While I’m more technologically savvy than most, I’m not always an early adopter.  I like my technology to work, so I will hang back and wait for the first revision.  Every now and then I make exceptions.

Sometimes it pays off: while I did have some initial issues being the first on the block with AT&T U-Verse, I’m really happy with the service.  AT&T, to their credit, never hesitated to roll a truck to swap out equipment, and once they figured out how to get the ports in the box on the street to not fry every time we had a thunderstorm, it’s been perfect.  In exchange for being a paying customer while essentially beta testing their product, I’m locked in at a lower price than new subscribers as long as I don’t change my service, which seems like a fair trade.  Plus there was that whole issue where I got all the premiums (standard and HD) for about 12 months for free because they couldn’t figure out how to turn them off when the 3 month trial ended – that was pretty sweet.

Sometimes it doesn’t pay off.  When T-Mobile announced it was teaming up with Google to deliver the first Android-powered phone, I drank the Google K00l-Aid by the gallon.  I read all the blogs as it prepared for launch… watched the launch press conference webcast… persevered through the T-Mobile website crashing on the first pre-order day… and had a new T-Mobile G-1 waiting on my doorstep on October 21.  Google, the company that can do no evil, would never lay a turd in the punch bowl, right?

I’ve tried not to say this since the end of October, but it needs to be said: this phone is crap.

The device is fantastic for surfing the internet, and the integration of GMail and Google Calendar is excellent (and the ability to sync the Google calendar to Outlook over the air has saved my bacon several times), but somewhere along the way these people forgot that this is supposed to be a phone. Here’s where the G1 falls short:

  1. Bluetooth.  This section screams “development ran out of time, ship it with a beta and we’ll fix it later.”  My first headset would pair with the phone, but the answer/end button didn’t work, nor did the volume buttons.  After finding another Motorola headset on an online forum post of headsets that are reported to possibly work (the fact that T-Mobile needs its users to report in an online forum what might work speaks volumes) I ended up with a headset where the volume buttons did work, but the send/end didn’t work reliably, nor could you activate voice dialing from the headset.  Also, audio quality while using bluetooth was suspect.  You could end up sounding like a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica half of the time while you drove down the street.
  2. Voice Dialing.  This feature screams “Crap! We’re shipping today? My code is still in alpha!”.  First of all, they didn’t think through the feature from a usability standpoint, and second, the feature just doesn’t work.  Here’s how voice dialing works on my G1:a. press and hold the send key and wait for a beep
    b. say the name of the person in your phone book that you’re trying to call

    At this point several things might happen: If you’re lucky, you’ll get a list of numbers and you can pick one with your finger.  If you’re not lucky, it will start dialing random numbers because it couldn’t figure out what you were saying and it guessed incorrectly.  But for the sake of anyone from T-Mobile or Google that stumbles across this rant, let me put on my Captain Obvious suit for a moment..

    Q: When do you need voice dialing?
    A: When you’re driving and can’t look at your phone!

    So, why do I need to look at my phone and pick from lists to use voice dialing on a G1?  Besides, it doesn’t work, so I end up having to fumble with the phone and find a name in my address book with my finger anyway.

    Here’s how voice dialing should work, as on my old Blackberry:

    a.  Press the voice dialing button on the side of the phone or press the send/end button on your headset.
    b. The phone says “Say a command”.
    c.  You say “Call (name from my phone book)”.
    d. If it gets a match, it says, “Dialing (name of my contact)” and dials the call.  If it isn’t sure, it says “Did you mean (contact name)” – if yes, it dials, if no, it asks about the next closest match or says “Sorry,  no match found.”  If there’s more than one number for the contact, it asks “Which number” and you can say “mobile” “home” or “office”.  Heck, when you issue the call command, you can say “Call (contact name) mobile” and it will respond “dialing (contact name) mobile” and call the right number.  If you want to call someone not in the address book, you just say “call (spell out the number)”.  It just works, and you can call home without causing a three car pileup on Loop 610.

  3. Phone GUI.  The dial pad goes away after you place the call.  This means every time you check your voicemail, you need to press Menu to bring back the screen and then swipe your finger up to bring back the dialpad to press 7 to delete the message… then swipe the finger down to hide the keypad before you press the phone back to your ear or else holding it to your ear will dial other numbers.  None of this was easy to figure out, either.  One of the most often asked questions the first week was how to hit the number keys while checking voicemail, as none of these moves were obvious from the GUI.  Did anyone who wasn’t a software developer try to use this phone for a week before they released it to the public?  Hint to the Android team: before you release your next revision, hand the phone to a non-techie and make him or her live with it for a week.  You’ll learn a thing or two.  I do tech support for a living, I tinker with Linux, I like to hack things, and even I had trouble with your GUI, mainly because it isn’t consistent from one application to the next.
  4. Battery life.  The G1 burns up your battery faster than a match and gasoline.  If I talked longer than a half hour with bluetooth, the battery was completely spent or if I sent more than 10 texts and then talked on the phone at all, the battery was completely spent… pretty soon you learned to use the phone sparingly unless you could keep the phone plugged into the charger.  If you used the wired headset, you couldn’t charge at the same time – it used the same mini-USB port.
  5. Dropped calls.  I couldn’t get through most conversations without dropping the call 2 or 3 times.  Sometimes the call would only hold 10 to 15 seconds.  Sometimes I would have to wait a minute before I could complete a call again.  I did not drop any calls while in Colorado Springs (using the Edge network as opposed to the new 3G network) and calls were also much clearer on the old Edge network than on the new 3G system.  Sounds like T-Mobile’s 3G system isn’t ready for prime time either.  While there is the option to turn off the 3G radio in the phone and force it to Edge, that kind of defeats the purpose of paying $200-$400 for a 3G phone, doesn’t it?

The applications were cool (when they didn’t drain the battery) and while the ability to download DRM-free songs from Amazon sounded good, the G1 makes an impractical music player due to the battery life.  Again, the allure of using the toys on the phone went away once it became clear that using the toys meant you wouldn’t have any power left to answer a call.

So, I’m done with shiny and new.  I’m back to the old Blackberry Pearl for now.  After a couple of go-rounds with the customer retention team (I was not going to pay them $199 for a new Blackberry Curve, which was an insult of an offer) I did get them to discount the Curve enough to keep me from jumping ship to Verizon.  The second rep that I talked to figured out that I wasn’t bluffing when I wanted to know how much I would have to pay to get out of the contract early… and noticed that I have been with them since November of 2002.

Moral of the story:  Functionality rules.  A mobile phone is a phone first and multimedia device second.  The G1 has it backwards: they put their effort and expertise into the multimedia stuff and made the function of the phone an afterthought.  Do your core functions well, then do your secondary functions well, then put it on the market.  Don’t expect me to wait for the open source community to hack at your product long enough to fix your bugs.  I can wait for a new release for a better camera or an on-screen keyboard.  I cannot wait for you to figure out why the phone drops calls or for you to put out a beta of the voice dialer.

I’ll be enjoying my old-school Blackberry.  It’s not sexy, it may look like you’re talking into a calculator, but it works.