Thoughts on the Google G1 phone after dorking with it for 15 minutes

I swung into a T-Mobile store today to get my hands on a G1. There were two on show at the front of the Michigan Avenue store I walked into, but the eight or so other customers in the store were in line to complain about customer service problems, not check out phones.

I played around with the G1 for about 15 minutes, but I never made a phone call. These are some random notes I jotted down (in no particular order) from the experience after I got on the bus. Here are a few things to know before we get to the meat: I’ve been obsessed with mobile phones ever since I got a job at Circuit City in 2001. I’ve owned some form of PDA or smartphone since Visor began making a better Palm than Palm, and I picked up a used Visor Deluxe at Best Buy in the fall of 1999. I’ve owned PocketPC PDAs and Windows Mobile smartphones, as well as Symbian smartphones like the Sony Ericsson P900. I despise Windows Mobile and what I believe to be are Microsoft’s terrible UI philosophies, and while I thought Symbian had promise back when the P900 was hot, I don’t have much faith now that it was sold to Nokia.

I own an iPhone now and as a writer for Ars Technica, I am pretty aware of the many caveats of the device and platform for both developers and consumer. I like open source software like the G1’s Android OS, but so far, I’ve never found any of it compelling enough to use for any primary or casual computing in lieu of Mac OS X or Windows.

Now that you know where I’m coming from, here’s where I got with the G1:

• Lots of annoying UI irregularities. Can’t tell whether to use the ball, keyboard, or my finger in some areas. While some applications and windows offer a choice on how to do something, the fact that this choice seemed to arbitrarily appear and disappear between applications and windows got annoying pretty quickly.
• The Home screen is a blank canvas that can be expanded with a selection of application icons and functional widgets. This is kinda fun, but some widgets, such as a large analog clock, seemed weird since the time is also displayed at all times in the industry-wide menubar at the top.
• The Home Screen’s flexibility also became disorienting. There’s no way to tell which portion of the screen you’re in (by comparison, the iPhone’s uniform Home Screen displays a small dot for each “page” of applications so you always know exactly where you are when browsing). There’s no way to tell how wide the home screen is, and while there appeared to be only three “pages,” I had to bounce back and forth a couple times to, say, find the Maps application or the Google search widget.
• The device itself—designed by HTC, a company famous for its Windows Mobile phones—feels massive for its relatively uninspiring hardware feature set (though a 3MP camera is certainly an improvement over most smartphone competition, including the iPhone). I agree with others that the flip-out hinge for the display feels pretty rigid, though it was by no means rock-solid as some have claimed (though this was a demo model that could very well have been beaten on pretty hard already). As someone who has upgraded through lots of standard mobile phones and smartphones, though, the G1 simply looks and feels clunky, like it was designed and built about 2-3 years ago; not as if it was built from cutting edge manufacturing processes like some of the competition.
• I loved some UI ideas in Android, especially the menubar that can be pulled down like a set of window blinds to reveal notifications for voicemails and text messages.
• The G1’s bottom portion that contains its five buttons and the navigational rollerball is bent upwards from the display, as if someone took the G1 over his or her knee (screen down) during the manufacturing process. I haven’t read other reviews to find out if there was some kind of ergonomic ideal at play, but I absolutely hate this design. It cramps my thumb and makes it harder, or at least more uncomfortable, to use the phone’s buttons.
• As the G1’s display flips up to reveal the physical QWERTY keyboard underneath, the aforementioned bend in the hardware got in my way of using the keyboard. Once flipped up, the display aligns itself directly over the keyboard, but the navigational butt of the phone kicks my right hand out farther. I constantly had to readjust my right hand in order to let my thumb strike certain keys. This was obnoxious, and while I obviously didn’t spend much time with the phone, I never able to figure out a comfortable fit.
• The G1’s browser was ok and handled fairly complex sites like Ars Technica’s, but images never loaded so I don’t think I got the browser’s full experience. I don’t know if this was the T-Mobile store has a fairly sketchy connection inside the Michigan Avenue mall or someone perhaps turned off images in the browser, but it seemed ok for what it rendered. 
• The browser was a little sluggish when responding to finger movement and flicks for scrolling, but a huge benefit of the hardware keyboard is that Android incorporates the “Space bar = scroll one page down” command. It even used smooth scrolling so I could tell exactly where I ended up after the scroll. Very pleasant experience.
• The G1’s camera button is located on the lower right side of the device, presumably to encourage users to shoot photos in landscape mode so the shutter button ends up right where virtually every regular camera keeps it. This worked great when I shot in landscape, but when I shot in portrait, that button button couldn’t be in a worse place no matter which hand I used.

I didn’t test much else on the G1, as I didn’t feel like, say, setting up my Gmail account and figuring out how to nuke it when I was finished. The OS overall felt pretty responsive when closing and opening apps. Other complaints I have can arguably be summed up as personal preference, so I didn’t feel like diving into them too much. Generally speaking, I’ve never liked the design and aesthetics of most open source software and OSes, and that opinion stands on Android as well. I don’t know what font the OS uses, for example, but it looks boxy and geeky to me, as if an issue of 2600 is included in every G1 box. The Android Marketplace is simple and straightforward to use, but there is a lot of black everywhere which, again, not only looks overly geeky to me, but amateurish in light of the iPhone App Store’s subtle gradients and comfortable detail. This can come down to a preference for the overall design styles of Apple or the open source community, though, so I don’t feel like spending much time on that discussion right now.

That’s about all I can remember from my short time with the G1. Feel free to ask questions in the comments and I’ll see if I can respond with something useful.