market. There are a few interesting items, such as the app that can scan barcodes on products with the phone's camera and then look up product information online while also offering price comparisons. That's great if you do a lot of shopping, but our economy isn't exactly ripe for that just yet. It's also pretty easy to notice a huge fragmentation of consistency in user interface design in Android even at this early stage. There's no central theme/skinning capability so application developers just design whatever they feel like.
So if you're a big Gmail user and don't care about many of the high-end features and business tools found on other platforms, then the T-Mobile G1 and Android may be a good fit.
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