Updated: Htc Dream! Google Selling Unlocked G1 Phones In India !

[Mufaddal 678]

no more t mobile pre orders

guys the g1 is creating d same stir as the iphone .....the t mobile pre orders for g1 has sold out in just 4 days

"f you're a T-Mo customer and have been biding your time to pick up the HTC G1… You've already missed your chance, sorry! It looks like all available orders in the pre-order program have been filled. If you want one, you'll simply have to wait a bit longer, and head into a store around October 22 to pick one up. No details have been revealed yet on how many pre-orders they actually received. Somewhere around 60,000 units is the last rumor I heard. That would make up roughly 10% of the total sales they wanted to achieve before the end of the year.

Note: It took roughly 4 days for the G1 pre-orders to sell out. Seems like a long time to me?"

via :engadget

Edited September 28, 2008 by mufaddal_km

[Mufaddal 678]

and i waswaiting for this to happen .......bloggers have started comparing the almighty iphone with the so called iphone killer htc g1 android phone

though i like both the devices in the fact that both of them have sumthin unique and out of this world to offer .....but it seems the blogosphere is very skeptical about the g1 beating the iphone

here is an article i found at alleyinsider.com

GPhone v/s iPhone:

• iPhone has a more polished, intuitive user interface - Google’s Android OS is powerful and looks attractive, but it’s a bit too Windows-like. Apple’s iPhone user interface is simpler, cleaner, and just makes more sense.
  
• iPhone has multi-touch - Pinching doesn’t work in Google Maps to zoom out on Google’s own phone. HTC and Google simply can’t have multi-touch.
  
• GPhone’s keyboard is nice but its not useful - Especially since one can’t access Exchange/BlackBerry email accounts. GPhone almost twice as thick as the iPhone?
  
• Apple’s App Store is a year ahead of Google’s - There are so many apps that we’ve downloaded, especially professionally produced games, and how much time we spend using them. There is no info about partnerships with any gaming company or other big gaming shops. Google’s Android App Store will be sparse at the beginning, and will take a while to fill out.
  
• Syncing the iPhone to your computer is a breeze - Music comes from iTunes, photos from iPhoto, etc. Google won’t have an iTunes-like desktop syncing app, and instead will sync up with Google’s various Internet-based services.
  
• Google’s GPhone comes with a tiny percentage of the memory, just 1 GB - iPhone comes with 8/16 GB.
  
  
• 
  seems like the dirty comparison games have started ................ as far as i m concerned i still think the d real power of android is its sdk n dat will b d main domain where android should win over apple .......but then lets wait n watch what magic the 3rd party developers can do
  
  

[ACS 130]

Very Interesting..

At this pace, Google maybe the next to send someone to the moon.

Waiting to know, what they conquer next.

[Mufaddal 678]

leading mobile games publisher Gameloft has announced support for the Android platform. According to the official release, they plan to develop more than 10 games for Google’s mobile platform. Bubble Bash will be the first games and will hit the G1 users during the Q1 2009.

Commenting on the announcement, Gameloft’s CEO Michel Guillemot said: “The momentum and excitement for the Android has been building for some time. We plan to fully support this platform since it provides another great outlet for an enhanced gaming experience for consumers.”

[Mufaddal 678]

SAMSUNG AND LG TO COME UP WITH THEIR ANDROID DEVICES

Now that HTC has blazed the trail for manufacturers to give Google’s Android platform a go, but apparently T-Mobile’s G1 was “short of expectations” and the odds of LG or Samsung releasing their own Android handsets before the second half of 2009 are slim, according to Mirae Asset Securities. Even though Motorola and Nokia might be getting fresh with Android, clearly other manufacturers, including Sony Ericsson, remain hesitant to throw their chips in with the new kid on the block. It’s hard to read their intentions at this point - it sounds as if it’s fairly certain everyone will make an Android phone sooner or later, but want to let the G1 chew through the kinks first.

Mirae Asset Securities says many advertisers remain unconvinced by Google’s proposed application-centric revenue model, which isn’t entirely uncalled for. Apple’s the only one who has successfully pulled off a prepackaged software store to noticeable success, but we still haven’t seen how all of that developer excitement will be delivered to the end-users front door. If the G1 can pull it off, hopefully these other manufacturers will warm up a bit.

[via unwired view]

[Honest 836]

1.5 mn Android G1 Pre-Ordered Already

'iPhone killer' proves to be a hit with the masses

Google and HTC's first Android OS mobile phone G1 is already creating records of sorts even before hitting the retail stores. According to Motley Fool, the first shipment (50,000 units) of the T-Mobile G1 sold out at pre-orders to the T-Mobile subscribers. So, the company had tripled its next shipment order to HTC which sold out as well. Thus, it is estimated that about 1.5 million of G1 phones have been sold on pre-ordered basis.

For now, T-Mobile is fulfilling the pre-order requests and it's likely that G1 will take a while to reach retail markets in the rest of the world. The other touchscreen counterparts like iPhone 3G, BlackBerry Storm and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic are yet to achieve any such numbers at pre-order sales.

Each phone caters to a specific audience and of course with new Android SDK more applications would be added to the Android Market. It would be sensible if HTC adds that missing 3.5mm port for hooking headphones to G1 so it can easily give other touchscreens run for their money.

Courtesy : Techtree

[Mufaddal 678]

T-Mobile customers that have pre-ordered the HTC G1 may be in luck.

