09 November 2008

I purchased a G1
... and then I brought it back!

Being a big Linux geek I was intrigued by the G1 so I went and signed the 2 year contract and picked up the handset for $179 ($195 w/ tax) and went with the $25 a month plan since I'm not a big texting person.

Anyway initial impressions were the battery was utterly horrible. To put this into perspective, I charged this thing overnight and pulled it off the charger at 8am and by roughly 2pm it was completely dead.

My usage mainly consisted of light browsing, checking out market, and maybe messing about with a few applications. It was like clockwork everyday that this battery died.

Finally, at around day 3 I returned it for a new one hoping this issue would be resolved which it wasn't. Ok whatever, some other problems I faced were I had a huge echo whenever I was on the phone with someone, and I mean it was loud almost as if I was talking to myself.

Next issue, sub-par camera...I just couldn't take a decent picture to save my life. No matter how still I kept my hand every picture came out blurry. Another problem for me was while browsing I'd just touch the screen to move it down a bit and the whole page would scroll down which would annoy the piss out of me.

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Yet another issue, sometimes when the phone went into standby it would take along time to come out like upwards of a minute...weird. The body of the phone seemed very flimsy and easily breakable.Also, the keyboard was nearly flush on the device making it hard to type. No ability to install apps to SD card! FFS, I was running out of space after only installing a few apps. No way to close out applications, after a while things seemed to run slower and laggier.

Some positives of the device now....good web browsing when it was working properly; probably best compared to the iphone in this area. Notification area was also a nice feature. Market was also another positive experience though sometimes it would take a while for downloads to start which I imagine is T-Mobiles fault.

Youtube was nice...seemed very high def. All in all, I feel Android has a lot of potential in the future, but as of right now it's lacking what most other mobile phones already provide. I do however look forward to seeing what future android handsets bring. Anyway, I returned my G1 after 10 days and I'm now back on my e51 =)

Oh yeah, one more thing I found odd was that you need a gmail account just to setup the phone!!!!