I’ve been using the new T-Mobile/Google T1 Android phone for a week and have a few initial observations.

First, this is a decent phone with a nice feature set.  It is able to make calls, browse the web, get email, and has some basic GPS functions.  However, the phone comes off as lacking a certain sense of polish.  In fact, the best analogy I can think of is that it is what I would expect a next generation Palm OS to look like if they hadn’t fallen off the face of the earth.  In a week of use, here is what I have found:

1)  Phone works well.  No real complaints on making and receiving calls.

2) Browser works well, but has some very annoying quirks.  For example, every time I touch the screen to scroll, it brings up a zoom button which obscures part of what I am reading.  Very annoying.

3)  Media playback is abhorent.  I know that many say it is tolerable, but I’ve found it really lacking.  The fact that no video application was provided shows that Google does not consider this to be a media device.

4) Market place is well done, but I’d like a way to browse the market from my desktop, not just the phone.  As the number of apps increases, browsing via the phone will be increasingly difficult.

5) Keyboard works great.  No complaints.  Same with the trackball.

6) Data speeds are fine over Edge and 3G (which turned on in my market yesterday)

7)  Having two email apps is annoying.  In addition, there seems to be an auto-complete bug in the non-Gmail mail application which makes the feature non-functioning.  Additionally, even though my email provider is G-mail on my secondary account, the mail application does not include any features like starring a message that are present in the primary email application.

Overall, the marketplace will really define whether I carry this phone in addition to my iPhone.  If the market delivers applications for Sling, Qik, Skype, and other critical apps missing on my iPhone it will be worth having the G1 around.  If no innovative applications arrive, I’d have a hard time committing to carrying this phone, even as a backup.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Tech Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.