It is sounding like the htc g1 could be arriving as early as this Friday the 17th. Several people have reported that their orders have already been shipped and are scheduled for delivery this Friday. Crazy. That would put delivery of the device a full 5 days ahead of schedule. Way to go T-Mo! If you pre-ordered the device too, grab your tracking number hit up UPS to check the status of your delivery.

source BGR

[Honest 836]

^^^

Oh, thats really a great news dear Mufaddal Sahab.

[Mufaddal 678]

T-Mobile today announces the hotly anticipated T-Mobile G1 ” the phone built for the internet and the first to run on the innovative Android open source mobile software platform - will be available in the UK from 30 October. Exclusive to T-Mobile, the G1 offers a completely new mobile internet experience with full touch screen functionality plus a QWERTY keyboard for easy online communication, high speed internet with popular Google services already on board, and access to innovative application downloads from the new Android Market.

Since unveiling the device in New York in September, over 25,000 UK consumers pre-registered their interest in the device. The wait will be over on 30 October as the T-Mobile G1 hits the shelves at T-Mobile stores just five weeks after it’s official unveiling.

The G1 is available for free on T-Mobile Combi and Flext price plans from £40 a month, including unlimited fast mobile internet browsing powered by T-Mobile’s award-winning network. Combi 35 offers 800 minutes and unlimited texts while Flext 40 gives up to 1,250 minutes or up to 2,500 texts or any mix of the two.

Jim Hyde, Managing Director T-Mobile UK said: With so much excitement generated by the announcement last month, we’re thrilled to bring the T-Mobile G1 to the UK in time for Christmas. It’s set to revolutionise the way we use the internet on our mobiles: it’s uniquely built for effortless online communication - whether you want to email, text or blog - and with access to some groundbreaking applications on Android market, the possibilities really are endless.

The T-Mobile G1 will feature a range of exciting applications pre-loaded at launch and with a couple of short clicks to Android Market, customers can find and download innovative applications from games and navigation tools to on-the-go shopping comparisons.

source: tmobile uk

now one intersresting point to note is HTC G1 was supposed to b launched in europe in early 2009 but it seems google has preponed their schedule so as to keep the hysteria of android alive amidst all the competition .........just hope v get to c this device in india soon and not somewhere in 2009

[@ksh@T 20]

T-Mobile G1 review

Hardware:

The hardware part is a little tricky. The phone has supposedly been in development for years, yet we can’t get beyond the feeling that this device is a little bit too prematurely at the prime-time stage. The black model especially just looks like a prototype in a couple areas. One being the four physical buttons on the banana end of the handset. Those are send, home, back and end/power. While the tactile feedback of those buttons is fine, you often times try and select one, and it doesn’t register anything. That’s because of the small size and physical surroundings if you will. They are basically flush with the case, thus making it difficult sometimes to accurately push one of them.

The screen is very crisp and actually offers the second best touch-screen experience ever, yes, compared to the iPhone at number one. For all you Storm lovers, we haven’t officially reviewed the Storm yet so that is why it’s not in this list if it did in fact make it on. It’s a capacitive screen which means that force isn’t necessary. Essentially the touch panel registers the minute electrical pulses in your fingers instead of looking for an actual physical touch input. That works great and we’re happy to say the screen has a high-quality feel all around. It’s not glass, rather a very hard plastic which we love using.

Now onto the probably one of the G1’s biggest features — keyboard time! There are two parts to this; the keyboard is better than most, but not quite perfect. The reason is that the keys are about 1-2mm too flush with the case. There is a bunch of room under the flip, and we really would have loved to see HTC jump up the ‘board a little bit. If they could, they probably would, so it’s most likely not their fault, but that would have made for one of the nicest QWERTY typing experiences to come along in a pretty long time. The layout is completely fine and you won’t have any trouble navigating at all. That includes a very clean white backlighting on the keys and the actual hard/soft plastic feel the physical keys have.

When you take the battery cover off the G1, the first thing you might see is the vibrate mechanism. It’s actually the first time we’ve ever seen one exposed on a mobile device and it gives off a weird vibrate feeling. It’s sort of a rough *** vibrate that makes you feel like the phone is going to explode. Ok, well maybe not that bad, but we guess a stronger vibrate is better than a weak one? That’s what she said.

The speakers are another big important feature of the G1 as this is pretty much a consumer-targeted phone. The placement is again, (noticing a trend here?) flush with the casing. There’s a tiny raised dot which theoretically would help divert sound off a flat surface when resting your phone on, but it honestly does little to remedy the muffled sound you’ll get. The actual speakers are pretty decent when not on a flat surface, but we had trouble hearing alert sounds when the phone wasn’t right next to us or when it was in a pocket.

The camera isn’t all too bad, but for some reason we were expecting more out of a 3 megapixel + camera. Performance even in daylight didn’t work out too well for us, and pictures never got that sharp and crisp look we were looking forward to. Forgot about low-light performance. Without a flash, that’s a non-starter.

Now, onto the actual flip mechanism… it works very well. HTC has made this thing really durable and it slides out with ease, and the same goes for closing it. It’s pretty violent (read: not smooth) but we don’t have any qualms about it. Put it like this… if people are experiencing hardware problems with the G1, we highly doubt it will be with the flip assembly.

