The e-mail, calendar, and contact functions on the G1 are all dependent on Google's Web-based services; there's actually no way to sync these items directly with your PC. When you power on the phone for the first time, you have to sign in with a Google (or Google-hosted domain) account; it associates that account with the Gmail, Contacts, and Calendar icons on the phone. (One account per phone, please.) From there on, the G1 remains synced with Google's Web-based services. There's also an additional e-mail app that handles AOL, Yahoo!, and other non-Google POP/IMAP mail accounts. The SMS/MMS client is threaded, just like Gmail.
E-mail reads well on the G1; it includes HTML formatting and images. But attachment support is poor: You can preview Microsoft Word and Excel documents, but you can't save or edit them, and PDFs get stripped down to bare text. At least you can save a JPEG attachment if you receive one.
As you might expect from a Google phone, the G1's Web browser is one of the best around. Like the iPhone's, the G1 browser is based on WebKit. Pages load quickly and look sharp, as long as you can ignore the giant holes in pages where Flash content should go–but that's a problem on the iPhone, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry handsets, too. You can zoom in on pages by tapping an icon on the screen; it usually takes a tap or two to get to the point where you can accurately hit links with your finger (though you can always use the trackball). While pages show in either portrait or landscape mode, you need to switch to landscape mode and pop out the keyboard if you want to enter text.For instant messaging, you've got AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live, and Yahoo! Messenger. The AIM client, unlike many mobile clients, accesses your entire buddy list. You can log in to one account per service and leave each running in the background.
Media, in terms of both creation and consumption, is a big hole here. The G1 has a music player and a 3-megapixel still camera, but no video player or video camera. There's no way to sync your music with your PC; instead, you just drag and drop unprotected AAC, MP3, or WMA files onto a memory card. There's no standard 3.5mm headphone jack (only a proprietary USB-based port) and no stereo Bluetooth support. Basically, the G1 has the media capabilities of a phone from 2005.
But again, all this will change. According to Google, stereo Bluetooth support is on the way in the form of a firmware update. There's already a version 0.1 free video player available in the App Market, the company's answer to Apple's App Store. The player didn't work with our sample MP4 and 3GP videos, but version 0.2 or 0.3 surely will. Really, the only unfixable annoyance here is the lack of a standardized headphone jack.
Photos taken with the 3MP camera looked good, though I was disappointed at the lack of camera options. There's no way to reduce the resolution to save memory and no way to adjust white balance JPEG compression. In its default mode, our simulated daylight shots looked sharp and clear. True outdoor shots were a bit washed out, and low-light shots had a bit of low-shutter-speed blur, but none were all that bad.
The Google Maps client is smooth and fast. It uses GPS to find your location and offers driving directions. It also features a "compass view," which shows a street view in the direction you're actually facing. There's a YouTube client, but it had trouble playing some videos when I tested it.
You get about 60MB of available space for apps and data, plus a slot for a microSD memory card; our new 16GB SanDisk card worked fine. I wasn't able to get the G1 to run out of memory or crash, so there's clearly some solid memory management being used here. Launching too many apps at one time slowed down system responses, however. This was most visible in games. Even a simple one like Glu's Bonsai Blast would slow down from time to time when other programs were running in the background. There's no way to quit running processes.
The most exciting thing about the G1 isn't what you get in the box. It's Google's aforementioned App Market. The App Market added new programs every day of my review period, and the phone isn't even on the shelves yet. If the G1 takes off and LG, Motorola, and Samsung follow quickly with their own Android devices (as they're expected to in February 2009), this could be the start of something big.
There's already useful stuff in the App Market, which unlike the App Store has lots of utilities and very few games right now. Shopping for toys at FAO Schwarz, I used ShopSavvy, an app that reads the bar codes off of products using the G1's camera, to find out that almost everything I wanted to buy was less expensive at Amazon.com. (Duh.) There's a Skype IM (but not voice) client, a third-party task switcher, and a gadget that lets you cut and paste various items onto your home screen. I'm encouraged to see that programmers will have more access to basic features of the handset than they do on the iPhone.
T-Mobile has a fairly weak lineup of branded smartphones, so until the BlackBerry Flip 8220 gets its act together, your choice will be between the G1 and the even less-expensive BlackBerry Curve 8320. The latter is ready to do your work now, while the former is full of promise for the future. The 8320 offers Wi-Fi calling and Microsoft Exchange e-mail support, along with far better media capabilities, thanks to its 3.5mm headphone jack, stereo Bluetooth, and both iTunes and video syncing. The G1 has a better Web browser and screen, and most important, the App Market. In other words, the Curve is today, the G1 is tomorrow. So we'll stick with the Curve as our Editor's Choice for now. But keep an eye on the T-Mobile G1, and on Android in general. I think it'll grow on (and with) you.
