I’ve had my T-Mobile G1 for close to 4 months now, and I have to say that the device works fairly well. Considering that this is a first gen Android device, it has performed fairly well. At first I thought that the lack of a virtual keyboard was a step backward, but it really wasn’t. An actual keyboard just seems to make sense to me, especially if you write a lot of e-mails through out the day. Using a virtual keyboard is good for sending SMS messages, tweets or short e-mails, but the thought of using it to write medium to long e-mails might be bothersome to me. This doesn’t mean that the G1 keyboard is perfect, the keys are a bit to small, and a little to flat. It’s nearly flush with the backplane, and can cause you to mistype easily. But I think its much better than a virtual keyboard. One other annoyance is the “chin” part of the phone. Well, not really annoyance, it’s just that if you’re listening to music via the miniUSB port, the connector gets in the way and it makes it very uncomfortable to type.

The Android Market has some decent apps in there. The ones that I have are:

• The Weather Channel
• twidroid
• Last.fm – Personal
• ShopSavvy
• Save MMS
• AK Notepad
• Shazam
• Linda File Manager
• MySpace Mobile
• Visa Mobile
• Scrobble Droid
• WifiScan
• Speedtest
• Video Player
• WikiMobile Encyclopedia

All these IMHO are great apps, however, being a Windows Mobile convert I would think that a File Manager and Video Player would be something that came already with the Android OS. But I remember reading a month or 2 back that this was by design because Google wanted the open source community to write them.

Navigation through the phone is pretty easy, you use a combination of the hardware buttons and touch to move around, which is pretty intuitive, given that the buttons are intuitively labeled with a back arrow and “home” key to bring you back to the home screen.

A couple of gripes and wishes:

• More memory. It would definitely help, I defintely notice a slow down when the phone get close to 1000 SMS messages.
• MiniUSB port relocated to the top of the phone or to the bottom of the keypad. Or get rid of this port and add a 3.5mm audiojack so we can get our choice of headphones.
• did i mention more memory?

Well those are my thoughts. Feel free to comment here on on twitter:

http://twitter.com/robnapiza