Summing up the hardware bit, we’ve just got to get this out of the way; WHY IN THE HELL IS THE DAMN THING ANGLED AT THE BOTTOM LIKE A BANANA? Can someone please enlighten us? This does absolutely nothing for the handset, it just makes its more difficult to hold and carry in a pocket or something else. It really annoys the crap out of us that it isn’t just flat. Heck, everything on the device is flat — buttons, camera, speakers — why not keep in the tradition of flatness?

Software:

There’s no real task manager. Sure, you hold the home button and get a recent list of open apps, and you can install a 3rd party program that makes it easier to switch applications with shortcut keys, but still, sometimes you just want to completely close something. In all fairness, the G1 and specifically Android does a pretty decent job at managing memory, but we have run into a couple “wait for application to respond or close” errors while putting the phone through it’s paces.

We realize this is just the beginning and we’ve got more hope in the platform itself than we ever had before, but for something that was being cooked up for so long, and something practically started by the Sidekick king himself, we can’t understand why there are so many general inconsistencies and non-existent functions.

For instance, the device has an LED in the earpiece to designate charging status (orange for charging, green for full), yet that can’t be used as a notification light for missed events. There’s no keyboard options like key repeat rate, delay, no trackball sensitivity options, and worst of all, when you set a lock for the device, there’s no timeout option! Let’s repeat this. When you set a lock password for the phone, which isn’t a password at all, it’s a specific drawing on the screen which is pretty cool yet highly insecure, the phone will lock and require a password each and every time the screen goes off. For people who the screen set to a 15 second or 30 second timeout, that means you’ll have to unlock the phone by pressing the power button, the menu button, and then drawing your pass-phrase on the screen every single time. Absolutely ridiculous we say.

We’ll explain the inconsistencies for you so you know what to expect and get an idea for how we say the phone is definitely v1. In maps, you can press menu + z to bring up the zoom keys, but you can’t do that in any other application like the web browser, for instance. Just plain stupid. Android could be at least 40% better if all these inconsistencies were addressed and actually let you do more with less, instead of making you work harder to get to the same place.

What about an on-screen keyboard? You’re out of luck. It’s way stupid in our opinion that you can’t pull up a T9 layout and fire off some quick 4 or 5 letter word to a friend in an SMS. You are forced to slide the phone open, and bang out your sentences using the physical keyboard. This can get extremely tiring seeing as there’s practically no way to send off a quick message when it’s closed. Heck, we would have ever appreciated some canned pre-loaded responses. That would have probably held us over for a bit, but nope, there’s no way to basically enter any information other than dialing a number when the phone is closed.

Let’s look at Wi-Fi on the G1… it works pretty well most of the time, but we have run into a couple occasions of the phone staying connected to a much weaker saved network rather than switching to a stronger saved one. The biggest issue you’ll run into using Wi-Fi on here is that it absolutely murders the battery. Even when the phone is locked your battery is dying rather quickly. You’d be lucky to get around three hours of semi-rough usage with Wi-Fi. On the other hand, if Wi-Fi is off, the battery life should really impress you. It’s got a 1150mAh battery which is definitely decent and should power you though the day. We were just a little depressed about the Wi-Fi situation as our Bold and iPhone are both on Wi-Fi and have no issues whatsoever, especially when they are just in standby mode.

Phone calling is pretty straightforward here, and the speakerphone sounds great when it’s not obstructed. The interface is clean and is one of the areas where the G1 looks really, really polished. It’s semi-iPhone like with a swap call button, merge call button, speakerphone button, and keypad button. Call quality was also very good with the G1 in our limited calling tests.

One of favorite applications on the G1 is the SMS app. It’s just very natural to use and makes texting seem fun again. You could think of it as a unified MMS/SMS inbox since everything that is sent to you will show up in message threads in that application. It’s very natural and logical to have such a clean interface where text messages along with photo messages, audio, voice notes, and slides all are seen in one conversation. Big ups to Google for that one, we likes. But what about email? We’re sad to report that emailing is probably one of the worst things the G1 does. It’s clunky, slow, and unresponsive if you are on EDGE. Plus shortcuts are pretty much non-existent.

But, if we go back to the whole unity thing for a second, we’re just not sure why Sidekick king failed to address the issues of inconsistencies and a general lack of usability in some areas, while adding great features in others. Unless we’re seriously missing something, and we doubt we are, there’s no way to instantly flip in between messages, or anything like that. On a Sidekick you have the left and right shoulder buttons to flip through conversations in an application and that applied to every application; IM, SMS, email, even the web browser. But there’s nothing like it here. What’s the point of having 4 dedicated hardware buttons and a full keyboard when there’s basically no shortcuts? It really hinders the overall user experience and will cause people a lot of unnecessary headaches.

Speaking of instant messaging, how is it? As far as smartphones go, it’s one of the worst experiences we’ve had. Google Talk is the best out of AIM, Yahoo, Live Messenger and Gtalk (no surprises there, right?) but it’s still not that good. Reconnects rarely worked for us, we would get signed in and out for no reason, you can’t hide offline buddies, and while you can press menu + space to flip between conversations, the whole thing is clunky at best. So, how are the rest? They work over SMS, people. Utter. Fail. One of the stupidest things we’ve seen in a long, long time. Now, there’s been some debate over AIM and the other clients using data or SMS, but even if they don’t use SMS they are still horrible. Messages take forever to come in, you have very limited options in terms of communicating (read: text only, no media), and again, reconnects aren’t smooth. This should be the “killer app” on the G1 out of the box. Yes, there will be 3rd party solutions, but that doesn’t negate the fact that so many things are just unpolished and rushed here.

