Wise Startup Blog

So the new gPhone arrived at my office yesterday, and after a couple hours of consideration, I’ve decided to crack open the box and write up a quick review after my initial usage. The good.

I had pre-ordered the gPhone about a month ago, when T-Mobile announced the phones were going on sale.

It took me a couple of tries until the screen actually worked, but I eventually was able to place my order. Unfortunately they didn’t have any White units in stock, but luckily they didn’t stick me with the Brown.

For some reason the brown sounded appealing at first, but if I ended up with one, I would have felt short-changed. Look at the Zune: brown doesn’t work.

T-Mobile G1 New gPhone Review

The packaging is very nice, with the box having an insert and the outer frame showing through in the area with the ‘G1′. Inside the box was a nice foam padded area, and the phone was prominently displayed.

T-Mobile definitely took their time crafting nice packaging for the device, but as usual, the accessories definitely underperformed. The new gPhone packaging and look for T-Mobile makes me feel like T-Mobile is starting to build their brand beyond AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon.

I don’t know about you, but I like all of the accessories to maintain the same fit and finish of the device, but the accessories definitely fell short.

There is the headphones, that look like the standard blackberry affair, and the charger was disappointing, as strange as that sounds–I didn’t expect an iPhone charger, but I would have liked a foldable charger akin to the Blackberry.

The device itself is actually pretty impressive. It looks like your typical PDA/HTC phone, but has a little sophistication to it. The all black lines give it a business feel, and the keyboard isn’t as bad as I thought.

Personally, I like the iPhone’s keyboard the best, and can type on it using one hand. With the gPhone, I have to use two hands.

The most annoying part of the keyboard is my right hand. It’s inhibited by the bump of the buttons, and makes it hard to start hacking away like I would on a Blackberry or iPhone. I’d have to say the keyboard is more of a drawback than a feature.

The buttons on the base of the device are pretty useful, and I found myself using the trackball more than I did the screen. Maybe it’s because I’m used to my Blackberry 8800 and its trackball, but it seemed to get the job done for the most part.

The trackball didn’t always became ‘active’ on the screen. And what I mean by this is essentially when you’re using a PC and you’re trying to click in the search box, but the mouse hits the wrong area, and you can’t type. This is the same situation with the trackball. I had to essentially tap on the screen with my finger to get the trackball in the correct sensing-position.

The flip mechanism was a lot more well constructed than I expected, and you can see the locking and snapping mechanism, it looks pretty robust. My girlfriend actually felt the snapping of the keyboard into place was a little too violent and thought it might lead to deteriorating after extended use/drops.

I think it should last you at least a year, but for those people who don’t upgrade their phones as often as me, it could present a problem.

The Android OS was less than impressive. It felt more like a computer than the iPhone, but lacked the fit and finish I’ve come to expect on the iPhone. Browsing around menus was often confusing, and not as intuitive as the iPhone.

I expect over time to learn the ins and outs of the phone, but would have liked more ease of use out-of-the-box. One feature that was appealing was the ability for apps to run in the background. I could listen to music on the Imeem app, while browsing the Internet, or trying to figure out how to connect to a Wifi hotspot.

Managing the connections is also less than intuitive, and I hope will get more updates in the future. You can’t manage connections from the desktop, but have to go into settings, which can be a lot of steps for trying to setup an open network. I actually couldn’t get on our local open network, because it requires you to validate the session in the browser, and I couldn’t get the connection started, and validate in the browser effectively.

Wifi on my home network was great, and I could even stream Imeem over Edge, which was particularly impressive.

The camera was better than I expected, but the shutter was incredibly slowww. It is even slower than the iPhone, making it virtually useless. You can see in the picture below that it seems to have some shake, which is really because you have to hold the camera still for a good 6 seconds.

Hopefully we’ll see a software update for the camera, because as of now it’s useless. As for video recording, I can’t find anything. I was hoping there would be a native app, but there’s nothing included. I searched the App Market, but couldn’t find a video recording app as well.

Using gMail and my email was a little annoying to setup. Unlike the iPhone, you don’t have a central area for mail. You either have your Mail or gMail. You can’t view both inboxes at the same time or even switch to them. You have to log into each application separately.

There are nice notifications that come up when you have new emails/SMS/etc but without PUSH, it’s a little aggravating the email experience is so lackluster.

Overall, my conclusion is that I will most likely be selling the G1. It doesn’t offer me the email ease of use that my Blackberry has, and without a 3G network in my area, the iPhone is killing it in terms of speed.

While I think I would be more confident having only the gPhone if I were on a trip, and the iPhone wouldn’t perform as well. On a day-to-day basis, the iPhone fits my personal uses better, and is more impressive, and show-stopping.

For those of you on T-Mobile, who don’t have an unlocked iPhone, I would say this is a great phone upgrade for anyone not used to Blackberries, and the Sidekick users should be really happy with this upgrade.

There are a couple of caveats you should be aware of. This new gPhone is not the only Google Phone to be released. T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T all will be releasing a gPhone at some point, although Sprint has said they will not have an Android phone available.

As far as comparisons go, this phone is better than anything Sprint has to offer. It is comparable to an iPhone, and is better than the Sprint Samsung iPhone killer.

The Android/Google Phone does not support flash. So you can’t watch Hulu, YouTube (natively), etc. The gPhone does not have A2DP support. And the headphones do not supply a 3.5mm jack meaning you can’t use your iPhone headphones.

The T-Mobile network is also quite slow. It’s on EDGE, and there is not T-Mobile coverage nationwide, so you may be stuck with very slow downloads or streaming audio or video.

Perhaps the next devices will be a little better than this new gPhone, as I think version 2.0 will have a great chance of being a true iPhone competitor or even killer.

Until then, I hope you enjoyed my review of the new Google gPhone G1 or whatever you want to call it