The Android G1: What it Can Do

Nov 1st, 2008 by Nut

Outside the Box

Where I get to write on all things not writing or money related

I already posted on the guilt trip I had when I bought this phone last week, but that’s pretty much gone now that I’m learning all the cool stuff the phone can do. The app market has tons of cool programs you can download (and some useless ones), and that’s really where this guy shines.

Shop Savvy

The ShopSavvy tool is probably the one with the biggest wow factor:

Using the phone’s camera as a scanner is a freaking sweet idea and will change the way a person shops. Every time I show this to someone, they’re like “Oh my god, I have to have that.” Yes, you do have to have it.

Imeem

For those of you that know about Pandora, then this is basically what Imeem is. You start with a song or artist and then you fine tune that “station” by telling the program if you like a certain song or not. It works on the slower Edge network OK, but on 3G it doesn’t skip a beat. I can walk home and listen to my personalized radio station with no skipping, no waiting, no nothing. It’s pretty sweet. I did notice that some rap songs were edited for language, which kind of sucks, but whatever. It’s free music wherever I want it.

Iskoot

This is one that I have downloaded and sort of played with, but not all the way. This basically brings Skype to your phone. The only thing is that you will be charged minutes on every call you make. So let’s say I call my buddy in Nigeria, who is on his PC using Skype, then I won’t be charged for the call to Nigeria, but I will be charged the 20 minutes towards my plan that we spend chatting. That’s because it’s too much work for the phone to do all the maneuvering that Skype does on your PC, so Iskoot makes a call to their servers and they process all this information. So you’re “on the phone” even though you aren’t paying any long-distance charges. So if you want to talk for two hours, just go home. If you need to, say, ask your buddy if he wants the green jacket or the red one while you’re at the store, then you can ring him up and ask real quick. Neat.

Wi-Fi

Chicago is wired for 3G, so Wi-Fi is just an added bonus, but T-Mobile also lets you use any of their Wi-Fi hotspots, which are all over the city in places like Borders and even at the airport. So if I need to do some serious surfing I can take advantage of that. Also, since I’m an AT&T DSL customer, I get access to the Wi-Fi signal at Starbucks stores around the city, so that gives me even more coverage. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I researched the hell out of it and, yes, it should work.

Movies

I did a lot of research on this one too and it’s pretty straightforward to turn your favorite DVDs and TV shows into a nice, compact format that looks good on the phone. My 8GB memory card hasn’t arrived yet, so I haven’t started loading tons of stuff on the phone (it only comes with a 1GB card), so I haven’t gone nuts testing this yet.

Music

I have downloaded some of my music onto the phone and it sounds great, whether it’s through the speaker or through the headphones (which suck, by the way). I really want to test out the Amazon MP3 store but for now I’ve only used music I already own.

The Bad

This first-generation stuff is never perfect, and this phone is no exception. It gets very hot sometimes and the headphone jack is proprietary, so that sucks. It wouldn’t be a big deal if the headphones were good, but they suck, so you need an adapter. I’ve also had some lockups that froze my phone in sleep mode, so I had to reset my phone and so far that has fixed it. But the phone is open source, so if there is any issue, the community is fast to fix it and that’s pretty exciting.

All in all, I’m happy with my new phone. Long live Android.

If anyone else out there with a G1 has anything to add, please leave a comment.

PS. The other day I realized why I wanted this phone so badly instead of the comparable iPhone: everyone has the iPhone and I hate being a follower. Even though buying a phone like this (pretty much an iPhone) makes me a follower in itself, the G1 allowed me to buy into the trend without feeling like I did.