A little back story first: I wanted the "google" phone for a little while, waiting until generation 2 (post-G1). I nearly jumped on the droid but then got the rumors of this coming straight from google. I kinda figured that Verizon would find a way to limit the phone and screw the whole thing up, so I waited. So glad I did. You can read technical reviews all over, so I'll skip that here. I will say that the phone is slick, hardware is nice, and that if the screen was any sharper I'd use it to shave. Also, my last phone was a RAZR, so this a pretty big upgrade for me.
Pro-tip #1: As I noted previously, I got mine unlocked. I had always thought that phone companies subsidized phones in order to lock you in to a two-year plan, guaranteeing their income stream. Apparently, I was wrong. They just spread the cost of the phone (and then some) over the two years. Lesson to all- check the prices on the service packages and do the math before signing up.
The good stuff:
- So far coverage has been good, or as good as it had been before. Wireless network was super easy to set up, and my phone automatically hops on the two networks I have setup with no troubles at all. Voice quality is also good.
- Syncing to my gmail, contacts, and calendar was as easy as entering my login information. I was able to import the phone numbers off of my SIM card and they were loaded to my contacts. I did have to go in and merge these; I also had to set all the numbers from my SIM to be marked as "mobile" instead of "other". I am not sure if they were wrong on the SIM or if this is a bug of some sort. In any case, it was pretty easy. I at least now have a good seed of an address book (which I had started when doing Christmas cards).
- Setup was a breeze. The animated backgrounds are cool. Good preloaded applications. The "Google Goggles" (free in market) is slick. Speech-to-text on all text boxes is pretty good. Not perfect, but good.
- The LED trackball is actually really useful for navigating links on web pages, moving the cursor in a text field, and for being notified.
- Youtube videos are fantastic.
- The keyboard (software) is quite good.
- I had to look up how to put music on, but once I did it was easy.
- Usage is pretty intuitive.
- Headphones, charger, and micro-USB cable included. Good to see standardization on cables so I can get some more cheap. (Compare this to my iPod.)
- Purchasing through the marker uses your Google checkout (which you needed to set up to buy the phone). It worked easily and I was playing Tetris in no time.
The cons:
- No Google reader or Google tasks apps. I am using a bookmark for the first (the mobile site is good) and an app called gTasks (free) for the second. I got the tasks app when I went to reference my shopping list in the lower level of Ikea and had no signal.
- Haven't seen an app for gChat either, though I haven't looked that hard yet.
- Not sure how voice mail works- I haven't gotten any yet.
- For some reason I have a hard time getting the keyboard to come up in the messaging app. Using the trackball helps here.
- The clock shows the weather when the alarm goes off. This is a con only because it was 9°F this morning. This did not help me get out of bed.
- I am glad spare cables are cheap as I am going to be getting a few and leaving them at work, in the car, etc. Going to need to plug in every night I would say. I probably can't fully judge average power-consumption based on the first day of constant use, but this thing is going to use it's charge, that's for sure.
Summary:
Overall, I am loving this thing. Having twitter (using seesmic) and Reader there while waiting for something and having a minute or two is great. Having Wikipedia and the rest of the internet right there as well is super great. I am really looking forward to this week's episode of This Week In Google to see what the power-users (mostly Gina Trapani) think. I'm definitely in the honeymoon stage right now, and I have some learning to do to move beyond the basics, but I am looking forward to it. I am very happy so far.
If anyone has any question or you want to get together and check this thing out, let me know.
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