If not now then when?

T-Mobile G1 First Impressions

I've been patiently waiting for the Android-powered phone for quite a while now and last night my G1 arrived a whole 12 days earlier than expected. I was like a little school girl with her very own pony. I've now given myself a little over 24 hours to actually use the phone, talk on it, play games on it, etc., and wanted to provide some early feedback for anyone considering the phone.

Setup

Using my old SIM from my previous phone, the G1 came with a weakly charged battery, enough to get me up and running. I was instantly prompted with a Google login screen (or you can create an account if you don't already have one). Once past there, you're in and ready to use the phone. The next thing I had to do was get my contacts setup. Since the G1 uses your gmail contact list, and I've been using contacts stored on my SIM, I had a lot of work to do. This process was painful because although the G1 provides an "import from SIM" feature, you have to add contacts one at a time. This sucked. Somebody will probably tell me there is a bulk-add feature and that will be funny.

The next step once I got all my contacts from my old phone into my gmail contact list was to merge records together. This was another painful task because I had previous contacts in my gmail contact list with email only and no phone, and now I had many duplicates except they only had a phone number. So I had to merge them one by one, always having to delete the duplicate contact before saving the primary because gmail won't let you have two contacts with the same email address. Luckily, this can all be done on a computer since the G1 auto-syncs your contacts.

So that entire process took me about an hour, but it is actually something I've needed to do for a long, long time. Many people more organized than myself probably already have well-maintained contact lists, in which case this setup process will be a breeze.

That was about all I did last night, once finished I plugged it in since by then it was ready for a full charge.

Daily Usage

Before I left the house in the morning I had enabled the wifi feature and had all the auto-syncing (gmail, calendar, contacts) running. It was about 9am when I unplugged the phone from the charger. I'd say by about 11:30 my battery life was at 40% which was pathetic. So I plugged it into my computer with the handy USB cable provided and let it charge while I worked and played with the phone. As an aside, when plugged in via USB, the phone is treated as a standard USB mass storage device to your computer. What, you can just drag and drop music, videos, pictures or whatever onto your phone? Yup. Awesome.

So the battery thing turns out to be a big deal. Guess that's a good thing because it means (cross my fingers) that there will be an update to Android and/or the G1 to conserve battery life. In the meantime, I picked up a few good tricks for preserving battery life:

1. Turn off the auto-sync of your contacts (I have found this to be the single biggest consumer of battery life)
2. Don't leave the GPS on
3. Reduce screen brightness to 30% or so. It's still plenty bright at this level.
4. Set the screen timeout to 30 seconds or leave it at the default 1 minute but be diligent about locking the screen when you're done with it.
5. Don't leave the wifi on, although I'm not convinced this is a big offender, still need to do more testing.

So why is the auto-sync of the contact list so bad? Well, because it is CONSTANTLY polling gmail for an updated contact list. It's fucking ridiculous how often it checks. You can go to the auto-sync settings page and with contact sync enabled, you can watch the damn thing sync (which takes anywhere from 5-20 seconds), wait for not more than 1 second, then sync again. And again. And again. Ummm, hello, can I have a sync frequency for the love of god? If you're not going to utilize data push technology, you've got to let me adjust the frequency.

Anyway, once I turned off the auto-sync contacts, my battery life improved dramatically. It has been unplugged for more than 8 hours and I still have 50% battery life left, and that's with wifi turned on. My contacts don't really change very often, and if they do I can just hop over to the sync settings page and force a sync, no problem.

Everything else is pretty normal, phone works good, audio quality is good, dialing on the screen is easy. The web browser is great (WebKit-based) though a bit tricky to use at first when trying to click tiny little links on a page, but now that I can zoom quicker and also found out I can use the scrollball to navigate my click focus, I'm becoming better at using it.

I also setup a separate email account (IMAP+SMTP) so I can check my work email from time to time, though I chose not to have it auto-check this account. I've read some complaints about non-gmail email not working reliably, but so far I've had no issues.

My only other minor gripe is the touch screen doesn't seem to register my finger press from time to time. Maybe it's my fat fingers or maybe it's a dirty screen, or maybe I'm just not good at using a touch screen (this is my first), but I will say that I've noticed less and less "dead clicks" as I use this phone more. It's one of those things that frustrates the hell out of you for the first hour or so, then after a few days you say to yourself "this is a piece of cake, what was I whining about?".

I could go on and on about general usage of the phone, but by now we've all played with an iPhone right? Yeah, it's like that. I want to talk about the Android Market.

Android Market

This is the shit. I will be honest, I barely got my phone running and I was in the market downloading all sorts of stuff. You've got apps you might have heard about like Shazam (music identifier) or iPhone similar apps like Tunes Remote among loads of others. There's also about 5 (and growing) different "flashlight" apps. So silly. What's really cool about the app marketplace is not so much the apps themselves, but the fact that ANYBODY can put an app in there without needing to approve it. Plus, with a setting on the G1, you can run unsigned apps on your phone which basically (at least as I understand it) means you don't have to go through the official Android Market to install an application. This is very cool.

What really makes this all possible is the Android platform is open-source and their development SDK is available for download right now. Sure, it requires you to write code in Java, which for me personally, is not a pleasurable experience, but I went from downloading the SDK to running Hello World in no time at all. I'm really excited about this.

I don't really know what more to say, I've only had the phone 1 day so these are some really early impressions, but I am very impressed. Despite the battery thing, which I think I've taken care of with the contacts syncing bullshit, I am very pleased with my new toy.

What are you waiting for? Go get yourself one now. Hey, they're cheaper than an iPhone (with a 2-year contract) and instead of being with a notoriously bad customer service company you will be with one of the highest rated customer service companies (in the world of cell providers). That doesn't suck. No I'm not marketing for tmobile, I was just scarred by att/cingular after being with them for 6 years. That's why I'm talking about the G1 right now instead of the iPhone a year and a half ago.

Update: It's been about 3 days now since I got the phone and there is no doubt that the contacts list auto-sync feature is what was draining the battery quickly. I leave wifi on all the time and I still have half (or a little less) battery left after the end of the day. The contacts list will force sync itself with gmail when you edit anything in the phone, so as long as you manually force a sync if you change things from within gmail (away from your G1) then you can disable the contact list auto-sync and have no side effects.