T-Mobile G1 Cell Phone Review - Hardware

A physical keyboard is a must for some, and the G1's put up very good text entry scores, though using it one-handed is a bit difficult. The trackball is a great navigation tool, but we're concerned about its durability, and the touchscreen is responsive and bright enough for most conditions. It's disappointing that the G1 comes with so little internal storage, though the included 1GB microSD card is helpful. Regrettably, the G1 lacks a standard headphone jack, making it impossible to use your own standard headphones with it out of the box.

Text Words Per Minute (9.51)
To see how quickly it's possible to enter text on a device, we time how long it takes to enter a set of standard text and calculate words per minute from the resulting time. On the G1, this text yielded 47.56 words per minute, a result bested only by the iPhone 3G at 61.50 words per minute among our comparison phones. If this surprises you, know that the G1's physical keyboard requires deliberate presses to register contact on its nearly-flat buttons, where the iPhone 3G requires only a brief touch on its sensitive touchscreen to register input. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

T9 and Auto Complete (0.0)
The G1 does not have T9 predictive text entry or auto complete to supplement text entry via its QWERTY keyboard. The G1 does have an auto-replace feature that can be turned on the main Settings menu - this function automatically corrects commonly misspelled words, but does not speed up actual text entry in any way, earning the G1 no points in this area.

The G1's text entry settings

One-Handed Typing (7.05)
To see how easy it is to enter text with one hand, we time how long it takes to enter the same standard text as used in the Text Words per Minute text, and calculate words per minute from the resulting time. The results of this test are often more drastically different for QWERTY keyboard devices than non-QWERTY ones since a full keyboard has greater distances between keys for a single hand to travel, requiring more time to enter text. This was definitely the case with the G1 - it took more time to enter text with one hand, culminating in a lower words-per-minute result of 35.24. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Keypad Backlighting (4.0)
The G1's keypad backlight is quite subtle and is really only visible in dark rooms on our black test phone. It illuminates the keyboard evenly with a bluish-white light. The timer for the backlight is not related to the screen's backlight timer, which can be set in the main Settings menu, but it will quickly come back on with the briefest movement of the trackball or a button press.

D-Pad/Joystick (8.0)
The G1 does not have a joystick or D-pad, but it does have a small trackball that acts like a mouse to move between fields and in any direction. It does not present a cursor on the screen like a mouse attached to a computer, but fields and items are outlined in orange when they can be selected by the trackball. It works quite well, but it is bit touchy, often scrolling faster than you expect it to and taking little input to effect a move. The trackball also acts as a select button when pressed, and this function works in all orientation modes and keyboard positions. When pressed, it offers good tactile feedback to let you know that you pressed it hard enough to register input.

Our only concern with the trackball is its durability. As with a mechanical computer mouse, debris and other gunk could easily get trapped underneath the ball, hindering its functionality.

Touch Screen (6.0)
The G1's touchscreen is smooth and responsive, and quite similar to the one found on the iPhone 3G. It's a capacitive screen, meaning that it will only sense contact with a conductive material, so only your fingers will work and a stylus won't. We found it to be responsive, though it lacks the multi-touch capability that the iPhone 3G has, and will therefore only sense a single contact at a time. The only on-screen text input that can be done is through a virtual dial pad in the phone application - all other input must be done through the keyboard.

The G1's user interface can be navigated almost completely by touch, except for text entry. This omission is a bit frustrating when using the phone in portrait mode - you must turn the phone sideways and slide it open to reveal the keyboard when you come to an area where you must enter text, which can get annoying when you're just trying to do something quickly or need to do it frequently.

Jog Dial (0.0)
The G1 does not have a jog dial.

Soft Buttons (0.0)
The G1 does not have physical soft buttons. On-screen buttons can be selected with the touch-screen or by using the trackball.

Volume Control (6.5)
The G1 has a volume up and down rocker button on the left side. It is raised and is easily differentiated from the side of the phone by feel, though the plus and minus signs engraved on them are not large or significant enough to tell apart by touch, though it's easy enough to figure it out based on the phone's orientation. The rocker button has a surprising amount of travel and good tactile feedback so that you can easily tell when you've pressed it fully. The only time they're not easy to press is when the keyboard is exposed since you have limited leverage for your other fingers on the other side of the phone to press hard enough on the rocker.

Power and Standby (4.0)
The G1's End key doubles as the power and stand-by button. As previously noted, this is a small button that is completely flush with the front of the phone. It's doubtful that it would be pressed accidentally in sufficient duration to turn the phone on or off accidentally. When the G1 is off, pressing it briefly will turn it on. When the G1 is on, pressing it briefly will put it in stand-by mode, and pressing it for a few seconds will start the shutdown process.

We want to note that turning off the G1 using the power button prompts two extra steps. The Android engineers must be very cautious folk, indeed. The first prompt requires you to choose to power down or go to silent mode. The second prompt warns you again that the G1 is shutting down and you must choose to continue or cancel. Since pressing and holding the power button for a few seconds is usually an intentional act, it's not clear why 2 additional prompt levels are needed to turn the phone off. One is fine and fairly common in smartphones, since losing unsaved data could be a concern for many users and the power button might have been pressed accidentally, but a second is unnecessary and thoroughly annoying.

