The GPhone is Here…and Here are My Thoughts

by Eric Bramlett

Real Estate

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I was pleasantly surprised to come home from the grocery store last night and see a package from T-Mobile w/ my new G1.  My girlfriend wasn’t so pleasantly surprised b/c it meant that I would for the most part ignore her for the evening while playing with my new toy.  Here are my first impressions:

1. If you’re already a Google fanboy, you’ll love it.  When you fire it up, it prompts you for your google ID, and you’re done.  Your email, calendar, and contacts are all seemlessly integrated with the phone.  You don’t have to lose your @mywebsite.com email address, either.  Using Google Apps, you can allow big G to give you all their services for free, and retain your branding.
2. The App Marketplace is REALLY thin right now, but there’s not an app on there that costs.  I immediately installed Accuweather (which I had on my BB,) and Plusmo College Football (which was already available for IPhone.)
3. Coming from the BB, I like the trackball + touchscreen navigation.  Very easy to maneuver websites with a lot of small nav buttons using the trackball, and very quick to navigate easier sites with the touchscreen.
4. I’m assuming b/c they piggybacked off the 1-800-GOOG-411 technology, the voice dialer actually works REALLY well.
5. There’s no port for headphones, which is really annoying.
6. Amazon MP3 is every bit as good as itunes.
7. So if you rotate the g1 on its side the screen does NOT adapt.  It’s very easy to navigate through w/o using the keypad, so I think this was a pretty silly move.  I’m not sure if they can do a soft upgrade using the compass or something, but I hope they can.
8. The messaging is not as consolidated as the BB.  I really like getting my sms, mms, and emails all in the same viewer.  There doesn’t appear to be an option for that here.
9. The browser isn’t quite as nice as the Iphone’s.  The Iphone browser does a good job of autosizing a site to fit the screen – android’s, not so much.  However, it’s still the 2nd best phone browser I’ve used.

So, all in all, I’m happy with the g1, but not ecstatic.  As a piece of hardware, it misses a few functional aspects.  The software is very solid, but does miss out on a few key points.  However, as an open source project, the software stands to improve incredibly fast, and will only get better.  I’m very excited to see an open source project this size, and I think it has the potential to change the way the mainstream thinks about open source.  I will more than likely keep my g1 just for that reason – I’m a lefty open source pinko!