JC - Technology and Stuff

Well, it’s been 5 weeks now since I was downsized from T-Mobile and I no longer get in my car at 7:00am in the morning for my drive to the corporate office. A lot of things have changed. As I was sitting at my desk in my home office this morning I was thinking that maybe it would be a good exercise to write a little about it and all those subtle little lifestyle changes that take place.

First things first, I am fortunate not to be in the same position as some American families who are currently struggling on a day to day basis just to get by on the basics. For that I am thankful. Indeed, I hope not to ever have to face that position. Even so, being ‘unemployed from the corporate world’ does make you think a little more about decisions made on a daily basis. I guess it’s a sort of inbuilt survival mode. I hope this article helps you focus a little on how to survive a corporate downsizing and get back on the track to success.

The most important thing to get past is denial. This is crucial for your long term survival. Thinking “it’ll be alright tomorrow” is not going to get you through. Spending more on your credit cards to compensate for the sad feeling inside is also not going to get you through. You need to admit that your income has taken a sudden decline and that you will have to change your perspective on living and spending for possibly quite some time to come.

Okay, so you’ve got past that. What next? First off you need to make a list of all your monthly and ad hoc expenditures. Be exact and don’t miss anything out. Then add on 10% or so for all the things you also spend money on that you’ve forgotten about or don’t capture. Now write down all the sources of income you have (i.e. Unemployment Insurance) and also write down what you have in savings. Then comes the scary part. How long do you realistically think you’ll be out of work? 6 months? A year? In this economy it may actually be somewhere between those two numbers, or more. So, divide your savings between that number to give you a monthly spend and add to it your new income. Now compare that to your list of outgoings. Swallow. Then swallow again.

Obviously when you are unemployed some things have to change. Some of the little luxuries need to be struck from the spend list and then it’s time to do some serious pruning. The idea here is to make your available money last as long as is feasibly possible. Don’t be overly optimistic about getting another job. Try and be realistic. We are in a tough economy. So, you make alterations to your spend list and shave off a few dollars here and there, but somehow it still doesn’t seem to match what you have available to spend. That’s because you’re still not being as cutthroat as you need to be. Now is the time to move into money conservation mode. Minimum payments, minimum expenditures, maximum efficiency. You’re going to have to examine every aspect of your monthly budget line by line and make adjustments.

When you’re done with all this you know better just how long you can manage for before it gets to the nearly poverty stage. The aim is that you never have to get to this stage. But what do you do next?

When you knew you were being laid off you probably made a list of a million things that you could do with your time. You probably also made a list of all the jobs you meant to get around to. Well, guess what, it doesn’t quite work out like that! Along with unemployment comes personality and attitude changes. Subtle, but changes nonetheless. You have been so conditioned to doing your job every day that for some unknown reason you can’t seem to get into a new routine. Instead you squander time, wander around aimless, look at job boards, chat to a few friends, and generally watch days pass by.

In the same way as you made a list of your monthly expenses you’re going to have to make a list of your new routine. Otherwise you will never get things done. Make time every day for looking at and applying for jobs. Make time every day to get certain tasks done. Try and fill your normal work hours with things that are scheduled. Only use your normal non-work time to do the social things. Changing your routine is hard but it’s this one thing that will ultimately determine your success. Being unemployed makes it very easy to put something off until tomorrow. Don’t be tempted by that thought. You should be trying to get back to work and filling your time with useful and necessary things to do.

Stuck for ideas? Volunteer for something. Embark on a large project that needs planning and organizing. Give back to your community. Cook, redecorate, organize the apartment or house, do the garden. There are lots of potential things you can do. The important thing is to fill your working hours with useful and beneficial things. Don’t cut yourself off from the world and spend your days watching TV, reading or playing World of Warcraft!

As time ticks by you will gradually settle into your new routine and it is this routine that will ultimately determine your success. If your routine is laziness and apathy, be prepared to spend a long time unemployed. If your routine is non-stop morning til night, then you’ll be re-employed a lot quicker. The reason is fairly obvious. Staying busy focuses your mind, keeps you networking, keeps you pushing for something and lowers the odds on you finding a new job substantially.

So, there we have it. Just a few thoughts. You’ve been downsized; not shot at or physically injured. Get over it! You are ultimately in control of your future success and happiness. Sure, it may take some time. I didn’t say it wouldn’t. But it’s times like this in our lives that define who we are and who we want to be.

