T-Mobile G1
|

If the following assessment appears to speed through things a little too quickly, fear not - the full T-Mobile G1 review can be found in our handset review section of the site.

For those short on time, however, here is a condensed version of that in-depth appraisal:

Basic features

"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.

"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."

Software and apps

"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.

"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."

Gaming

"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.

"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."

Conclusion

"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."

T-Mobile G1

Score
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)