



Hardware

Internals

Phone / speakerphone / call quality

Camera





The G2 is a tough looking device. It's not exactly rugged, but it looks like it means business. The housing is made up of two distinct surfaces: a gray, soft touch plastic, and silver brushed aluminum. The overall design is reminiscent of the Nexus One, though more squared off and stately. The phone feels higher end than a lot of previous HTC devices, with little touches like a standalone release latch for the battery cover. While the phone is handsome, it is on the thick side, clocking in at 0.58 inches (the device itself is 4.68 inches by 2.38 inches in length and width). It's not light, either. The G2 weighs 6.5 ounces, which has a notable heft in your hand. Next to an iPhone 4 it looks massive, though it's only a bit bigger than something like the BlackBerry Torch or Droid Incredible.On the front of the device, the glass, capacitive screen is surrounded by a silver band, and HTC has chucked off the trackball for a BlackBerry Bold-esque optical trackpad. You've got the standard Android hard touch buttons here, and we can attest to much better tracking on these than with the Nexus One. On the right side of the phone is a two-stage camera button and release latch, on top is a power / sleep button and 3.5mm headphone jack, and the left side of the phone sports a volume rocker and micro USB slot. Around back is the 5 megapixel camera's lens alongside an LED flash.Of course, this isn't just a touchscreen device -- the face of the phone slides and pivots up (using HTC's "z-hinge") to reveal a full QWERTY landscape keyboard. Now a lot of fuss has been made about this hinge design, and we can tell you that the reports are mostly true. The hinge works beautifully, but if you tilt the phone so that gravity is working on the screen, it will slide back down or dangle. It just doesn't lock tightly into the "open" position. This wasn't really a problem in nearly all of our use, but it will be a major bummer if you're planning on laying down and holding this above you while typing. Besides the very minor hinge issue, the keyboard itself is one of the best landscape QWERTYs we've ever used. The keys are excellently sized and shaped, and have a good bit of space between them. The tactile feel of the keys was just clicky enough to reassure, but not too stiff to move quickly. Additionally, HTC thoughtfully has included three dedicated quick keys which can be user assigned to just about anything, and the keyboard has a standalone "www / .com" key -- a big help. If you like landscape keyboards, it'll be tough to find a superior choice.Overall, from a visual standpoint the G2 is a handsome phone which is well made, but it won't appeal to all tastes. It's a serious device, and we're fairly confident that for many in the Android community, this hits a lot of the right notes.The G2 sports a Qualcomm MSM7230 CPU clocked at 800MHz, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage, and has a microSD card expandable to 32GB (it comes with an 8GB card). The display is a 3.7-inch, 800 x 480 capacitive touchscreen (S-TFT), and the phone sports a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, capable of 720p video. Of course there is WiFi here (802.11b/g/n), along with Bluetooth 2.1, an AGPS chip, proximity sensor, and an accelerometer.The G2 packs in a 1300mAh battery inside, and we found that it performed excellently in daily use, even with constant Twitter updates, lots of pushed email, browsing, and phone calls. You'll have to get the phone on a charger come nighttime, but for us that was pretty late in the day and we'd only just tapped orange on the battery icon. We were impressed by the phone's ability to sip juice even though it was pushing quite a bit of content over the network.On the display side, we're happy that HTC went with an LCD panel for the G2, but there are still some visibility issues in direct sunlight. It's not impossible to see the screen, but it's not that easy either. Otherwise, colors looked far more balanced than what we've seen on a lot of AMOLED screens, blacks were deep, and text looked especially crisp.Overall performance on the device was extremely speedy -- we never saw lag or stalls when switching between apps or opening tabs in the browser and loading pages. Don't let the 800MHz number fool you, the G2 is as fast or faster than most top-end Android phones we've used.The earpiece on the G2 sounded excellent to us, and the most of the people we spoke with said it was all clear on the other end. We had a few calls where the other party said we had broken up, but it was unclear which phone was responsible. The phone software seems to be working better on the G2 than any previous Android 2.2 device we've used. Maybe it's the proximity sensor, but sensing when we had it against our ear or away was way faster and more accurate, and the phone just seemed to be generally snappier.The speakerphone, unfortunately, was downright painful to our ears. It has a tinny, shrill sound that made taking hands-free calls unpleasant, and was a total non-starter for music. In a pinch it'll do, but we'd suggest getting yourself a good Bluetooth headset instead of having to hear the audio this phone puts out over the speaker.The G2 camera looks promising on paper, with that 5 megapixel sensor, autofocus lens with macro, single LED flash, dedicated 2-stage shutter button, and support for 720p video recording. While relatively standard today, these specs improve upon HTC's former 5 megapixel Android flagship device, the Nexus One. In practice, the camera produces very reasonable results (and is sometimes even exceptional), though it can be tricky to attain solid focus in darker settings. Color balance seemed good if a little washed out, exposure is generally accurate, and low-light performance was decent, with noise only becoming problematic in extreme conditions. As you can see in the handful of side-by-side shots with the iPhone 4 below, the G2 performs admirably, but it seems to be lacking the clarity and color depth of the competition.