It's now been a month since I joined the modern phone age and replaced my old Razr with the T-mobile G1. Here are my first impressions based on that month of use and abuse.
Googles - Duh. It syncs with your gmail contacts, mail, and calendar, keeping you updated on all your google-world happenings. Gtalk is also built in, but does not yet allow video chat. It would be nice for other Google features to be incorporated, such as the Reader (which now is viewed through the browser), the new Tasks feature of Gmail, and perhaps in time the Google Docs. For now though it suffices, and even shows the Google contacts buddy icon when a call is made/received. - good GUI - the Android OS strikes the perfect balance between Apple's chunky icons and Windows Mobile's tiny checkboxes and menus (I can't operate a Windows phone without a stylus). The icons are all sized for touch-screen use, and the full keyboard takes care of the typing without the need for on-screen keyboard. There is no multi-touch, but the scrolling is fluid and all the touch-enabled actions are very intuitive.
app market - for a new release, the android application marketplase has quite a few useful items. "Any Cut" for creating custom shortcuts is a must, as well as the bar code scanner to look up the cheapest price while doing your holiday shopping and an ssh client to get some lab-work done while on the run. I also downloaded a voice recorder and a note-taker (both of which should've come built in). Opera is availible as an alternate browser, but Chrome seems to handle most of my needs (see Cons). - mini-usb charger - If only all phone manufacturers moved to mini-usb! Why do phone chargers have to be so complicated? I have a half dozen mini-usb cables (some from previous phones) so I can keep one anywhere.
Cons:
- camera - While the camera is high resolution, it's slow, clunky and non-intuitive. Sometimes it takes up to 10 seconds to snap a photo after pressing the shutter button. It doesn't auto-turn off either, so forgetting to go back to the main menu after using it can drain your battery in a matter of minutes.
t-mobile - spotty 3G, especially in MI where is almost doesn't exist. However, t-mobile does have an agreement with AT&T, so half the time I'm "roaming" on their towers.- battery power - if using the camera, or watching video with sound the battery drains before your eyes. It can last a day if you use it strictly for phone purposes and perhaps some email, but I have needed to charge every night.
- dialer - the number buttons (used for those pesky phone menues for example) are actually on-screen, so unless you have your keyboard flipped open while making a call (which is awkward) you have to unlock the phone, flick open the dialer and then press the number. This makes such simple tasks as pressing 7 to delete a voice-mail un-neccesarily diffucult.
no flash - :( Maybe it's an effort to funnel video-watching to the specialized YouTube app, but the lack of flash support on web pages haunts Android alongside its mobile cousins. I wouldn't care so much, but this puts a severe damper on my ability to watch the puppy-cam (speaking of which I couldn't get 3GP streaming video to work either, argh).