By DAVID POGUE
Published: October 16, 2008
The Google phone is real, and it’s finally here. Stand clear of popping corks.
Actually, to be completely accurate, there isn’t anything called “the Google phone.” You can’t buy “the Google phone,” any more than you can buy “the Windows PC.” Google makes the software (called Android), and it’s up to the phone manufacturers to build cellphones around it.
What has its debut on Oct. 22, therefore, is a Google phone, the very first one: the T-Mobile G1 ($180 with two-year contract). Others will follow in the coming months.
The G1 is quite obviously intended to be an iPhone killer. Assessing its success, however, is tricky, because it’s the sum of three parts. Google wrote the software, HTC made the phone and T-Mobile provides the network. What you really need is separate reviews of each.
The software. The Android software looks, feels and works a lot like the iPhone’s. Not as consistent or as attractive, but smartly designed and, for version 1.0, surprisingly complete. In any case, it’s polished enough to give Windows Mobile an inferiority complex the size of Australia; let’s hope Microsoft has a good therapist.
The Home button opens a miniature computer desktop, with a background photo of your choice. A sliding on-screen “drawer” contains the icons of all of your programs; you can drag your favorites onto the desktop for easier access, or even into little folders. You can park playlists, single-purpose “widgets,” Web pages or address-book “cards” there, too, just as on a real computer (which this is).
The Home screen scrolls sideways to reveal more desktop area. You’ll need it once you start downloading programs from the online Android Market.
Like the iPhone store, this market is a gigantic development, rich with possibilities; as programmers everywhere create new programs, mostly free, this “phone” will turn into something vastly more flexible — and patch many of its feature holes.
Better yet, Google insists that its store will be completely open. Unlike Apple, it will not reject software submissions if they don’t serve the mother ship’s commercial interests. For example, Apple rejects programs that would let you make phone calls over the Internet, thereby avoiding using up cellular airtime. Google and T-Mobile swear they would permit such a thing.
One crucial improvement over the iPhone: a Menu button. It summons a panel of big buttons for functions related to what you’re doing. It’s the equivalent of right-clicking a computer mouse.
This panel offers commands like Hold, Mute and Speaker when you’re on a call; Archive and Delete when you’re working with e-mail; or Rotate and Share when you’ve taken a photo. If you can just remember to tap that Menu button, you’ll rarely flounder trying to find your way around.
Android comes with built-in programs like Contacts, Calendar, Calculator, Music, Google Maps, a YouTube module and chat and text-messaging programs. The Web browser uses the entire, glorious, 3.2-inch screen (480 by 320 pixels); unfortunately, it offers no Flash video. Worse, you have to do a lot of zooming in and out, and the onscreen + and - buttons are much fussier to use than pinching on the iPhone’s multitouch screen.
There are a bunch of minor glitches. For example, you have to deal with two different e-mail programs: one for Gmail accounts, one for other accounts. The Gmail program can view Microsoft Office attachments; the other one can’t. And when you’re using the non-Gmail mail program, hitting Reply puts the cursor in the To box (which is already filled in), rather than the body of the message.
You can’t get from one message to the next without returning to the Inbox list in between. There’s no Visual Voicemail (voice mail messages appear in a written list) or Microsoft Exchange compatibility, either.
Where Android really falls down is in the iPod department. There’s no companion program like iTunes to sync your photos, music and videos to the phone; you’re expected to drag these items to the phone manually after connecting via USB cable to your Mac or PC. More time-consuming fussiness.
Nor is there an online store for music, TV and movies. T-Mobile has worked out a deal with Amazon’s music store, which is a start, although you can download songs only when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot. Out of the box, Android can’t play videos at all, although a video-playing program is available from the Android Market.
Some of the goodies in Android will reward the iPhone holdouts: voice dialing, picture messaging, built-in audio recording and the ability to turn any song into a ring tone are all included — no charge.
Those who are Google haters won’t want an Android phone. A Gmail account is required and your calendar and address book don’t sync with anything but Google’s online calendar and address book services.
Skip to next paragraph The phone. The G1 has Wi-Fi, GPS (but no turn-by-turn directions) and a mediocre camera (for stills — no video recording). The dedicated Send, End and Back buttons, and the tiny trackball for scrolling, make the G1 more flexible than the iPhone, but also more complicated.
The big news is the physical keyboard. As on a Sidekick phone, the screen pops open with a spring-loaded click to reveal a tiny thumb keyboard underneath, much to the relief of people who can’t abide on-screen keyboards.
It’s not pure joy, though. The keys don’t click down much. Worse, you have to keep turning the phone 90 degrees from its customary vertical orientation every time you need to enter text. That gets old fast.
There’s also a removable battery. Good thing, too — when all the G1’s guns are blazing (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and so on), the juice is gone in about 3.5 hours of continuous use.
Unfortunately, the keyboard and the removable battery make the phone a lot thicker, heavier and homelier than the iPhone. Nobody looks at G1 and says, “Ooooh, I gotta have that.”
And it’s bizarre that, even though the phone contains a tilt sensor like the iPhone’s, it’s not hooked up to the screen. Turning the phone 90 degrees to get a wider look at a photo or Web page doesn’t rotate the image. You have to do that manually, using a menu or by popping open the keyboard, which makes no sense.
Finally, there’s no headphone jack. (Hello?!) If you want to use headphones, you have to buy and carry a special adapter that connects to the USB jack.
The G1 has very little built-in storage for photos, music and programs. Instead, it requires a MicroSD card (it comes with a 1-gigabyte card). To match the storage of the base-model $200 iPhone, you need an 8-gig card (about $30); to equal the storage of the 16-gig iPhone, well, you’re out of luck.
The network. G1 plans start as low as $55 a month for unlimited Internet use and 300 minutes of calling.
But T-Mobile also has one of the weakest networks. You iPhoners complain about AT&T’s high-speed 3G Internet network? T-Mobile’s fledgling 3G network covers only 19 metropolitan areas so far, compared with AT&T’s 320. And outside of those areas, Web surfing on the G1 is excruciatingly slow — we’re talking minutes a page.
(Then again, the Android mantra — “open”— may yet be the G1’s savior. After 90 days, you can request a T-Mobile unlock code that lets you use it on any GSM network, like AT&T’s or the ones in Europe.)
So there’s your G1 report card: software, A-. Phone, B-. Network, C.
But get psyched. Although the ungainly T-Mobile G1 is the first Android phone, it won’t be the last; Android phones will soon come in all shapes and sizes, and on all kinds of networks.
With so many cooks, it’s unlikely that any of them will achieve the beauty, simplicity and design purity of the iPhone. And it’s certain that none of them will inspire the universe of accessories — car adapters, cases, speaker systems and so on — that makes the iPhone fun to own.
Even so, Android itself is very successful. Clearly, there’s a sizable audience for phones that have the touchy, easy-to-navigate fun of an iPhone, without such an extreme philosophy of feature minimalism. If that’s you, then you should welcome the Android era with open eyes and ears.
E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com
