24 Hours with TMobile's HTC G1 Google Android Phone

So I've had the T-Mobile G1 for a little over 24 hours now and I thought this would be a good time to recount my experience with the google phone - good, bad, and ugly.

Good

1. Beautiful display and font quality.
2. Phone quality - my sidekick would routinely drop calls at two specific places on my daily drive. The G1 doesn't drop below three bars of signal even at these weak spots in the network and calls stayed clear and crisp through the weak spots.
3. Included headphone/mic: while I might not listen to symphonic music on these, they're not bad for phone calls. Everything was clear and callers reported hearing me well.
4. 802.11 - 'nuff said.
5. Google calendar - I had not realized how truly good this app is, on the mobile, or the web.
6. The trackball - an excellent design that I was used to from the sidekick.
7. The touchscreen - for all the criticism over the lack of multitouch, I find the touch screen gestures quite usable if not as deeply integrated as I would like.
8. Brown - yeah, brown. I like brown. Apparently, so do a lot of other people.
9. Street View - bad ass.
10. Pac Man! Drive with the trackball, the touch screen, or the accelerometer.
    

Bad

1. The button presses that aren't on the screen just aren't quite right. There is a subtlety and nuance involved in getting the feel of these right and that feel is good or not great. So there may be a point to Apple's buttonless design. Somebody send a haptics team to HTC - quick.
2. The camera seems slow and unwieldy which may inherit a bit of its bad behavior from the buttons.
3. As reported elsewhere, switching from portait to landscape, ala touchscreen vs. keyboard navigation is painful. In particular, there seem to be a number of places where the navigation could have been easily supported more fully on the touch screen but force a keyboard interaction instead.
4. The phone comes with the GPS in a coarse mode from the factory. This meant that the first time that I asked the map application to locate me, it had me somewhere near Kitchener, Ontario which is quite a ways from Pittsburgh, PA. Once I discovered the setting for GPS granularity the tracking improved down to the few feet range. I guess it uses a lot of battery so that's why they leave it in coarse mode from the factory.
5. The omission of a native google reader app seems silly. It's not particularly difficult, and with google having what should be the most effective software engineering team in the world, this kind of omission is laughable.
   

Ugly

1. There is no task list app! That's a big WTF DOA for a lot of people, me included. Now I may be willing to write my own, but really, it's the canonical hello world in a number of frameworks. Surely, the collective genius at google can produce a todo list. And yes, I'm aware that there are a slew of web-based ones that are excellent - I'm holding out for a native android app.
   
2. Crash! The morning after I got the phone, I proceeded to check the weather with the weather channel app that I had downloaded from android market. I hit the menu button and the phone locked completely, including everything on the screen, and all of the buttons. It didn't respond to any of the reset sequences. Only after removing the battery, was I able to get it to reboot successfully. So much for google's smooth crash handling I'd seen reported.
3. Contacts - the migration of contacts from my sidekick to the G1 was positively painful, requiring a lengthy and tedious, mostly manual process that could have been easily planned for by T-Mo. The fact that they failed to solve this is an indicator of how little the designers are thinking of these issues. They stop at the design of the phone but the complete product is the sum of a lot of other components in addition to the phone.
4. Did they mention the battery? The battery life is horrible. Granted, I've been playing with the thing obsessively. However, I've not seen it go for more than about 12 hours without a charge. That seems awfully short.

Summary

The T-Mobile G1 with Google Android is a significant improvement over my previous sidekick, which despite the fact that very few people had ever heard of it, was a trendsetter in its time. Virtually every facet of the phone is improved. I don't really care what the comparisons to the iPhone are as the iPhone is not an option for me due to Apple's highly proprietary, provincial, and insular view of the world. While the T-Mobile is far from perfect, and HTC's effort here is clearly not to Apple's hardware standard, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Time will tell whether the android market can deliver on the promise of an open application market for mobile phones. Is this 1981 all over again? I think so.