CDRacingZX6R
10-22-2008, 10:30 PM
I’ve had the phone for the day and got to really play around with it and found that overall I’m very happy with the choice of buying it. In fact, I liked it far more than I expected to.
The screen is awesome. It doesn’t get quite as bright as an iphone, but it’s extremely visible in all forms of light. It feels very solid to the touch, and viewing pictures, etc on it look fantastic.
The size of the phone is awesome. For whatever reason on videos the phone looks huge to me. Even the T-mobile G1 website makes the phone look super fat when it shows the side profile of the phone, but in reality I found it feels comfortable in the hand and while in call.
I love the track ball and physical keys on the phone. The Iphone is a great phone, but sometimes not having a track ball for those tiny links really killed me. Espeally since I have owned the Blackberry Curve, and Blackberry Pearl before and really liked the use of the track ball.
Another thing I love is having a full keyboard. Granted I am disappointed with the amount of travel each key has, but as the day progresses the keys soften up a little bit for me and even though its far from perfect, it’s still very usable and I think in a few weeks I’ll adapt to it completely.
The call quality is fantastic. In limited testing I’d say the call quality wipes the floor with my old Iphone 3G. My old Samsung Instinct (yes, I’ve had a lot of phones) might have had slightly better calling reception, but I don’t think it anyone would notice.
I live in the Orange County area and so far I’m always showing 3G. Indoors, outdoors, everywhere from Los Angeles (where I picked the phone up) to Orange County, California it’s been all good so far. However, it’s speeds are a different matter.
The 3G speeds so far when tested have been woefully slow so far. Web pages take a great deal of time to load, when indoors, even with close to full bars displayed. I contribute this to the fact that the network is new, and today is the launch day for the phone so I got a feeling everyone is using the 3G network at this time. I think it should get better.
The wifi connection works great. I only throw this in there because I have seen some people having issues with Wifi dropping every few minutes etc. So far for me, wifi has worked very strongly, and I’ve not had any issues with it.
GPS is average. Not any better or and maybe sligtly worse than the Iphone 3G. On my phone it's had problems locating me indoors, where as the Iphone didn't have that problem for me. But the Iphones GPS, was nothing to brag about. Phones like the HTC Diamond, Samsung Instinct, Mogul, and Touch offer far better GPS units. At least in terms of sensitivity. With future updates this might improve, but I doubt it’s ever going to be sensitive enough to offer turn by turn directions. But you never know…
As for the battery I can’t really say yet. I’m following the HTC suggestion of running the battery dry, before doing the first full charge. So I got home, drained, charged it full, and have been running it since. So far the battery drain with usage seems to be on par with my old Iphone 3G.
Overall, I got to say I’m very happy with the phone. Do I think it’s better than the Iphone 3G? No.. Not really. It’s different. I think there are pros and cons for both phones, and really this feels more like a traditional smart phone, with a great operating system with tons of potential.
Add to the fact T-mobile is a great network, good CS (They gave us in studio City two Android T-shirts, a 4G Sd card, etc) and offers fair pricing for their phones. I think people can’t go wrong with the G1 or T-mobile. The Sky is the limit, it just takes some time.
The screen is awesome. It doesn’t get quite as bright as an iphone, but it’s extremely visible in all forms of light. It feels very solid to the touch, and viewing pictures, etc on it look fantastic.
The size of the phone is awesome. For whatever reason on videos the phone looks huge to me. Even the T-mobile G1 website makes the phone look super fat when it shows the side profile of the phone, but in reality I found it feels comfortable in the hand and while in call.
I love the track ball and physical keys on the phone. The Iphone is a great phone, but sometimes not having a track ball for those tiny links really killed me. Espeally since I have owned the Blackberry Curve, and Blackberry Pearl before and really liked the use of the track ball.
Another thing I love is having a full keyboard. Granted I am disappointed with the amount of travel each key has, but as the day progresses the keys soften up a little bit for me and even though its far from perfect, it’s still very usable and I think in a few weeks I’ll adapt to it completely.
The call quality is fantastic. In limited testing I’d say the call quality wipes the floor with my old Iphone 3G. My old Samsung Instinct (yes, I’ve had a lot of phones) might have had slightly better calling reception, but I don’t think it anyone would notice.
I live in the Orange County area and so far I’m always showing 3G. Indoors, outdoors, everywhere from Los Angeles (where I picked the phone up) to Orange County, California it’s been all good so far. However, it’s speeds are a different matter.
The 3G speeds so far when tested have been woefully slow so far. Web pages take a great deal of time to load, when indoors, even with close to full bars displayed. I contribute this to the fact that the network is new, and today is the launch day for the phone so I got a feeling everyone is using the 3G network at this time. I think it should get better.
The wifi connection works great. I only throw this in there because I have seen some people having issues with Wifi dropping every few minutes etc. So far for me, wifi has worked very strongly, and I’ve not had any issues with it.
GPS is average. Not any better or and maybe sligtly worse than the Iphone 3G. On my phone it's had problems locating me indoors, where as the Iphone didn't have that problem for me. But the Iphones GPS, was nothing to brag about. Phones like the HTC Diamond, Samsung Instinct, Mogul, and Touch offer far better GPS units. At least in terms of sensitivity. With future updates this might improve, but I doubt it’s ever going to be sensitive enough to offer turn by turn directions. But you never know…
As for the battery I can’t really say yet. I’m following the HTC suggestion of running the battery dry, before doing the first full charge. So I got home, drained, charged it full, and have been running it since. So far the battery drain with usage seems to be on par with my old Iphone 3G.
Overall, I got to say I’m very happy with the phone. Do I think it’s better than the Iphone 3G? No.. Not really. It’s different. I think there are pros and cons for both phones, and really this feels more like a traditional smart phone, with a great operating system with tons of potential.
Add to the fact T-mobile is a great network, good CS (They gave us in studio City two Android T-shirts, a 4G Sd card, etc) and offers fair pricing for their phones. I think people can’t go wrong with the G1 or T-mobile. The Sky is the limit, it just takes some time.