Well I packed up my desk today. My comfy compact corporate cubicle is now empty of any personality it once had and the dusty photos of the family are stored in my backpack for safe-keeping. My on-off relationship with T-Mobile is once again heading to an ‘off’ cycle. Maybe I’ll be back there again some time in the future. In the meantime it’s an opportunity to do something different - in the middle of a recession.

I have worked at T-Mobile in Seattle several times since early in 2002, both as a contractor and as an employee. I have enjoyed watching a small telecoms company grow into something that is now challenging the behemoths of Verizon and AT&T. Their phones and their phone plans are second to none and time and time again they have won Customer Service and innovation awards. They are fundamentally a good company.

Unfortunately though like so many relationships, especially ones that are realistically one-way, there often comes a time when a period of break-up is necessary. Now is one of those times. T-Mobile has bid me a ‘bon voyage’ and sent me out into the wilderness to fend for myself. Now I’ll have to learn a new daily routine. No more 7:30am trips to the kitchen to fill my coffee cup; no more 11:45am visits to the Chinese restaurant; no more meeting-packed days in conference room 4H; and no more all-hands meetings to learn the scoop on the upcoming phones. Now I’m merely a customer once again.

It’ll be nice to be in charge of my days again. It’ll be nice to have lunch with my wife. It’ll even be nice to be a little scared about where the next pay check is coming from. Change is inevitable in life and ultimately change is a good thing.

You can expect a change in direction and content on my blog going forward. I always write about whatever is on my mind, and that is one thing that is not going to change. It’s just that now there will be different things on my mind, and those are the things I will write about. It’s time to devote more time to writing. It’s time to get out and help some people develop better life skills. There are lots of things to do.

T-Mobile? Yes, I’ll miss you, of course I will. Breaking up is never easy. But there’s a big wide world out there that’s calling my name.

One of the few shortcomings of the T-Mobile G1 phone since its release has been its lack of a synchronization tool for Microsoft Exchange email (a la corporate email). I am pleased to say that a recent check of Android’s Application Market has revealed two tools that now solve the problem to a certain extent. They are Moxier Mail Beta and Touchdown. These two applications are a little different from each other and which one you choose will probably depend upon how you use email on your G1 phone.

Moxier Mail is the newer of the two products, only having been released last week. It is currently availabe as a free beta until March 31st 2009, and after that will be a purchaseable download from the market (prices yet to be confirmed). I briefly tried Moxier and it seemed to do the job of syncing with my corporate email very well. So well in fact it ran in the background, even on a reboot, and happily displayed all my new emails as they arrived. The downside is that there is currently no support for contact or calendar information and that apart from inbox and sent (which it displays as one), there is no support for other folders. With regards to set up though, I have to say it’s really easy. Two minutes and I was done. So, if you’re looking for something that sits in the background and really offers true push email, this may be the product for you. One note of caution though, the G1 is known to have battery limitations and this program, by running constantly in the background, is not going to help that situation.

Touchdown, on the other hand, takes a different approach. It has two versions of the program available to choose from. Firstly there is the paid version ($29.99) that has full functionality - including contacts, appointments and multiple folder support - and then there is also the free ‘read only’ version, that doesn’t allow you to send emails or store more than a day’s worth of emails on your phone. Sound stupid? Not at all. For me this is actually my preferred way of operation. All I want is the ability to read any emails that come up out of hours, or in between meetings, and check on my appointments. I can respond to the actual email when I am back in front of my computer. To be honest, I hardly ever send an email from my phone, even using Google Mail, usually all I do is read new emails. I can always text someone of I need to, which is generally more efficient anyway if it’s an urgent situation. Set up of the program is a little more complex than Moxier (but probably is able to work in more diverse configurations), but after reading through their PDF help page I managed to get it all connected. It is not a true push email program so it doesn’t run continually in the background as such. You can set it to poll your email account every ‘x’ minutes. You’ll have to work out what’s best for you (paid version only - on the free version you need to refresh ad hoc).

On a separate note, for me it’s only the email part of any of these applications that I am really interested in. All my contacts and calendar appointments are already synced to my phone via Google. Oh, how I love modern technology!

