JC - Technology and Stuff

Ok, a few days have passed and it’s another chance to write some more updates on the T-Mobile G1 usage experience.

I’ve now been using my phone for 5 days and I think I’m finally getting into the groove with it. Bottom line - I like it and am glad I took the opportunity to buy one. So with that said, here’s a few more experiences, observations, hints and tips:

Battery - Yes, as I’ve mentioned before, I think the battery life is definitely the weakest part of the phone. I am used to a Blackberry Curve that would typically last me 2 to 3 days between recharges. Mind you, I didn’t spend my time on the Blackberry surfing the web, playing music, watching YouTube, or locating myself on GPS. Actually, I still don’t do a lot of that on my T-Mobile G1 phone either now that the initial ‘try it and see’ period has passed and I’m using it as a normal everyday part of my lifestyle. I’ve learned to set it almost to how my Blackberry was set up. Bluetooth is only turned on when I get in the car, GPS is only turned on when I need it and WiFi is off by default as I have 3G for most things. Actually at home I do need to turn WiFi on if I want to surf the net as in my apartment I get a very flaky 3G signal. With sensible battery management I seem to get about 24 hours or so of life out of it (well at least 18 with the phone recharging while I’m asleep) so it’s not as bad as it could have been.

Yahoo! Mail - I mentioned last time that I was having trouble with my Yahoo! email. The good news is that I have now resolved the problem. It seems that the advice given by my phone was not so good. My Yahoo! email account is one of these ‘plus’ accounts and so the T-Mobile G1 suggested that I would need to set up my pop and smtp servers manually. That’s what I had done before. This time around I decided to delete my Yahoo! account on my phone and reinstall it. I did this and let it use the default settings. Lo and behold, it all works fine. It syncs, receives emails and does all that it’s now supposed to do - automatically. Just another learning experience.

Adaptability - The one thing that I’m really impressed about the T-Mobile G1 phone is its adaptability. I have made the home screen (well 3 of them actually) my own; one touch access to those things I need, logically grouped how I want them. I even took the advice of another blogger and downloaded ‘Any Cut’ from the Android Market. I then created my own customized shortcut that would send a text to my wife with a single touch. That icon sits on my home screen and I know it will be used a lot over the coming months. I think it’s important if you use your phone as a PDA that it reflects your personality. The T-Mobile G1 does not disappoint in this.

Ring Modes - One thing I liked about my Blackberry was that I could create ‘profiles’ for when I was in the office, at home, wherever and these profiles controlled the way my phone would behave. For example every morning I switched my Blackberry over to ‘work’ profile and from then on it only vibrated at me, never ringing out loud. When I got home, I switched it over to ‘phone only’ and then all I got was the phone notifications, no beeps for SMS, etc. This system has been part of my life for the past several years. The T-Mobile G1 doesn’t work in this fashion I am sad to say. Vibrate is controlled via the ringer volume control. It goes from loud to silent, with the last but one setting indicating vibrate. Not quite what I had in mind. Couple that with the fact that I don’t / can’t wear my T-Mobile G1 on my waist (when I am at work or out and about) like I did with my Blackberry and I feel weird. I’m sure over the next couple of weeks I’ll find a workable solution to all this, but at present I don’t know what to do with my phone; leave it on my desk, put it in my pocket? I don’t know. I went to a meeting this morning with my phone in my pocket and of course it rang halfway through the meeting. I just had to let it ring. Something my Blackberry handled much better. Of course, I could have remembered to put it on vibrate first, but I’m not used to having to keep resetting my ringer volume during the day depending upon where I am.

Dialing and Talking - Using a touchscreen phone for talking on the phone is still a bit of a weird experience for me. I’m used to a keypad of some description and even that disappears on the T-Mobile G1 when you’re actually on a call. At first I panicked and opened my phone up to expose the keyboard so I could delete voicemails and respond to menu prompts. Thankfully I discovered there’s a pull up tab on the bottom of the screen that appears when you’re on a call. Pulling up the tab gives you your numeric keypad back and all works fine. I still don’t like the way the phone goes dark however. If your call is longer than your screen timeout setting (actually I’ve discovered it goes dark after about 10 seconds) then you first have to wake the screen up by hitting the menu key, and then pull up the tab. A lot to remember when all you want to do is ‘press 5 to speak to a Customer Representative’! Still, I guess this is just one more usability process change I need to go through.

Orientation Flip - One of the features least known about is the ability to flip images and webpages from portrait to landscape (and vice versa) WITHOUT opening up the keyboard. In both the pictures and browser applications there is a ‘menu’ option to flip the orientation of the screen. This is really useful and exists contrary to information written by reviewers! (As you can see by comparing the screenshot at the top of this post with the one below. They are both the same, just ‘flipped’ around - and no keyboard!).

Reference Manual - One last link that I must publish is to the T-Mobile G1 Reference Manual. This is a really good resource and is hidden away on the T-Mobile website. READ IT!!

All in all like I said, I love this phone. It’s just quite a big change from my Blackberry and I guess you forget what that experience was like when you first switched to it from a ‘normal’ phone. My wife also now has a T-Mobile G1 as she got T-Mobile G1 envy immediately. She is loving it, and the changes for her from her previous phone are greater than mine. We are now officially a two T-Mobile G1 phone family.

I promise not to blog about the phone again for a week or so and will write about some other topics over the next couple of days.

For those that are interested, previous reviews and impressions appear here and here.

T-Mobile G1 Phone with Google, Black (T-Mobile)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Home, Technology, Thoughts, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.