My colleague Paul Taylor will be writing a fuller hands-on review of the first Android phone, T-Mobile’s G1. For now, though, here are some initial thoughts from the press conference to unveil the phone, which has just ended in New York:
- The G1 looks like a playground for Google services, though T-Mobile has suppressed the Google brand in some cases. For instance, click on an address in the address book and go straight to a Google map. Click again, and see a Google Street View. If you pull down a separate Window and start a chat with a friend the familiar Google “Talk” bubble appears on the screen. In none of these cases, though, does the Google name itself appear.
- There is one-touch search: a button on the pull-out keyboard that takes the user straight to a Google search box.
- The phone reads Microsoft’s Word and Excel documents, as well as PDF. There’s no Exchange support, though T-Mobile suggests that this is “a perfect opportunity for a third party developer” to create it.
- The most glaring thing about G1: it lacks the clear simplicity that accounts for both the intense aesthetic pleasure and great usability of the iPhone. There are nice touch-screen features that echo the Apple device, such as the ability to”swipe” across the screen to move things around, but the applications look cluttered and confused.
- The phone will cost $179 ($20 less than the iPhone) with a two-year data plan from T-Mobile. Importantly, though, there are no immediate details of how much the data plan will cost, so the full cost is unclear. The phone will launch in the US on October 22nd, in the UK in November, and in other European countries next year.
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