T-Mobile G1 review

After months of rumours and hype, the T-Mobile G1 represents the first chance for mobile users to get hands-on with Google's new Android operating system. There hasn't been this much buzz around a new handset since… ooh, some phone made by that fruity company. You know the one.

Actually, though, the G1 isn't really an iPhone-killer. It's more of a traditional 'smartphone' than Apple's handset – i.e. aimed more at business users and technogeeks – whereas the iPhone is more of a consumery device (although yes, it was snapped up by Applegeeks too).

Another difference is the way the G1 itself is attracting less hype than the operating system it's based on. Sure, it's the first Android handset, but more will follow in 2009, meaning that the excitement around the G1 is more about Android than the capabilities of this specific phone.

We won't beat about the bush: the G1 is a bit of a chunker. It's quite big, it's quite heavy, and it's more likely to stun a potential mugger than it is to win any beauty contests. That said, it feels comfortable in your hand, and the bottom section angles out a bit to fit snugly to your face.

Slide the screen to the right, and it swings out to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard for emails, messaging and web browsing. The keyboard is pretty good – it's got a lot of keys on it, including dedicated number keys plus a comma and full stop, and they're well spaced, so you can get up a fair speed typing without making too many spelling mistakes.

Meanwhile, the screen itself is a touchscreen, giving you the fullest choice of control inputs. It's bright and impressive to look at, and dragging objects around with the G1's user interface feels intuitive. There's no iPhone-style multi-touch, but it's pretty responsive. When the screen is snapped back in, you use a combination of touch, a trackball and buttons at the bottom, including dedicated Back, Home and Menu buttons.

One baffling omission, given the G1's capabilities for playing music both stored on the device, and streaming through applications, is the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack. Want to connect your own 'phones? You'll be needing an adapter. The sooner every phone comes with a standard 3.5mm port, the better in our opinion.

There's a 3.2-megapixel camera, but options for taking photos are limited to say the least – allowing the G1 to access your location when taking snaps is pretty much it. The quality is okay, and pretty bad when the light is low.

It's relatively early days for Android, and there's clearly scope for OS updates to add new features and improve problems. But we're pretty impressed with what's in the G1 at launch, even if in some areas it struggles to compete with the iPhone.

Take its web browser, for example, which is a highly capable HTML browser that works well with the touchscreen, but just not quite as tactile-y as Safari does on the iPhone. Maybe we've just been spoilt pinching to zoom in to websites.

If you already use a bunch of Google's web services – particularly Gmail, Google Talk and Google Calendar – using the G1 is a dream. You just enter your username and password, and watch as everything's set up for you. This means, though, that you'll have to manually set things up if you use other services.

In fact, even if you are a fully-signed up Googler, there's quite a lot of manual setting up to do in your first few hours if you want the G1 to work at its best. This is a strength and a weakness. Being able to tweak pretty much everything is a powerful feature, letting you customise the phone to your specific usage patterns.

On the other hand, non-geeks might find it a bit intimidating. For all the work that's gone into the user interface and applications, Android still feels a bit… techy. More Windows Mobile than iPhone in that regard. You might argue that given the G1's likely buyers, that's not a big issue.

Apps-wise? Well, there's lots of 'em, and many many more to come. Ultimately, the real value to Android will be the applications released for it. We've already given our first impressions of the Android Market store – a good start but improvements will be needed as the catalogue of apps grows.

One small note – our review handset came from HTC, which makes the G1, and it had the Amazon MP3 Store app preloaded. We're not sure if this is the case in the official UK G1s being sold by T-Mobile – if so, obviously this'll only be useful once Amazon launches the store in the UK to let you buy stuff.

So how is the G1 for gaming? There are two aspects to this – the Android Market (choice, quality and value of games), and the handset itself (for playing them on).

We can't come to a judgement about Android Market yet, since there's only a limited number of games available, many of which are from indie developers, while those from bigger publishers are demos or simple casual games.

What we can say is that Android is clearly fine for the casual side of things, but there's little to rival the attractive 3D titles on iPhone or N-Gage yet – perhaps understandably, the publishers are waiting till they're allowed to charge for games before releasing these.

However, with freeware like JOYity, we're seeing the first shoots of the location-based games that could become an Android staple.

But the phone itself? It's okay for gaming, although it's clearly not its raison d'etre. Playing games using the touchscreen is only as good as the game's interface, of course, and we haven't played many on the keyboard.

Would we recommend the G1 as a gaming handset? In all honesty, not right now. But that's more a function of few games being available for it, and the likelihood that by the time they are, there might be more Android phones on the way that are a bit more svelte.

But as we alluded to earlier, that's not really the point of this handset. The G1 will be bought by people who can't wait to get hands-on with Android, and more business-like users. For them, it's more features like the keyboard, the customisation, and the tight Google integration that'll make the G1 a must-buy.

It's an impressive handset, in short. In some ways, it reminds us of the bulky 3G phones that launched with Vodafone and 3's 3G networks a few years ago. Early adopters had to have them, but less than a year later, they were looking a bit old-hat as sexier new models came along.

In a year's time, we reckon the G1 may be suffering from this too. But if you can't wait to get your Android on, it's a fine launch phone that shows the potential of Google's new mobile OS.