[Honest 836]

HTC T-Mobile G1 Starts Shipping

The "Google phone" - and since it's no longer called to be more accurate - the HTC T-Mobile G1 has begun shipping. The device is, of course, the first official device running on the Android platform. There were reports of about one million of the handsets that were on pre order so now it’s time for those individuals to pay the piper, so to speak.

The handset incorporates a 3.2-inch TFT touch screen with a slide out QWERTY keypad. It is a 3G enabled handset that comes equipped with a hefty package of features like Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth but apparently does not support A2DP or file transfer (sounds familiar), according to reports. Let’s hope a quick fix is in order with a minor software update of some kind. The G1 also has a 3MP auto-focus camera but no word on Geotagging.

This handset is currently locked in to T-Mobile and there’s no word yet on when it’ll get here or if it’ll be locked in to a provider here as well.

Courtesy : Tech2

[HetalDP 947]

T-Mobile G1 review

Setup

Accurate or not, the phrase "it just works" has been closely tied to the Apple camp for eons -- and obviously, the iPhone tries to ooze that mantra from its every pore. Without ever having made a phone, though, Google already had a leg up in delivering on this promise to handsets by owning a service platform that virtually everyone uses in one capacity or another. Sure, plenty of people use MobileMe, but it really doesn't hold a candle to the Google juggernaut -- and even if it did, Apple hadn't counted on making seamlessly integrated, synchronized services part of its mobile platform from the get-go.

But what does that translate to in terms of usability? It's difficult to accurately describe how utterly painless it is to set up and use the G1 for the first time: you just enter your Google account's username and password and you're off to the races. If you don't have an account -- well, first of all, welcome to civilization. Second of all, no worries -- you can create one in less than five minutes' time right from the comfort of your phone. If you already actively use Google Calendar, Contacts, and Gmail, your data just seamlessly appears after a couple minutes of initial synchronization, quietly and with no fuss. Magic.

Problem is, most people that use Gmail aren't also actively using and managing Google Contacts. The app regularly gets panned as a tacked-on afterthought in Gmail, and we'll just say it straight out: it's truly awful. If you've used it, you know what we're talking about -- it makes managing contacts a laborious pain, and provides only the bare minimum of tools to get your info in order. Like it or not, you're joined to it at the hip the moment you make this platform a part of your life. If you're not keeping on top of it, it'll automatically add entries for anyone it decides you're emailing frequently, which means that over time you end up with this massive, unruly, and essentially useless list of email addresses. By default, this junk all gets transferred to your phone, making for an intimidating, frustrating experience the first time you open your little black book from the G1. It's easy to create a new group of Android-specific contacts -- and smartly, the phone also allows you to show only contacts that have phone number associated with them -- but we would've liked to have seen a wizard either on the web or phone side that makes cleaning up your contact list a breeze.

Despite the shortcomings, Google has still managed to completely eliminate one of the biggest pain points in the wireless world: changing phones. Even with ActiveSync, iSync, Intellisync, WhateverSync, the process of bringing a new phone online has usually been hairy at best, largely because you're moving across heterogeneous platforms. Sometimes the sync goes the wrong way and wipes out data on your PC, sometimes data just flat-out refuses to transfer, and quite often, you've got to physically connect the device to your computer to make it all happen.

If you're not using a smartphone, the situation's even worse; sometimes your carrier offers a solution for transferring contacts, sometimes you can get stuff where you need it to go over Bluetooth or the little chunk of storage on your SIM, but any way you slice it, it's not pretty. With Android, Google has the luxury of being able to take the monolithic approach -- you're always precisely one login and about sixty seconds away from having your entire world downloaded to you over the aether. For end users, the benefits of storing data in the cloud are more tangible than ever. That "cloud" just happens to belong to Google, and once you're in the ecosystem, it's hard to get out. Google AdWord revenue, secured.

User Interface

The G1's interface skin -- Android's default for touchscreens and only released skin thus far -- is thoroughly modern and attractive, but its high-contrast, almost cartoonish look might be a turn-off for some. In a sick, twisted way, that dovetails nicely with the fact that Google's stonewalling the enterprise market for the moment by leaving out support for VPN, Microsoft Exchange, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server; it's just a hip-looking, totally approachable UI that doesn't reek one bit of corporate starch. We'd still like to see a ton more configurability here, though. Google's own "Spare Parts" app, a free download from the Market, gets the ball rolling by allowing you to change the system text size -- something that clearly should've been including as part of Android's standard build, especially considering accessibility concerns and the fact that the default size is pretty freakin' huge. For example, in its shipping configuration the Settings application can only show six menu items at a time in the portrait orientation, and Gmail shows a fraction of an email more than that. On a 3.2-inch 480 x 320 display, that's just not enough for everyone. To add insult to injury, the current version of Spare Parts is buggy -- if you change screen orientation, text size reverts to the default.

Android's easy to use, but it's not always consistent. For folks coming from other platforms (which we guess is everyone, since Android's brand spanking new), that could be a little frustrating and make the learning curve steeper than it has to be. Here's an example: to delete a contact, you long-press their entry. The selection highlight will fade from orange to white, and after a moment, a contextual pop-up menu will appear, where you can choose "Delete contact." Okay, that's all well and good -- but try using the same paradigm in the alarm clock. No dice, right? Doesn't matter how long you hold your thumb on that alarm, sport, it's not going to give you a pop-up menu. Here, you inexplicably have to short-press the alarm, which takes you to another screen; once you're here, you push the Menu button and choose "Delete alarm." It's not hard, it's just needlessly different.

