Daily Archives: September 24, 2008

Unless you have been living under a rock you would have known about the G1. Google’s first android phone.

Here is engadget first look, Mossberg’s review and Google’s own press release.

Here is my review even though I don’t have it in my hand from the videos and other review this is what I think about G1.

Hard disk space : 1 Gb onboard and can be expanded with memory card which is bad. Iphone comes with 8 GB at the low end so they should have aimed few Gigs more than that. That is seriously an issue for a device that wants to become a smart phone.

No Video play back or No native video recorder. Hopefully some one will develop apps for that, but they should come with the Android by default.

No head phone jack that’s really a bad miss.

And a 1 GB limit on the data usage on 3G network (and we thought iphone had issues with data usage), you have to be kidding me.

If you can look past those issue you will get a phone that is open source and will have a open market place for apps.

Android is cool but way too many ways to navigate. With keyboard, the joy stick, touch screen. And no standards for buttons or ui. So only geeks will love it and use it unlike the iphone which can be easily used by a novice.

So it’s not just the device the UI also has issue. Now I know why apple didn’t put a keyboard on iphone. There is no way to make it look cool and still keep clean ui and user experience.

In India these phones will take time to come and will cost upwards of 30000 Rs because that’s what most of the high end HTC phones cost in India at the moment.

My advice is wait for a better device, and give android time to make improvements. Google always makes things better with updates like gmail, docs, calendars etc. So hope android will also get better with both devices and the operating system in few months time.

Until then get an iphone and have fun.

World’s first Android-powered phone’s Official site