New Phone - TMobile G1

I have a G1. I have played with this phone so much today, it's unreasonable. I'm quite sure that this is the perfect phone for me.

Main Gripe - Battery Life.
Main Pro - It charges fast as shit.

Hmm. Well I mean, there is a lot to say about the phone. I think that it's well worth the 2 year extension, it's so functional, there are a TON of apps out and it's not even 3 months old, it feels like a good piece of hardware, everything works well together.

Main problem was syncing all my contacts from my sidekick over to Outlook, then syncing from Outlook to Google. But my Calendar and Contacts (most important part of my phone) transferred flawlessly. The only thing I'm missing is my pictures, and those are on my Sidekick's SD car, so I'll get them later.

Setting up the phone to be your own customizable thing is really fun. I honestly wasted about 4 hours getting the right apps and setting everything up the way I feel comfortable.

They give you three screens to work with on the desktop, and you can have 16 apps each. Anyone who's touched an iPhone understands how to switch screens. The menus make sense, but the only thing I see being a problem is that this phone will do TOO MUCH, and it's visions will be limited by it's hardware.

It's fairly easy to rearrange icons on the desktops, also. On one side, I have shortcuts to various settings, the main one I have main apps, and on the right screen I have social, miscellaneous apps.

The battery gets hot as balls during charging, GPS kills the life, and when you try to use "WiFi or Cell Tower positioning," it's definitely off the mark for location purposes. A lot of the intuitive programming comes from utilizing GPS, and, unfortunately, only expect to get a couple of hours runnign full blast. I remember that when I was at 15% after about an hour and change of GPS usage, video watching and etc, I turned on 2G only, and turned off 3G and GPS.

That 15%, still with me emailing, calling and texting constantly, lasted me well into New York for another hour and a half.

One major gripe is the lack of being able to highlight text in an email you receive when you want to copy maybe a portion of the email. When you forward, you forward the ENTIRE original document, so you can't clean it up to make it look like it was yours.

Also, the keyboard takes some getting used to. The SK keyboard is raised and the buttons are easy to press. These buttons on the G1 are slightly elevated, and place a wear on the fingertips, for some reason. It's not conducive for heavy text use.

I like the way that Texts are "nested" and are acutally conversations (think AIM-like), and the IM program generally sucks for AIM, but is awesome for GTalk.

Also, when I'm on Google on my laptop, my phone doesn't get bothered with the messages and such. Also, Changes made on my G1 reflect onto my computer terminal. It's like the two entities are not only using the same service, but they're truly synced.

Don't expect to profile hop though, the G1 is a one-SN monster.

Syncing with Google is pretty flawless as well. I made changes onto my contacts via Gmail on my laptop, and they reflected that on my phone within seconds.

Just don't try to multi-task. I don't know what programs it gives priority to, but Messaging and Email always seem to be active. Trying to load too many programs not only drains the battery, but is counter intuitive due to the nature of "mobile Linux." I don't think the G1 has too much onboard Ram, now that I think about it.

And the GPS functionality sucked when I was on I95 between Boston and New York.

But all in all, I like the phone. There's so much going on that I could blog for days about it. And coming from the EXTREMELY limited sidekick, this phone is a huge functionality change. But one thing I liked about the Sidekick, well, Danger OSes in general, is that everything works with everything like you expect it to.

See a number online, and you can add it to contacts. You can highlight numbers or addresses and pull them up on your map, google search em, or do whatever. If you think that you should be able to do something with the information given you, you should be able to.

I definitely recommend this phone. USB charging, unlimited access to Google and brilliant elegance with the programing make me extremely happy.