Speaking of long presses, we did have some problems with the G1 being unable to distinguish between a long press and a scroll motion. The instant the phone detects that your finger has moved, it kills the notion of the long press in progress until you lift your finger off the screen and try again. Theoretically that's not a problem, but it's really easy to accidentally move your thumb just a millimeter too far while waiting for a pop-up menu to appear, which triggers like a one-pixel scroll of the list instead.

On the flipside, these same long presses we're complaining about enable copy/paste between any two text fields in the system, so we've got to give them their proper due. Granted, we frequently hear "I've never used copy/paste on my phone in my life," but we think the root of that attitude stems from the fact that many users are accustomed to phones that don't support it or aren't powerful enough to make it worthwhile. Android's at that level, though -- and with the G1 clearly taking the so-called "Sidekick Pro" market head on, we think these same folks are going to use it, like it, and refuse to go back to a platform that doesn't support it. All it takes is a few copies of lengthy snippets from an email to a note or a calendar for it to earn its keep, as far as we're concerned.

It might seem like a minor point to make, but you'd be surprised at how quickly this becomes a huge part of your G1 experience: Android's notification system is world-class. In fact, it's the best we've ever seen on any phone or any platform. The first piece of the puzzle is a totally average-looking status bar that appears at the top of basically every screen. To the right, you get the standard information every self-respecting phone is going to provide you: time, battery charge, signal strength, data network status, WiFi, and silent mode. To the left side, though, is where things start to get interesting. Over here, any app can place an icon to indicate that something interesting has happened -- instant messages, emails, voicemails, schedule reminders, and so on -- and optionally scroll a brief message (say, a snippet of a received SMS). Already, you're looking at a system that beats Windows Mobile and the iPhone, and we haven't even gotten to the good part.

That's just the start, though. The real prize is the pull-down curtain, actuated with a downward drag of a finger from the top of the screen, where notifications go to live on a more permanent basis until you delete them. The great thing about this screen is that each notification has room to stretch out and display plenty of details: who sent you the text message, what did it say, who called you, when did they call you, and so on. And because the curtain is part and parcel of the status bar, it can be accessed from anywhere in the G1 that you can see the status bar (which is basically everywhere). It's brilliantly executed, works really well in practice, and makes Android the only platform that takes alert organization seriously.

Portrait and landscape modes

Android does a fabulous job of managing the switch between portrait and landscape modes, which is a good thing considering that you'll be making that transition a lot. Too much, actually -- as we mentioned in the hardware write-up, without an on-screen keyboard out of the box, there's little option but to go from one-handed portrait mode to two-handed landscape mode each and every time you encounter a text field. We couldn't find a single screen anywhere on the device that didn't handle the change in orientation gracefully; icons, buttons, fields, and graphics all rejiggered themselves into logical places each and every time. We found ourselves waiting as long as three-quarters of a second or so on occasion for the transition to occur after we'd opened or closed the keyboard, which we think falls shy of becoming an annoyance (though just barely).

Home screen

One of Android's most endearing qualities -- and perhaps the first thing new users will notice -- is the home screen. It's really attractive, but that's pretty easy to pull off; more importantly, it's extremely functional. First off, you can add shortcuts to applications, web bookmarks, individual contacts, music playlists, and pretty much anything else an app developer wants to expose. These all look just like the icons you're used to seeing on your PC, and you can position them wherever you like.

Down the road, the second part of this one-two punch will be widget support, and we think this is where the home screen's true value lies. It reminds us a little of Samsung's TouchWiz concept, but by the nature of Android's extensibility, it'll be far more useful. Sadly, developers can't build their own widgets in version 1.0 of the SDK, but Google says support is on the way. Whether that'll happen tomorrow or a year from now is anybody's guess.

Put simply, the widgets will turn your home screen into a destination. After all, it's not just a place to launch apps -- that should be a very, very small aspect of what the home screen does for you, and that's a lesson that the iPhone and most dumbphones have yet to learn. You'll come to the home screen to check the weather, news, sports scores, your RSS feeds, run a couple web searches, and do pretty much anything else the legion of Android developers can dream of cramming into a pretty little space.

That all said, the home screen isn't without its faults. We're not sure why Android restricts you to exactly three panels' worth of screen real estate, for example -- it seems totally arbitrary. We suppose you'd need an insane number of shortcuts and widgets displayed to run into a problem there, but that's for the user to decide, not Android. Also, the method for deleting items from the screen is totally out of left field -- you drag them to the applications tab, which temporarily turns into a trash can while you're dragging. Probably not the most obvious technique.

Productivity apps: Calendar, Contacts, Gmail/Email, and IM

The G1 comes out of the box with mobile versions of Google's Calendar, Contacts, Gmail, and Google Talk services. Forgetting for a moment how good or bad each app is on its own, we can't emphasize enough: the pervasive nature of your Google account throughout Android is an absolute boon, and these apps are the central reason why. Your data's just there without any fuss, and so far, we've had a hell of a lot fewer hiccups with it than MobileMe did in its infancy.