   
The G1's two power down prompts

Other Buttons (3.0)
The G1 has 3 buttons between the Send and End keys: Back, Home, and Menu. The Home and Back keys are the same size as the Send and End keys, and feel exactly the same in terms of travel and feedback. The menu button is slightly above the other buttons and is rectangular in shape. None of these buttons can be re-programmed for other functions.

You should know that the location of the trackball between all of these buttons can make it easy to accidentally scroll it when moving your finger back and forth between the Send or Home keys and the Back and End keys.

Primary Screen Gross Resolution (9.0)
The G1's screen resolution is 320 x 480, putting it on par with the iPhone 3G, though since the G1 has a slightly smaller screen, its pixels are closer together. As a result, images will be slightly crisper with richer colors on the G1 compared to the iPhone 3G where the same number of pixels are spread out over are larger screen.

Primary Screen Pixels per Inch (9.20)
Pixels per inch is a measure of how close together pixels are spaced on a screen, and it's a function of the screen's resolution and its physical size. As mentioned in the Screen Gross Resolution section above, the G1's comparatively smaller screen yet same number of pixels as the iPhone 3G give it a higher pixel density, as can be seen in the chart below. As a result, the G1 earns a higher score in this area, putting it behind only the fantastic screen of the HTC Touch Diamond.

Screen Physical Size (7.76)
Phone manufacturer's claims of a device's screen size almost always over-state the actual viewable area of a screen, and this is true of the G1 as well. We measured the G1's actual viewable screen area to be 3.105 inches on the diagonal, a bit under the claimed 3.2 inches. We award a score based on this actual viewable screen area - the larger, the better.

Screen Brightness (13.15)
To measure a screen's brightness, we set it to the highest possible level and navigate to a blank white test web page, then measure the light output with a lux meter in a darkroom. The G1 does not have an ambient light sensor to adjust the screen's brightness automatically based on lighting conditions, so it was easier to measure this compared to other phones we've seen with ambient light sensors. The G1 put out 163 lumens in this scenario, placing it second only to the blindingly bright screen of the iPhone 3G at 207 lumens among our comparison phones.

The G1's screen brightness setting is set through a slider bar, allowing it to adjusted in very fine increments easily. Here, the screen's time-out setting can be changed from the default 1 minute to preset increments starting at 30 seconds all the way to never.

Screen Bright Light Performance (8.0)
To see how a device's screen performs in bright light, we set the screen to its highest brightness level, shine a light on it producing light equivalent to bright sunlight, and evaluate how easy it is to see the screen and use the device. Glare on a glossy screen is always a problem in bright light, but it was still relatively easy to use the G1 in this lighting setting, with only the menus and applications with a white or near-white background and small icon labels in white text causing trouble.

Color Depth (8.0)
The G1 can display 260,000 colors, well beyond the HTC Touch Diamond's 65,000 colors, but still far behind the Nokia E71's 16 million colors. We don't have a color depth figure for the iPhone 3G since Apple has not published this information.

Secondary Screen (0.0)
The G1 does not have a secondary screen.

Power & Data Ports (8.0)
Just like the HTC Touch Diamond, the G1 has a single multi-purpose port through which it charges, connects to a computer via USB, and plays music through headphones. The port accepts mini-USB cables, though its odd shape also accommodates proprietary accessories made by HTC. Fewer ports on a device can make for a more sturdy device with fewer entry points for dirt and moisture, so we have no complaints in this respect. Where we do have an issue is what this means for headphones, which is covered in the next section.

Headphone Compatibility (0.0)
The G1 does not have a standard headphone jack, relying only on its single port on the bottom of the phone through which it also charges and connects to a computer via USB. At release, the G1 does not include any adapter so that standard 3.5 mm headphones can be used with it, though we have heard that such an adapter will be included in the future. This lack of compatibility out of the box is disappointing, since most headphones included with portable devices offer poor audio quality, and many users often have their own pair of headphones they'd prefer to use. Additionally, replacement headphones are more widely available in the standard 3.5-mm size. The G1, with its current lack of an adapter in the box, is dissatisfying here and the G1 earns no points in this area.

Internal Storage (2.0)
The G1 comes with a paltry 256 of internal flash memory, of which 71MB was available to us on the G1 immediately out of the box with no 3rd-party applications loaded. While we appreciate the 1GB microSD card that comes with the G1, more internal memory is becoming standard on smartphones these days, and it's disappointing when a smartphone requires users to buy more memory separately.

With the Android Marketplace's offerings growing daily, it's important to note that 3rd-party applications can only be run from internal storage. So, if you plan to load up on 3rd-party apps, you may use up all of the internal memory available to you sooner than you expect. An update to Android could change this limitation in the future, but for now, some restraint when it comes to 3rd-party apps is probably in order so you don't run out of memory.

Expansion Slot & Format (8.0)
The G1 has a microSD card slot that will accept cards with capacities up to 8GB. Given the measly amount of internal storage in the G1, a microSD card slot is thoroughly welcome, and we appreciate as well that it's a standard card format and not a proprietary one.

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