In your hand the G1 feels good. Solid and all-plastic, but not nearly as clunky as the blurrycam photos showed. Getting used to the controls takes a little bit—babies can’t pick up and instantly know their way around, like on the iPhone. Control wise, it suffers from a bit of schizophrenia—with a trackball, touchscreen, candybar mode and flip-out QWERTY, there’s a lot going on at once. What’s nice is that it seems to not lock you in to anyone type of control interface—scrolling with trackball and touching work at the same time in many apps.
Physically, the flip-out LCD feels solid and springy. Keyboard keys are small, spongy and a bit recessed, so it’s hard to touch type right off by the feel of the keys. The touchscreen is better than we had hoped—far better than the HTC Touch’s slow-to-respond screen. Scrolling is smooth at times, clunky at others, depending on the app. It’s not multitouch, so it uses a “long press” UI element quite a bit—like to drag an app from the pop-out menu to the desktop—but since the touch is fairly responsive, it works pretty well.
You use the menu button a lot, more than we’d like. For instance, in the browser, our instinct—kind of biased one, admittedly—is to touch the top of the screen to pop up the URL. Here, you’ve gotta press menu. Same with any other app, to do pretty much anything. It also pulls the Palm move of having the home button be separate from the power/lock button, so if you push the red button instinctively to kill an app, you’re just going to lock your phone.
Browsing: It may just be that we’re not comfortable with it yet, but the browsing is kind of cludgy. Again, control is an issue – lots of UI to fight through. Scrolling and zooming around a rendered page is a bit jerky as well, but on par with Opera Mini and similar mobile browsers. The touch zoom buttons don’t work as intuitively or respond as tightly as they should. Even though they’re both based on Webkit, it’s not as smooth as multitouch Safari, yet. Scrolling around web pages with the trackball is definitely smoother and more intuitive, immediately, than using the touch screen.
Google Apps: We didn’t have a Gmail account loaded, so we couldn’t see incoming messages, but the app looks minimalistic and was snappy. Text input is with the QWERTY keyboard, as it is with every app right now. It’s kinda subdued, missing the colorful bubbly design of the Gmail Mobile app for other phones. Interestingly, there is a Google Talk service active within the IM app, even though we had heard from the Android Devs that GTalk was not making it into the first version of the software.
Maps is top-notch—we found our location within a few seconds indoors on Manhattan’s far east side with combines GPS and cell-tower. It’s incredibly optimized, perhaps the smoothest app experience we’ve had yet. And Compass View, which uses accelerometers to predict where you’re pointing the phone to scroll around Street View accordingly, is rad—augmented reality, here we come….More…
Click here for Price Information
Tags: apple, Best Deals, Blackberry, cell phone, Cell Phone Deal, Cell Phone Deals, cell phones, cellhut, cellphone deal, cellphonedeal.wordpress, Cellphones Deals, Coming Soon, Curve, Curve 8310, deals, G1, G1 mobile, GOOGLE G1, GSM, keepontalking, LG, mobile, Motorola, motorola deals, Motorola Unlocked Cell Phone Deals, Nokia, nokia deals, perfect, perfectmobile, perfectphonecell phones, phone, phone deal, phones, samsung, Samsung deals, Samsung Unlocked Cell Phone Deals, sony deals, sony ericsson, Sony Unlocked Cell Phone Deals, T-MOBILE GOOGLE, T-MOBILE GOOGLE G1, unlockcell, unlocked, unlocked Blackberry Curve 8310, unlocked cell, unlocked cell mobile, Unlocked Cell Phone, Unlocked Cell Phones, unlocked cellphones, Unlocked Phone, wordpress