Calendar is good, but not great. Going into it, we'd hoped it would be a faithful replication of Calendar on your desktop browser -- but perhaps that's asking too much. The feature most notably missing (as far as we can tell) is that you can't add guests to events that are created on the G1, which to be fair, probably won't affect most folks. In general, we got the impression that Google intended the Calendar app on Android to be primarily read-only with some in-case-of-emergency writability thrown in as a precaution, and used purely as a mobile view of the schedule you've set up through the web view, it's totally acceptable; you've got agenda, day, week, and month views, you can see all the calendars you've created and had shared to you, and the integration with Android's notification system is perfect.

Like the iPhone, Android actually treats contacts as a part of the Dialer rather than giving them their own dedicated application. That works just fine, especially considering that it still gets its own application icon for the tab in the home screen (in fact, you can create a shortcut icon to an individual contact, if you're so inclined). We like how contact data fields are treated -- different types of data are offered to perform different activities. For example, if you assign a phone number to a contact, you'll immediately see that number under both "Dial number" and "Send SMS/MMS" headers in their details screen, which makes it pretty easy to use Contacts as your jumping-off point for doing a whole bunch of common social tasks on the phone.

Android's Gmail client is, for lack of a better word, amazing. Most importantly, it offers push that's actually pushy enough to be called "push" -- in some cases, we actually received new emails on the G1 before our web client. It's also designed to mimic all of the web version's most important Gmail-specific features, like conversation threading, archiving, and marking as spam. Naturally, it knows how to integrate with your contacts, and like almost everything else here, it makes expert use of the notification system.

One huge, painful drawback here is that popular attachment types -- PDF, Office, and OpenOffice documents, specifically -- are only supported by virtue of Google's automatic HTML conversion on the server side. Android itself doesn't understand any of these, so it lets Google do the conversion and simply shows the typically mucked-up results in its HTML viewer. What's more, you can't save them to your device; you've got to go back into Gmail and reload the attachment as HTML each and every time. There's a huge third-party development opportunity here, and we're hoping there are plenty of companies already cooking up solutions.

Unfortunately, not everyone uses Gmail, and depending on your situation, you may not be able to switch. This is where it starts to get a little hacky. The G1 actually features two completely different, completely unrelated email apps: one for Gmail specifically, and one that's considerably less cool for everything else. It's obvious that this is Google's passive aggressive way of saying "if you want the Android experience, you've got to drink all the Kool Aid," but they can't really be faulted entirely. The world's garden-variety email servers -- of which the G1's app supports the POP3 and IMAP varieties -- don't support all of the goodies that Gmail specifically does, and to be fair, they've tried to make the process a little less painful by automatically detecting popular email types (Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, for example) and configuring them without any user intervention. The app works well and can load HTML-encoded emails with aplomb, but we're kind of weirded out by just how different it looks from Gmail. What's with the black versus white thing? Lots of users are going to be using both apps, so we would've liked to have seen more consistency here. Oh, and that HTML rendering we mentioned that Gmail uses for showing attachments? Yeah, no go here -- you'll have to forward them to your Gmail account or wait until you get back to your PC.

The IM app supports AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger within a single framework, which is a nice touch on Google's part (we wouldn't have been surprised to see them just support Google Talk) and saves you a few bucks that you might otherwise have to spend on a decent third-party solution. Google Talk is automatically configured and ready to go by virtue of your Google account being logged in, and actually, it's automatically on and running in the background from the moment you turn on the phone. Messages come in unobtrusively via the notification system, and of course, you can sign out individual accounts or all accounts at once if you need to.

Browser

First things first: no Flash support yet. Now that we have that out of the way, the G1's WebKit-based browser does bang-up job of rendering sites as faithfully as Mobile Safari (they're using the same rendering engine, after all), but the user experience is decidedly different. First, there's the issue of multi-touch -- the G1 doesn't support it at this point. There's some disagreement on how much multi-touch ultimately matters to the user experience, though, and let's put it this way: the G1 offers hands-down the best single-touch experience for browsing that you can find. Flick gestures work exactly as you hope they would, continuing to move the page after your finger has left the screen and slowing to a stop. Panning brings up zoom buttons at the bottom of the screen, but your main tool might actually be the magnifying box, which is called up by pressing an icon in the lower right of the app. The idea is great -- it automatically zooms out the page, offers a small, magnified box that you can drag around, and when you let go, you zoom into that area -- but we found that it became hard to control on large pages because even a small movement of your finger translates to a significant amount of scroll on the zoomed-out preview. We could definitely get used to it, though.

As we alluded to in the hardware section, page load times lagged way behind the iPhone 3G when both devices were in 3G coverage, but once the pages were loaded, scrolling was smoother on the G1. Actually, maybe "smoother" isn't the right word here -- both devices scroll pages smoothly -- but the G1 was able to do so without resorting to temporarily filling your screen with a checkerboard pattern until it could get around to re-rendering your view.

With the keyboard open, you can just start typing a URL or a search term, and as long as you don't have your cursor in a text box on a web page, the browser will know to pop open an address bar and let you do your thing. Like Chrome, the app unifies addresses and searches into a single box, which is great on a mobile device where you're always looking for ways to minimize tapping. Unfortunately, even basic navigation buttons like Back, Forward, and Bookmarks are hidden unless you press Menu, which doesn't make much sense. In fact -- get this -- you actually have to press Menu, then More, then Back to navigate back one page without moving your thumb way over to the physical back button to the right of the screen. It's not that big of a deal, but since the back button is in play elsewhere on the phone, it can get a little confusing (and it can back you out of the app). There's a keyboard shortcut for it, but frankly, that (along with Forward and Bookmarks) is something we want on-screen at all times, even if it costs us 30 or 50 pixels of real estate.

