With Google’s Android suddenly becoming the hot new phone OS again, I decided that it was time that I revisit the T-Mobile G1 that I tossed into the drawer back in January. Besides, my Blackberry Curve has been slowing down and locking up lately…
Back in January, I was running version 1.0 and it behaved like most 1.0 pieces of gear: not ready for prime time. About a week ago, I moved my SIM over to the G1, installed v1.5 (the promised “Cupcake” revision that was ‘imminent’ in January but didn’t arrive until April). Earlier this week it pulled v1.6 (“Donut”) over the air. Will v1.7 be “Eclair”?
Thoughts:
I no longer want to throw this phone through the window and see how many pieces it breaks into.
There is now the option to use a touchscreen keyboard, which I don’t use – I fall into the camp of people who think touchscreens make lousy keyboards.
The camera is now more intuitive (especially after the Donut update, where it is easy to flip between taking pictures and video) although it still doesn’t work well in low light situations.
The market got an excellent facelift in Donut; apps are easy to find and install. The most useful app for the G1 remains the power manager – well worth the $0.99 it now costs. Without its help, your battery will go down faster than a cheap hooker. I also downloaded the free Visual Voicemail app from T-Mobile, but I’ve yet to have anyone leave me a message so I don’t have an opinion on it yet.
In Settings/About Phone you’ll find a helpful feature – “Battery use.” It tells you what applications have been draining the battery. I think there’s no getting around the battery drain. The G1 is an early 3G phone. Until the chips consume less power, you either have to plug the phone in often or switch the different features like GPS and Bluetooth on and off only as needed.
I haven’t tried the voice dialing since the software updates. It was really flawed in version 1.0, and I haven’t heard about them overhauling the feature so I’m ignoring it.
I haven’t dropped any calls since the updates. In version 1.0 I had the phone application lock up and do a forced close in the middle of a call, so this is a welcome improvement. The T-Mobile 3G network around Houston has worked well so far. On my last trip to The Woodlands with the G1, I had 3G service without a problem; with the Blackberry in The Woodlands, Edge would fail and fall back to GSM leaving me with no data service.
Which brings me to this observation: my phone usage has changed a lot since January. If you look at last month’s bill, I used 100 anytime minutes and 150 My Faves minutes (Laura, my family, office) in the month.
I can think of two reasons for this:
- I added a landline at home again, so my mobile is no longer my primary telephone. Hurricane Ike taught me that there is still a place for wired telecommunications in my life, and with the UVerse discounts my landline gives me unlimited local and domestic long distance for under $45 after tax.
- I’m on the road less (although when I travel, most of those calls would go towards the unlimited My Faves bucket and not the 600 anytime/month bucket).
The real story on my phone bill is the data usage: over 1,000 text messages last month, and 26 megs of data.
So much of what I do anymore is text or data when I’m out of the house, and when I’m at home I use a landline. I’m making far fewer mobile calls than I used to.
How about you? Are you texting like a teenager?
