HTC G1 Review - Usability & Performance

Usability & Performance

I tested G1 in the San Francisco, CA Bay Area, where T-Mobile recently turned on their new 3G network.  Performance was generally quite good for both voice and data applications, even in my house where I consistently get no more than two signal bars of coverage.  The first full day I had the phone I experienced lightning fast 3G speeds while browsing the Web near Lake Merritt in Oakland; in the five days since, speeds have tapered off noticeably, though I also haven’t been back to that spot.  On a 25-minute bus ride from my office to my house, I retained 3G coverage for about 80% of the ride, dropping back to EDGE in two spots along the way.

Audio quality on voice calls was good, with only one “You there?  Can you hear me?” moment experienced at the beginning of a call.  G1’s speakerphone is plenty loud, and sounded pretty good during voice and music playback.  A USB-based stereo headset is included with the device, and it works decently well, though I had some trouble with the button on the in-line mic/remote.  A USB to 2.5/3.5mm audio adapter will be available as an accessory through T-Mobile.  Mono Bluetooth audio also worked well, though Stereo Bluetooth is not yet supported (Google has indicated it will be available via software update at some point).

G1’s user interface is nothing short of excellent.  This was my first experience with Android and I’ve come away very impressed.  Notifications, dialogue boxes, fonts, screen transitions - everything was smooth and pleasant to look at, and wait times while launching or switching apps was acceptable even at its worst.  There’s a consistency across the UI, from settings menus to the look of Gmail’s threaded conversations, that breeds familiarity and ease of use.  I don’t much care for the GMail way of reading messages, but it worked quite well on the G1. 

The touchscreen was ultra-responsive, and the widescreen rotated from landscape to portrait and back almost instantly when I slid the display open and shut. I really liked the notification bar at the top of the display that alerts me to new events - Email/SMS/IM messages, Calendar alarms, downloads, and the like.  The bar can be pulled down with a thumb swipe to view details of and/or clear notifications, and provide one-click access to relevant apps (clicking on “9000 new Emails” takes me to the GMail app, and so on).

The built-in YouTube client is excellent and the music player is more than passable, and while there’s no desktop sync software like Apple’s iTunes, it’s easy enough to drag and drop music files to the included 1GB microSD card and pop the card into G1.  Speaking of which, I tried out the Amazon mp3 app and purchased and downloaded a few DRM-free mp3 tracks via WiFi.  Downloading via 3G is not supported, but the WiFI purchase/download worked very well with my pre-existing Amazon account.  I was able to pop the microSD card out of the G1 after and copy my new music to my computer, where I could listen to it, copy it to my iPod (and iPhone), burn it to CD, and so on without any copy protection restrictions (DRM).

Strangely, the G1 ships without a native application for watching videos.  I downloaded the Beta version of Video Player for free from the Android Market (Google’s “App Store”) and had mixed results with it.  The player offers only limited file format support at this point, and playback itself was fairly choppy when I tried with an MPEG-4 video I created on my Mac.  Similarly, the 3.2 MP camera on the G1 does not support video capture - only still photos.  The camera offers auto focus, but no flash, and image quality was excellent in strong natural light, and so-so in less than optimal conditions.  Photo sharing via GMail and MMS messaging was a snap using Android’s software.

There’s also a full HTML Web browser on the G1, and it’s probably one of the three best mobile Web browsers I’ve tested to date (along with iPhone’s Safari and Opera Mobile, which ships on the HTC Touch Diamond).  The browser dealt very, very well with complex HTML pages and Javascripts, did a decent job with Web 2.0 functionality (mixed results but not bad), and offers very smooth panning and zooming.  I really appreciated the G1’s trackball when clicking on tiny little Web links that I couldn’t quite grab with a finger on the touchscreen - the trackball offers a level of precision that my fingers can’t quite attain on their own on any touchscreen, be it the G1, iPhone, Touch Diamond, or any other recent device.

A knock on the G1 that I’d be remiss not to emphasize, however, is that its QWERTY keyboard left me disappointed.  I’ve traditionally liked the thumbboards on HTC devices, including the new Touch Diamond and Touch Pro models, but G1’s QWERTY left me cold.  Actually, it left me a little fatigued and sore in the thumbs.  The keyboard is well spaced, but the buttons are mounted very close to the surface of the keyboard, which means the action on the keys is very shallow.  I was able to use the phone, but the keys are short and don’t travel very far, which added up to noticeable fatigue after a lengthy session of Web browsing and messaging using the phone’s multi-protocol IM app.  The backlighting on G1’s keyboard is kind of odd, too; it performed well in dark conditions, but I had trouble reading the “Alt” key labels in bright lighting.

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