G1, love and frustration.

G1, love and frustration.

Oct 22

I received my G1 in the mail yesterday at work and have had some fun times thus far.  Here’s a quick two minute synopsis.

Android is a great mobile OS that deserves a lot of credit. It has taken some getting used to, coming from a long history of Nokia (Symbian) phones, but I’ve adapted and taken quite a liking to my new best friend. The main drawbacks have been the lack of real headphones. Not the lack of a headphone jack, I can understand the need to make money, but the headphones that came with the phone were god awful. The other bother has been more of a time consumption and a realization of disorganization… my Google contacts. Since the G1 uses your Google contacts, there is a long and tiresome process of cleaning up your contacts. First I had to rid myself of duplicate names, merge information, delete unwanted names and when that was all over I had to get rid of all of my “suggested contacts”. Suggested contacts are by far the worst feature of the phone/Google contacts. Suggested contacts appear in most applications when looking up a persons name. NO, I do not want to contact a craigslist posting, I want to contact Craig. It takes about an hour or so, depending on the size of your list (mine was around 400), but it’s worth it in the end. Now you’ve got a clean contact list on your phone and on the web for backup.

The 3G speeds have been phenomenal, a mobile speed test put me at about 375kbit/sec, versus my old 100kbit/sec on Edge. Not only was it fast, I beat out 2 3G iPhone’s on YouTube and page load times (by far) and even better still, managed to beat an iPhone connected to wifi. By no means am I bashing the iPhone, I’m just saying how happy I am with the results.

Which brings me to another thing, android needs some visual designers to get on the ball. I love simplicity just as much as the next CSS obsessed designer, but the iPhone shows us how simplicity and clean graphics can really make things look amazing. A few tweaks here and there could really convince even the most die-hard apple fans reconsider. The applications in the android store, alongside the street view features just make this phone a hard to beat buy. T-mobile customers really shouldn’t be reading this right now, go out and get one.

4.8/5, probably a pretty bias review.

[youtube: my unboxing video]