So, there we have it, two solutions (make that three from two different companies) for getting your corporate email on your T-Mobile G1 phone with Google. I am confident there’s a version that will suit your way of working. Now this is something I love about the T-Mobile G1 phone and the Android platform, constant innovation and new concepts coming to the marketplace. I even read about a true GPS turn-by-turn mapper that came to the market this week too. But that’s another story for another day. In the meantime I will continue to very happily use the free version of Touchdown and view my corporate emails and appointments as and when I wish…

Well, I knew it was coming after I read all the reviews. I’ve always been a lover of Blackberry phones. I have owned four different models over the years until I switched to my T-Mobile G1 as an early adopter. But the Blackberry Storm looked different.

The concept behind the Storm is that it is a touchscreen version of a great phone, trying to play catch up with the iPhones and G1s of the world. But in my opinion (and it seems in the opinion of others) it was rushed to market too soon. The great thing about a Blackberry is that they just work and deliver email to you flawlessly. The unfortunate thing about the Storm is that the guys at RIM (or whoever makes their software) forgot that every Blackberry user also expects for the Storm to just work too. The problem is not the capabilities of the phone, the problem is in the UI. It’s just badly conceived and obviously put together in a hurry. Verizon needed to respond to AT&T and T-Mobile and rushed the Storm to market. A big mistake. It seems that returns of the phone are as high as 50% in some areas.

So if you’re thinking of getting a new phone for the new year, do what I did. Take the plunge and buy yourself a T-Mobile G1. You won’t be disappointed. I love my G1 and it’s flexibility and applications. I miss my corporate email push a little - but not a lot to be honest (and I know I’ll get that back very soon). Everything else that I got on my Blackberry I still get - POP email, calendar (even syncs to Outlook via Google), contacts; and SO much more besides (just read some of my other blog posts that talk to G1 features).

You can read the full article on Engadget here that speaks to some of the problems of the Verizon Blackberry Storm.

I decided it was time to update my list of favorite T-Mobile G1 applications as I’ve now been using my G1 phone for a couple of months. My previous list is here.

People stop me now and again to ask what I like about my phone and what makes it different from other phones. I usually only have to show them two applications:

• ShopSavvy - scans barcodes using the G1 camera and looks them up on its internal database to give best prices and shopping availability
• Bubble - turns your phone into a three way bubble or spirit level. Simple, elegant, and very useful!

Of course apart from that the phone does all the usual phone, text and email stuff. One application that I seem to use all the time though is Twidroid - a Twitter application. This just works and keeps me updated with all the latest tweets from friends.

In my last post I said I used College Football Live. I have now replaced that application with a new one released by Google - Scoreboard. This application keeps you updated on a whole range of different sports scores and if you’re interested you can read some more about it here and here. The second article lists a few easter eggs!

Lastly I want to add one useful system application to the list. Power Manager shows you every status you want on a single screen and you can tweak the settings to suit you.

So, if you’re looking for something useful to load, I’ve given you a start…

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)

I’ve had my T-Mobile G1 now for a whole 2.5 days and so it’s time to write a little more about it. Firstly I want to come back to a couple of things I wrote in my last post.

GPS - GPS  functions perfectly. I discovered the reason for location being a little off and that’s only when you are either indoors, or when the GPS is turned off. Under ‘Security & Location’ in the ‘Settings’ menu there are options for ‘Use Wireless Networks’ and ‘Enable GPS Satellites’. By default these are both turned on. What that means is that if you are inside somewhere and decide to use the Maps application and hit the ‘My Location’ option then the phone will end up using the WiFi method for locating you. That means triangulation from signals and other methods. Consequently your location will be reported slightly wrongly. However if you are outside or have a good signal from somewhere inside then GPS will work fine. I have found that even sometimes inside buildings I can get a GPS lock - but not always. So this clears up any confusion over the GPS functionality written about by a few reviewers.

Battery - This is one area that certainly is very different from my Blackberry experience. Battery life lasts about a day depending on what you do. So be prepared. It is possible if you do a lot of browsing, GPS use, or game playing that your battery may not last the day. Be advised! Just a little lifestyle adjustment to make. The battery does recharge very quickly however and it can also be recharged from your PC by just plugging in the mini-USB cable.

Browser - Overall I’m very pleased with the browser. It is responsive, displays everything just as it should and generally is a delight to use. SO much better than my Blackberry! A couple of things to note though are that a) the browser always opens to your last loaded page and not a ‘home’ page. This can be a little annoying from time to time; and b) page navigation is a little tricky at times when you’re in ‘zoom out’ mode and trying to find exactly the part of the web page you are looking for. The reason for this is that you have to keep your finger on the screen as you move around the page but sometimes it’s hard to see where you are cos your finger’s in the way, and so you let go and lo and behold you get the part of the page where your finger was! Just another little usage thing to get used to.

