Bye bye G1

After suffering with the Google phone for 4 weeks, I took it back to T-Mobile yesterday (the contract says you only have 14 days, but I live in California where the time limit on an upgrade return is 30 days.) Jeff Turner describes the G1 appropriately: Like Windows 2.0, it’s good enough that you can tell it’s going to become the standard some day, but it’s not really usable in its present form. The main gripes I had with it are, in no particular order: poor battery life, dropped calls, a crappy Bluetooth implementation, unusable e-mail, a pathetic keypad, and a dearth of applications. My previous phone was a Blackberry Curve, which did everything that it did extremely well; if the Curve could do 3G I’d have got a replacement for the one I lost in London. But it doesn’t, so I’ve gone to a Sony Ericsson TM506, a feature phone that does phone things extremely well, has a built-in GPS (that doesn’t seem to work very well) and may possibly be used as a modem to tether a laptop to the 3G network (that feature seems to be controversial as Sony Ericsson supports it and T-Mobile may not; see update below.)

It’s basically a stop-gap until there’s a competent Blackberry for T-Mobile’s 3G network, which unfortunately uses oddball frequencies in the US.

The G1 has a high return rate owing to the generally pathetic implementation of Android by HTC. And I also don’t like sharing all the information about my personal life that Google wants. But that’s another story.

It’s clear the the iPhone has changed the game for mobile devices and the entrenched cell phone suppliers are struggling to catch up. I don’t doubt that Apple will continue to dominate the mobile device space for at least the next year or two, so I may just have to accede to reality and jump on that bandwagon.

UPDATE: Tethering works, I get close to 800Kbps at home, the Bluetooth limit, but the quota is pathetic: 100 MB/mo, and that’s not going to last long. Presumably, it downgrades to EDGE when the 3G quota is exhausted. The phone doesn’t have a standard USB connector, so I tethered over Bluetooth using the very nice PC Suite from Sony-Ericsson. It guides you through the Bluetooth hookup and makes accessing the Internet through the phone a point-and-click operation, even on a Mac.

It’s nice to use stuff that’s well engineered, isn’t oversold, and actually works, (except for that GPS, which must be defective on my phone.) including the GPS.

The 100MB/mo quota for $20 for the TM506 makes no sense compared to the 10GB/mo they sell for $25 to G1 customers unless Google is paying a subsidy to T-Mobile. If they are, Steve Jobs must be laughing all the way to the bank.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *