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I will be honest with you. I am a huge iPhone fan. I am also a long time mobile gadget freak and I have owned handhelds from the original Palm Pilot, Handspring Visor, Blackberry’s, Pocket PCs, Windows Mobile Smart Phones, etc. But as far as a modern day converged phone, handheld, internet device and music player goes, I thought the iPhone is as close to perfection as it gets. It is almost a piece of art.

Enter G1 into my life today. I actually got a white one, so it’s a bit more refreshing than the black one that I have played with before. I instantaneously fell in love with it. Here are the top reasons:

1. First-time setup. This is super straight forward and delightful if you already have a Google account and you are already using all the Google online services such as GMail, contacts, etc. When I turned on the G1 the first time, it asked me to log into my Google account. After that, GMail, contacts, and GTalk were all automatically setup for me. I actually never really used Contacts on Google before, because I use Outlook & Exchange and I keep all my contacts there. But because I wanted to quickly import my contacts onto the phone, I ended up exporting my Outlook contacts and importing them into Google Contacts on the web. I checked the G1 immediately after import and they just showed up magically on my phone! Now, that’s software backed by cloud services!

2. Keyboard. I didn’t think I wanted a keyboard on my smart phone… but it’s so much more functional! Although I will say that the iPhone onscreen keyboard works reasonably well for me, I have always dreaded using it. But not so with the G1. I find myself typing a lot more, making the overall device much more functional to the point where I maybe able to get by without a computer (well, if I don’t have to work).

G1's Keyboard and Pearl

3. The Pearl. I didn’t know this before, but the G1 also comes with a trackball-like Pearl that you can use for navigation. Instead of using the touch screen all the time, it provides a convenient option for you to navigate the device and inside applications. Interestingly enough, I actually find it to be extremely useful as you can navigate everything without having to move your fingers much at all. You can see the pearl in between the “Home” key and the “Back” key in the image.

4. Background Apps. One of the drawbacks of the iPhone is that it doesn’t support 3rd party background running applications. As a result, your instant messaging and some location-aware applications are almost useless. The Android has a completely different application lifecycle management system in which the OS allows applications to run in the background and the OS manages the memory usage in a clever way. This makes certain class of applications (such as IM, messaging, certain location-aware apps) much more useful. Android also provides a nice notification bar on the Home screen. It took me a couple of minutes to realize that the notification bar can be dragged down, but once I found out, it was very useful.

If you are a developer, you might be interested in finding out how this works. The video below provides a great explanation of this.

5. Android Market. G1 is only the first Android phone and it has only been 2 months since it launched. But there are already many interesting apps on the Android Market. The one that I liked is called Compare Everywhere. It’s a shopping utility that turns the G1’s camera into a bar code scanning device. You can place the camera near a bar code, and it will automatically scan it and do a product search to look for online and local store prices. You can see how the camera with a redline overlaid on top turns into a bar code scanner in the picture below.

CompareEverywhere Shopping application

I believe overtime, the Android platform will attract more and more developers, leading to more and more interesting applications. You can browse the Android applications on the web at http://www.android.com/market/.

So my review of the G1 isn’t all glowing and happy. My primary gripe with the G1 is that it fails to establish a strong emotional connection with the user. The industrial design and user interaction/experience design is clearly inferior to the iPhone. When you look at the iPhone, it’s a beautiful piece of work. But the G1 looks very utilitarian. The same thing can be said of the user interaction and experience. The device is pretty responsive, but it just lacks the coolness and sex appeal of the iPhone. For example, the built-in Pictures application doesn’t have support for the flick and pinch gestures that made the iPhone such an iconic device. G1 is functional, but it won’t stir your emotions.

Summary

In summary, I was very impressed by the G1. It is only the first Android phone, and it already has some very strong points going for it. I will be attending CES in January in Las Vegas, and I will be looking out for new phones that use the Android OS.

Update (12/24/2008): Since this post was made, I have made an additional post after having more experience with G1. You can view the post here.

- J.