Keyboard - I love the fact that it’s a real keyboard and there are dedicated keys for ‘.’ and ‘@’, which is really useful in email address typing. On the downside I find that sometimes I cannot see the ‘extended’ keys when the backlighting is on in a dark room. I have to guess a little as to which key they belong to. I think this is primarily because they’re red. As I said, it’s fine in normal light, just a little difficult in dark light. The main keys of course are fine and easy to read in any light. Some reviewers have said they don’t like the feel of the keyboard or that the ‘nub’ of the phone gets in the way. I haven’t found this to be true at all. The phone works well for my typing methods so I guess that’s a personal thing, not a genuine problem.

Email Syncing - First of all everything Google is fine - 100%. Let’s get that out of the way. However my Yahoo! syncing is not so perfect. I find that for some reason my connection to Yahoo! email doesn’t work all of the time and I get ‘connection error’ messages from time to time. I haven’t managed to find a pattern here, although I think it may only be happening when I am connected to data services via a WiFi network and not when it’s 3G. I’ll have to investigate more on that. Like I said, it’s mostly fine, just a little annoying from time to time. But the biggest disappointment for me has to be that I have no access to my corporate email. I have tried to set it up in many different ways but all to no avail. Next week at the office I will try and talk to the IT Help Desk and see if there’s anything I can do to make it work. But for now - no go.

Android Marketplace - So far I’ve only tried a few of the applications but my general experience has been good. My favorite app is ‘Ringdroid’, an application that allows you to make ringtones from snippets of any song you have in your library. Now that is brilliant! ‘Pacman’ is also pretty addictive of course and I’ve tried out ‘ShopSavvy’ the bar code reader program. This program works well at reading barcodes, just don’t expect it to tell you where to buy cheap groceries as it’s aimed at ‘luxury’ items like TVs, big software, etc. But it does what it does very well.

Other Comments - Now I’ve had the phone for a couple of days it’s starting to feel more natural for everything. I have to say it’s a big usability change from the Blackberry. Not unpleasant, just a big change. I’ve managed to set up my ringtones how I like them - something that is not explained in the user manual by the way - and that’s made a big difference. On the topic of the user manual, it’s pretty basic. It covers all the applications of the phone, but you’ll have to figure out the ‘options’ yourself.

So, that’s about it for today. I’ll write some more thoughts later in the week.

By now everyone has seen all the pictures, read the early reviews and probably are totally confused as to whether to buy a T-Mobile G1 with Google phone. In this article I will try and give you my unbiased view of the product. As always, I must point out that T-Mobile is my employer, but I am a consumer, just like anyone else.

Most everyone has tried to compare the T-Mobile G1 with the Apple iPhone. That is their choice, but I think is a mistake. The two products, although having a lot of similar features, are very different devices. One is a closed and proprietary device and the other is an open and evolving platform for the future. It is on that basis that I am writing about the T-Mobile G1 phone.

So first things first. Unboxing the device was not a wow experience. I wasn’t expecting a wow experience however. I was expecting a phone and a phone is what I unboxed. I have been using mobile phones since the mid 1980’s (and at that time the word ‘mobile’ was debatable!) and quite simply I could not live without one now. I have also been a Blackberry user since 2004 and so now I must have email too. I also spend my life on the Internet and so a phone with a great Internet browser was also something that I really wanted. I am not a big music listener, nor YouTube watcher, but I do text a fair bit too. It is on this premise that am writing about the T-Mobile G1 phone. It is a phone I bought (with my own money at full retail price by the way) because I wanted to use it. For no other reason (except of course to spread the T-Mobile love to others!).

So as I was saying, I unboxed it and assembled all the pieces and followed the instructions on how to put in my SIM and battery, etc. I pressed the ‘on’ button and waited while it went through its startup. This was a pleasingly short process (less than 1 minute) compared to the 5 minute plus affair of my Blackberry Curve. Good start. The phone asked me to enter my Google account details which I did and very soon afterward I was up and running. Simple.

The fun started at this point as I really had no idea what I was doing. The T-Mobile G1 is not a regular phone at all, it has all these bells and whistles and looks just like a computer desktop when it’s started up. I hacked my way around for a while figuring most things out, but at some point I will have to really read the owner’s manual in some detail. An example of why is as follows: This morning my wife had left me a voicemail at some time. Of course my phone notified me and I simply pressed the notification and it dialled my voicemail for me  - clever. I then listened to the voicemail and got the normal response of ‘press 7 to delete this message’. I looked down at my screen but there was no ‘7′ to press, my display just showed I was on the phone to my voicemail! I’m sure I could have probably just hit the ‘dialer’ button and then a numeric pad would have appeared, but in the heat of the moment I wasn’t thinking. All the phones I’d ever used before always had the numeric pad available at all times. I panicked and opened the keyboard and pressed the ‘7′ on that. Thankfully that did the trick and deleted my voicemail. Little things that I will have to relearn in order to get the best experience from my new mega-phone!

Anyway back to the plot. I went through all the standard apps and pressed all the buttons and was suitably impressed. The phone did everything it claimed to do - and did it well. Gmail is a breeze. The calendar works well. I even managed to set up my Yahoo! email account too. The only thing I am missing is my T-Mobile corporate email. Hmm. There’s something wrong here. I’m in a quandary. I don’t know whether to just go without that email (which after years of a Blackberry might be a little difficult), to set up my T-Mobile email as a POP account, or to wait and pray that Exchange synchronization comes quickly. I’ll probably make a decision over the weekend. Of course it also means I don’t get my calendar appointments (at work) any more either. I’m not sure how I feel about that yet either (Update: I managed to sync my Appointments from Outlook straight to my Google calendar via a clever piece of software - Google Calendar Sync -, so now I actually do have my work appointments on my T-Mobile G1).

Several reviewers have complained about the GPS and its lack of accuracy. I have to say that so far I too have had mixed results with this. GPS positioning functions but so far every time it has identified me as being about two to three blocks from where I actually am (Update:- Actually I discovered that this is due to the fact that the G1 is locating me via WiFi and Cell Towers and NOT GPS. I have not to date managed to get a GPS lock). Both times I have been inside though so I’ll try and make a point of trying this again over the weekend from outside somewhere. That aside, the maps and all associated functions work really well. It’s just like being on the Internet version of Google Maps.

I love the implementation of the T-Mobile G1 keyboard. The hinge is strong and feels good when you open it up. Sending emails and text messages ‘just works’ and is actually a better experience than on my Blackberry Curve. The fact that I get HTML enabled emails too is wonderful. Now I can choose to see an email just the same as if I was on my PC, something that the Blackberry Curve also struggled with. I’ve not opened up any attachments yet - something else I will test out over the weekend.

The big question for me was the browser. Would the T-Mobile G1 browser experience be what I expected? In a word - yes!! Every site I went to displayed flawlessly. I tried to edit documents and spreadsheets in Zoho but that didn’t work - I didn’t really expect it would - I just wanted to see. Maybe that’ll be something I’ll be able to do soon when Google Chrome is officially on the T-Mobile G1. As advertised there’s no Flash or PDF support, but I’m sure that’ll come along soon too. The important thing to remember here is that nearly every regular website you want to go to is now available in full color, zoomable, and wonderfully presented ON A PHONE!!! What do you want for your money? With the T-Mobile G1 it’s so easy to forget that at the end of the day you are just using a phone. I keep forgetting this and expect it to back up my hard drives, browse my networks, make my lunch, etc. No, this is just a phone on steroids, not a PC or PC replacement. But the line is getting very blurry.

So, these are the first impressions. I’ll write more over the weekend.

Tonight I got my new T-Mobile G1 with Google phone. I have to say it’s just brilliant!! I don’t care about no stinkin iPhone - I got myself a real competitor from a real cellphone company!!

Tomorrow I’ll post some pictures and write some more detailed information about it. But until then you’ll just have to take my word for it. Oh you jealous people out there who haven’t got one yet!!

Later…

At last! The T-Mobile employee phones portal had a new addition today - the T-Mobile G1 phone. No advertising, no fanfare, it was just there. I suspect that’s because everyone has been eagerly awaiting the phone and if it was announced like that then the systems would explode with all the rush (metaphorically speaking). So, I got my order in quick - just one choice at the present - the bronze colored version. No news on a delivery date either, but it looks like somewhere before November 10th according to some small print I read. Now the countdown begins. I can’t wait