Living with the G1
I have used the G1 as my main phone for three weeks now. Here’s how I think the G1 could be improved.
I think the camera is probably the weakest part. It’s very slow to take a picture and doesn’t cope very well in lower light situations. I’d go so far to say it’s the worst camera I have used on a phone.
The second major failing is the poor battery life. You have to charge each day otherwise you end up with a dead phone. On one occasion, the G1 alarm failed to wake me up in the morning because the battery was flat even though I had charged it the day before. I wonder what makes the G1 use so much more power than say Windows Mobile or Symbian devices. It’s the same with the iPhone which also has poor battery life. Maybe it’s something to do with Linux? Maybe it’s the extra polling occurring for the various Internet services?
There’s a minor problem with the keyboard in that under some lighting conditions, with keys backlit, I can’t see the keyboard letters.
Android itself could be improved considerably with the inclusion of sync/edit of Google docs and Picasa web albums.
Overall, it’s easy to get things done but sometimes it’s less obvious to undo or delete things.
Messaging (via Google Chat) can be slightly annoying when you get a new message notification on the G1 but not within GMail on your PC that you happen to be using at the time. You end up having to find the conversation within GMail (in All EMail) before you can reply from the PC.
While talking about notifications, the GMail notifications don’t work as well as they did prior to the UK G1 update that ocurred last week. I now have to manually check for email to be sure no new messages are available.
As with the iPhone, I am missing a file browser (3rd party efforts on the Android Market can only see the SD card).
Some users will be confused that the phone is set up, by default, to only install Android Market applications. There’s also no mechanism, such as that on the iPhone, that notifies you of available upgrades for your installed applications.
Although this post comes across a fairly negative, I am, in fact, fairly happy with the G1. I won’t be going back to the iPhone which will now be just used for development.
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