Messaging

We guess we can't really play the "whoa, threaded messaging!" card here anymore, now that manufacturers have wised up to the fact that it revolutionizes the SMS experience and have started bundling it as a matter of course on modern smartphones. Android goes along with the trend; no killer features here, per se, but it gets the job done and nicely inlines SMS and MMS messages into the same thread. One nice touch is that it'll let you take a picture or record audio in real time -- no need to hop out to the Camera app when you want to send a quick snap of what you're seeing. Sending messages to multiple recipients is a breeze, too; in a rare show of consistency, the interface is nearly identical to the email composition screen.

Music / AmazonMP3

Is AmazonMP3 the G1's killer app? Nah, Android itself is the G1's killer app, but having access to Amazon's vast (and cheap) library of non-DRM music on the go is a pretty comforting thought. We're a little surprised that Google and Amazon decided to lock downloads to WiFi; it's a move that doesn't really fall in with Android's free, open mentality, and we're hoping it was concern for the user experience -- not T-Mobile pressure -- that led them to make that call. It's not a pretty app by any stretch, and it doesn't fall in line with the UI standards set fort by the phone's other programs, but it doesn't need to be; it just needs to work, and work it did. We had some problems with album artwork occasionally not loading, but only made the whole affair even less attractive. When we can get the Misfits' Static Age for $8.99 from the comfort of our local Starbucks, we'll learn to live with it.

The music player is straight up bare-bones, and we're already pulling for a few viable replacements sprouting up in the Market over time. It'll show you album art, has a Party Shuffle mode, uses the notification curtain to give you Now Playing details, and lets you assign a song you're listening to as your ringtone in real time -- which is kind of cool -- but it has no controls or track information visible when the phone's locked and has literally zero audio adjustment controls. It also doesn't play protected content -- but if you're seriously considering Android as a platform, odds are good (well, hopefully, anyhow) that you don't have much protected content to begin with.

Assuming you're not buying all your music from AmazonMP3 over WiFi, you'll probably be connecting your G1 to a computer at some point to load tracks. We love that it doesn't try to get fancy -- you plug it in with any old mini USB cable you have lying around and the phone's microSD card just shows up as a mass storage device. The coolness ends there, though, because the Pictures, Camera, and Music apps just totally crap out once the drive is mounted to your PC on account of that whole "can't mount the same drive from two places at the same time" conundrum (it's kind of like the movie Timecop, if you're familiar). Going into the cam, for example, tells you to insert an SD card -- which is awesome, considering there's already one inserted. It's an annoyance, and if they can't figure out how to keep the storage mounted internally while it's connected to the PC, they should've at least bothered to clean up the error messages.

YouTube

There are obvious parallels to the iPhone's YouTube app here, and Android's version definitely holds its own. The gesture of swiping horizontally to move through featured videos felt vaguely awkward, but it's the freaking YouTube app we're talking about -- we've already said too much. It's got all the same functionality that the iPhone cut brings to the table with the added bonus of a category browser, a nice touch. Video quality is about on par with what you can expect from the iPhone, too, with plenty of degradation over EDGE or 3G. We've never been huge fans of mobile YouTube to start, but unless you're a diehard time-waster, we wouldn't bother here unless you have access to WiFi.

Android Market

We feel like we won't get an accurate picture of just how good the Market is until it's out of beta mode and starts offering payment collection for developers, but already, it's a destination that new G1 owners won't want to miss. There are plenty of great apps to explore here, and thanks to Google's open attitude, we should see a ton more added on an ongoing basis. Of course, the lack of oversight also means the signal-to-noise ratio is lower, but the Market has a handful of features to help users figure out what's good and what's not. For starters, there's a Featured section at the beginning of the Market's home screen that's maintained by Google (which uses that same weird horizontal swipe gallery as YouTube, coincidentally), and each app category can be sorted by popularity or date added -- good for finding the best apps and the freshest ones, respectively.

Perhaps the coolest feature here, though, is the security warning for each app you download. Android can determine what potentially sensitive features of your phone the app will have access to, which should theoretically help you make smarter decisions about the kinds of things you're comfortable downloading (and by whom they're published). It gets really in-depth, too -- it doesn't just tell you that the app has access to your personal information, for example; it tells you that it can read contacts and calendar entries. Really nicely done.

Wrap-up

The G1 isn't going to blow anyone's mind right out of the gate. Looking only at the hardware, there's nothing here that's particularly impressive, yet nothing that's particularly bad (though the GPS needs some work). It's a fine, solidly designed device that has enough style to please most users -- but it won't win a ton of beauty pageants. Think of it this way: if it were running Windows Mobile, it'd be a footnote in HTC's history.

At the end of the day, however, this isn't about the hardware, and really never was. The story here is Android and what it promises... though doesn't necessarily deliver on at first. Like any paradigm shift, it's going to take time. There is tremendous potential for this OS on mobile devices -- it truly realizes the open ideals laid out by Google when they announced this project. The only problem seems to be the stuff they either left on the back burner, cutting room floor, or hoped would come from that exciting, untapped world of open source developers. While there's plenty to praise in this phone, there's a lot more that's missing -- and some of those missing elements are what we consider to be core components of a device in the G1's class.

