The Home screen is very basic. If it wasn't for the big clock widget, you'd think this was an old obsolete Macintosh. There are application icons on the desktop and they have labels under them. Nothing special here. You can however swipe your finger horizontally to get 2 more desktop area panels to the left and right. A tap-n-hold on the desktop will let you add more application icons, widgets or other shortcuts to the desktop. This is the only visually user-customizable part of the G1's operating system. You can change the background image here and manually arrange the icons/widgets, but that's it. There are no themes that will change the look and feel of the entire operating system like on Windows Mobile, so that means all of your other applications are not going to look nearly as pretty as your home screen.
The big grey tab opens a drawer full of application icons. This is similar to the Windows Start Menu, except that it's not labeled with a logo. There are no settings to arrange the icons in a different order, list view, or smaller icons, however you can type the name of a program and this drawer area will filter the options to match what you typed. This is an excellent feature. Windows Mobile Pro has a similar function that jumps to the area of the list that you've typed, but I like Android's filtering a lot too.
Here we see a tap-and-hold menu on the home screen's desktop. This is what you use to add more shortcuts or widgets.
Here is a runthrough of the interface of the G1.
An Alarm clock is in the programs folder. Nothing special here, but it's useful.
There's an Amazon MP3 application where you can browse, preview, purchase and download DRM-free music. This is a nice feature and I wish there was an application like this for Windows Mobile.
The web browser uses on-screen static zoom buttons to zoom in and out. The 4 way arrow button in the bottom right will let you zoom out completely and move a magnification box around the page to find an area to zoom in on. Using only the keyboard and hardware buttons, it's pretty difficult to get these buttons to appear.
The browser also supports multiple windows that you can switch to in the Windows dialog found within the "Menu" menu. Opening too many windows will slow you down though, so try to keep it light.
Here is a runthrough of the browser.
The calculator is very basic, and has big finger-friendly buttons
The calendar has all the basic views and features you'd expect. The month view shows small time-slot areas to the right of each day to indicate how busy you are that day.
The Calendar downloads multiple Google Calendars including Public ones. Oddly, the "Heroes" TV schedule calendar I added to my account did not show up, while the Solar-lunar one did.
Contacts is a basic list of white on black type. After you start moving the list with your finger, a large grey tab appears on the right. If you can catch it before it goes away, you can drag it up and down like a real scroll bar in order to get to different parts of the list. The letters appear in the middle as you scroll with the scroll bar tab.
The Favorites tab lets you save contacts that you call a lot.
The call log naturally lists what calls you've made. The only option in the menu here is to clear all calls. There are no filtering capabilities.
When the keyboard is extended, the Dialer tab tells you to use the keyboard. Oddly typing letters on the keyboard in this mode enters numbers, and the letters represent numbers as if they were in a T9 layout. For example, E is 3, W is 9, etc. It's very confusing.
In portrait mode there are numeric buttons here, but pressing them does not auto-search your contacts using corresponding T9 letter assignments.
The email application is very basic. It connects to IMAP and POP3 accounts, and can attempt to auto-detect settings, but that didn't work for my custom domain accounts.
The folder view does not list the number of unread messages in each folder and you have to use the hardware Back button in order to get to the listing of accounts. You can't swipe the screen left or right with your finger like you can with TouchFLO enabled Windows Mobile devices.
When you open a message, you'll see large buttons at the bottom. There's also a "Show pictures" button that will let you download images embedded in HTML emails.
And it does nicely support HTML email display. The three buttons remain at the bottom of the screen at all times, and they tend to take up a lot of room.
There's another separate email application for Gmail, it doesn't work at all if there are data connection problems or you're in Airplane mode.
Conversations are collapsed into one item in the Inbox. You can star and label messages just as in web based Gmail.
Opening a conversation shows email messages in an instant-messenger-style thread that you can scroll through.
The instant messenger program lets you log into AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live, and Yahoo Messenger. Google Talk is logged in automatically to your phone's Gmail account.
Google Maps is about the same as any other version of Google Maps on any other mobile phone except for its support for the digital compass and "Street View".
Notice the satellite dish icon in the status bar at the top. This indicates that Google Maps is using the GPS receiver to determine your location. You have to turn on the GPS in the Settings area of the phone before any applications are able to access GPS information. I was looking for the "Use GPS" command in Google Maps, and since it wasn't there assumed that it was going to use GPS automatically when required (as many Windows Mobile programs do). This is not so and it has to be turned on manually. Also, the Maps application here is only capable of displaying your position on a downloaded map through the internet. It will not use voice-prompts to direct you to a chosen destination. Eight years ago on Pocket PCs, that was the main reason we wanted GPS capabilities - to let the device tell us where to go. Android's Google Maps software is very limited in that respect and requires much more user interaction.
The Android Market application is still in beta, but it allows you to browse a variety of Android compatible applications that you can easily download and install to your device. This makes extending your devices capabilities very simple. Windows Mobile has many different ways of installing 3rd party software, and that makes it quite complicated. On the other hand, the applications available on the Android Market right now are not terribly impressive or useful. How many tip calculators and weather apps do you need?
The Messages application is for SMS and MMS messages. It shows SMS conversations listed by the name of the person you're talking to, just like Windows Mobile 6.1.
When you open a conversation of SMS messages, you see the threaded list like so. It only shows the time the message was received if it was received with the last day. That is not to say within the last 24 hours.
If you tap and hold on a message you can see some message details in order to figure out what time it was received.
The music application supports MP3, WMA, M4A, WAV, MIDI, OGG, and AMR audio files. There doesn't appear to be any skinning or theme capabilities in this application either.
Here's a look at multimedia.
Of course, T-Mobile's MyFaves application is here. We wouldn't have it any other way.
The pictures application is nothing special. It shows thumbnails of pictures on your device, and you can tap them to enlarge. When you enlarge a photo, large left/right arrows appear above it along with the +/- zoom buttons at the bottom. There are not finger gestures supported here, but when you zoom in, you can pan around with your finger.
The settings item in the programs folder gives you access to settings for Wireless controls, Call settings, Sound & display, Data synchronization, Security & Location, Applications (uninstall, shortcuts), SD card & Phone Storage, Date & Time, Text auto-correction, and About.
The YouTube application is pretty good. Videos play smoothly, you can email links to the videos from within the "menu" and you can even read comments.
The voice dialer application lets you call contacts or phone numbers using voice recognition. It does not require training, but it cannot be activated from a Bluetooth headset. It also does not support any of the other features found on Microsoft Voice Command such as text-to-speech reading of incoming emails, text messages, appointments, and caller ID. It also doesn't support commands for playing music in your media library, asking about your schedule, launching programs, checking phone battery levels, time, setting flight-mode, etc.
The camera application is extremely basic and completely void of settings or features. You can't change the resolution, switch to video record mode, adjust colors, etc. None of that.
Here are the two options you have in the Camera settings.
The photo quality is just as bad as most of the camera phones out there other than the Touch Diamond/Pro and Nokia N95 that is. Click the image above to see a full resolution sample.
Over the air system updates is great though. Windows Mobile does supposedly have this capability in its Windows Update application, but it has never been used. Android's has been used here, but it didn't change anything noticable.
Click on to the last page as we cover battery life, bugs, and list the Pros and Cons.
