In the shadow of the iPhone

Editor's note: This is our first look at Android, and in this review we focus on the primary question on most people's minds—can this phone knock the iPhone off its perch? In the coming weeks, we'll dive further into the phone, and look more closely at its niche uses, and its open nature. For today, the focus is on whether or not Google has delivered a product with polish, features, and ease of use.

The T-Mobile G1 Google smartphone, designed by Google and made by HTC, remains firmly in the shadow of the iPhone—for now. The phone, which goes on sale next week in the US and next month in Britain, was released too early. The HTC hardware and Android OS that powers it lack the polish and depth of even the iPhone 1.0 in most respects. It's not a bad phone, but the software and hardware needed more time in the oven to bring them to a golden brown crispness.

The G1 would come off much better if it wasn't competing with the 3G iPhone and iPhone OS 2.1. Admittedly, it's not clear that Google would have been able to sign up carriers back when the original iPhone was released back in the pre-3G and pre-App Store days, back when Google assembled the three dozen firms that form the Open Handset Alliance, without the iPhone as leverage. While Android's development predates the release of the original iPhone, phones based on the OS will be pushed onto the market in part because of Apple's exclusive carrier deals; carriers left out need an alternative.

The G1 is burdened with a lot of issues that have little to do with the phone itself, but we'll see if we can get past that to explore the general inadequacy of the phone.

The hardware

You notice the G1's ordinariness as soon as you unpack the phone, which comes wrapped in a small, neatly designed box. The cables are the kind you find accompanying any phone, which somehow makes the G1 appear bland even before use.



Android's Maps program integrates multiple Google Maps views, and uses the GPS receiver for position.

The G1 guides you through a simple and well-designed setup process for creating accounts and filling in basic parameters. Oddly, despite the inclusion of a WiFi radio, there's no option to add existing WiFi accounts during setup. Instead, the phone defaults to using T-Mobile's limited 3G network, available in a few dozen cities right now. (Both data plans for the G1 include unlimited T-Mobile HotSpot use, which includes several thousand locations in the US)

Previews of the phone, produced by reviewers at national publications (like Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal) led me to expect a somewhat better piece of gear than what the G1 turned out to be. The G1 has a slightly rubberized case that's comfortable in the hand, but the fit and finish isn't all there.

The phone's slide-out keyboard doesn't have a smooth motion—it slams into place. The display portion wobbles slightly and doesn't lock solidly into open or closed positions. The bottom portion of the phone, when in closed portrait mode, has a slight raise and tilt, and feels exactly right. HTC crammed five buttons and a trackball nubbin into that area.

When butterflied open, the raised and tilted portion winds up on the right side of the keyboard, and irritates while you type. The keyboard is quite nice, with all the letters and numbers available, along with keys for period and the @-sign, plus a dedicated Google search key. It's quite similar to a one-letter-per-key BlackBerry.

Ports and buttons seem to be scattered around the phone, based on where they happen to fit, rather than having been placed through a well-thought-out design; HTC may have based this on a previous model to produce it so fast. Owners of HTC phones may be used to having volume up/down buttons in a reasonable place (the upper left side of the phone in portrait mode), but the compact USB jack is at the bottom, the camera button at the lower right, and the microSD slot cover is partly hidden when the phone isn't opened.

There's no standard headphone jack either, although the unit comes with a set of uncomfortable microphone/earbuds that use HTC's proprietary USB audio connector to hook into the phone. An ungainly USB-to-2.5mm adapter is available, but not included.

The earbuds have good audio quality when listening to music. There's a large rectangular bolus in the cable with a thumbnail for adjusting volume, a button for controlling call and music behavior, and a built-in microphone.

In use, the G1 doesn't feel overly large unless you're holding an iPhone in the other hand. But the slide-open keyboard makes the G1 more practical for large quantities of typing. As a 100wpm touch-typist, I'm still uncomfortable with the iPhone's glass keyboard; I could type well on the G1 keyboard immediately.

A built-in speaker produces decent sound and can pump out at extremely high volume. The speaker is on the back, so it's easy to muffle if you're playing back YouTube or using it as a speaker phone when resting it on a table.

The out-of-the-box brightness was far too dim, obviously set to about 35 percent of maximum to preserve battery life. At its full brightness, video playback from YouTube was far more attractive.

The built-in three-megapixel camera produces extremely sharp, high-quality photos, even at a range of a few inches. Its auto-focus and exposure adjustments are fantastic. A third-party bar-code scanner had no trouble instantly recognizing and decoding a photo of a UPC printed on a book, for instance. However, the best hardware feature of a smartphone should not be its camera.



A photo taken with the G1's camera

The phone comes with a 1 GB microSD card installed, which is used by default to store photos, music, and other items. Plugging the phone into a computer via USB mounts the card, and its contents can be copied without special software. This is a meager amount of storage compared with the iPhone's base 8 and 16GB models, but a 4GB microSD card can be had for as little as $14; T-Mobile maybe should have opted to eat a few dollars and include that amount of storage.

Although I didn't have a G1 for long enough to test its battery performance during long phone calls or other typical drains, but the battery life seemed adequate. The unit lasted about a day with heavy data use, downloads, and video playback from YouTube, although that was with the inadequate default brightness.