Shortcomings aside, though, you're still buying into one of the most exciting developments in the mobile world in recent memory. When you put the G1 up against, say, a Sidekick LX, it seems like a no-brainer for T-Mobile customers looking for a powerful QWERTY device -- especially at $20 less. You don't need to be a cutting-edge mobile geek or a pundit to do that math. When facing off with platforms like the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices, it holds its own, but has a lot of ground to cover before it's really making the competition sweat. Still, if you're just excited to be a part of a platform that's likely going to be around for a very, very long time, the G1's a totally reasonable day-to-day device to make it happen, and we expect some pretty great things from this corner of the market down the road.

[HetalDP 947]

I am getting HTC G1 Android Device from t-mobile in 8 days from USA. Planning to use Airtel then Reliance GSM if available.

BYE BYE to CDMA

[Honest 836]

Wow, thats a great news my dear Hetal. Hope your handset arrive on time.

At what price are you getting the same ?

Regards.

[HetalDP 947]

I got the Phone from my Friends Cousin who lives in CA and had a Free Ticket to get a Free Upgrade to any Class 1 Device he was already using iPhone 3G in t-mobile and had trade off HTC G1 to me.

The Price was Very Less but u know its a Family Trade off. dont not matter for everybody

[dkaile 1,051]

But the size, dear hetal, size..... hathoda hain...

[_Kailash_ 63]

when u r in Love With Something the Size doesnt matter lolz

and if u have seen that movie ...>"Love Comes IN aLL Sizes"

WTG Hetal Pls post review when u get it lolz(no need 2 say but ....)

[Mufaddal 678]

thats gr8 ......but how much did u get it for ????????????

[Sadikk 301]

300$

[Mufaddal 678]

300$

that a dam good deal

[@ksh@T 20]

Security Flaw Is Revealed in T-Mobile’s Google Phone

[vIa:NYtimes]

SAN FRANCISCO — Just days after the T-Mobile G1 smartphone went on the market, a group of security researchers have found what they call a serious flaw in the Android software from Google that runs it.

One of the researchers, Charles A. Miller, notified Google of the flaw this week and said he was publicizing it now because he believed that cellphone users were not generally aware that increasingly sophisticated smartphones faced the same threats that plague Internet-connected personal computers.

Mr. Miller, a former National Security Agency computer security specialist, said the flaw could be exploited by an attacker who might trick a G1 user into visiting a booby-trapped Web site.

The G1 — the so-called Google phone — went on sale at T-Mobile stores on Wednesday.

Google executives acknowledged the issue but said that the security features of the phone would limit the extent of damage that could be done by an intruder, compared with today’s PCs and other cellphones.

Unlike modern personal computers and other advanced smartphones like the iPhone, the Google phone creates a series of software compartments that limit the access of an intruder to a single application.

“We wanted to sandbox every single application because you can’t trust any of them,” said Rich Cannings, a Google security engineer. He said that the company had already fixed an open-source version of the software and was working with its partners, T-Mobile and HTC, to offer fixes for its current customers.

Typically, today’s computer operating systems try to limit access by creating a partition between a single user’s control of the machine and complete access to programs and data, which is referred to as superuser, root or administrative access.

The risk in the Google design, according to Mr. Miller, who is a principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators in Baltimore, lies in the danger from within the Web browser partition in the phone. It would be possible, for example, for an intruder to install software that would capture keystrokes entered by the user when surfing to other Web sites. That would make it possible to steal identity information or passwords.

Mr. Miller has previously gained attention for finding other vulnerabilities. In March, he received $10,000 and a Macintosh Air laptop in a contest at the CanSecWest security conference by reading the contents of a file stored on a Mac laptop by directing the machine to a Web site that was able to exploit a vulnerability in Apple’s Safari browser.

Google executives said they believed that Mr. Miller had violated an unwritten code between companies and researchers that is intended to give companies time to fix problems before they are publicized.

Mr. Miller said he was withholding technical details, but said he felt that consumers had a right to know that products had shortcomings.

[Mufaddal 678]

ASUS ANDROID PHONE COMING NEXT YEAR

Asus is known as a late entrant to the smartphone game, but that doesn't mean they're slow learner. As a matter of fact, we're hearing they'll be launching an Android-based phone during the first half of 2009. According to the company sources, the Taiwan-based company may initially sell these phones in the local market before also launching customized models for overseas clients.

In other news, the company sources also noted that Asus plans to gradually phase out EMP-based handsets and instead switch to handset platforms from Qualcomm and Marvell.

Asus' smartphone shipments in the Taiwan market totaled 30,000 units in the first nine months of this year, and they expect to add another 10,000 units until the end of this year.

[Via: DigiTimes]

Edited October 29, 2008 by mufaddal_km

[Mufaddal 678]

The first T-Mobile G1 has been unlocked thanks to the guys over at Unlock-TMobileG1.com

[Dj 25]

hiccups though with unlocking so far... u can use radio options like calling and texting but smart functions like gmail and all dont work yet...

[Mufaddal 678]

hiccups though with unlocking so far... u can use radio options like calling and texting but smart functions like gmail and all dont work yet...

yup just like iphone this is just a start just imagine unlike iphone it took geeks only a few weeks

( or days) to atleast get the radio function working on other networks....this is just the preliminary level i m sure as time passes v would have a better soln