About 6 weeks ago, it was finally time to upgrade Julie’s mobile phone. She’d been making do with a hand-me-down BlackBerry 8700g, so we looked around and decided to order a T-Mobile G1, also known as the first Googlephone. After a couple weeks, I couldn’t stand Julie’s shift to the top of our household early adopter rankings and ordered another one to replace my BlackBerry Curve 8320. I needed a new phone anyway as my Curve had always been a little flaky since I dropped it in the bathtub in Feb’08 (why didn’t I blog about that? remove cover and battery, rinse in rubbing alcohol, place in a ziplock with some rice, wait for everything to dry out).
Moving away from a BlackBerry was no trivial thing. I have had four BlackBerry devices since my first one in 2003 (see here for a really good RIM history lesson):
- The so called BlueBerry 6210, a monochrome device
- BlackBerry 7100, a color device that debuted the SureType keyboard
- The aforementioned 8700g
- The aforementioned Curve (with WiFi and a trackball)
Throughout the years, my dependence on the device has grown. It’s become a trusted partner in both business and personal affairs. But, alas, due to the vagaries of exclusive marketing agreements, the new BlackBerry Bold will be exclusive to AT&T Wireless for quite some time and Verizon Wireless will dominate distribution of the BlackBerry Storm. Thus, I decided to take the leap and go for the G1.
So far, I’m really enjoying the device. Powered by Google’s Android open source mobile OS, the device has a touch screen, a real QWERTY keyboard and a trackball for GUI interactions plus it has WiFi, GPS, is 3G-ready and a fantastic screen. Although Android Marketplace is a far second to Apple’s App Store for the iPhone, I sense momentum is building and I’ve found a few cool apps out there.
The biggest downsides for me so far are the short battery life (daily charges are mandatory) and lack of integration with MS Exchange. The G1 does come fully integrated to Gmail, Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts and supports generic POP / IMAP access to other mailbox platforms, but there’s nothing really good yet for MS Exchange. So I’m manually synching contacts using MS Outlook Export and Gmail Import, using Google Calendar Sync for that data and accessing work e-mail via my company’s OWA implementation. Pretty hack compared to the seamless BlackBerry experience, but I expect the Android Marketplace will come through in the next few months to save me.
So, without further ado, here are the unboxing pics. Enjoy!
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- Da Box
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- Da Packing
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- Da Gadget
