Gadgetory

hi I'm Bonita senior editor for cnet.com and today we have your first look at the t-mobile g1 as most of you know the g1 is the first smartphone to run the Google operating system and will be available from t-mobile starting October 22nd so I didn't personally review this phone Bonni cha did and I definitely bugged her about it and until she let me hold it I really wanted to see how the design was you know we knew what the design details were but holding it in your hands and kind of playing with it and taking a look at that stupid chin that juts out I don't know it was part of the fun bonding activity everybody kind of crowded around how it's really ugly I remember the Open Handset Alliance when they made that announcement in 2007 I think so you know it was right well the iPhone is coming out I was there at the original launch of the event in New York it was out on the east side and this event space the most notable thing obviously Larry Page Sergey Brin coming in halfway through the presentation on rollerblades rollerblading up saying that they had actually rolled blended across town to get to the event the thought my mind was how is this gonna stack up to the iPhone was this gonna Jub with the idea of the modern smartphone that happened presented just two years earlier and at some point I remember we all crowded into a conference room and somebody said what if it's not a phone at all what if it's Google's software that lives on a phone and that wound up being exactly what it was so here's our phone here's our homepage I'm gonna pop this open because this is really the money right here the thing that I really liked about it at the time was it wasn't an iPhone it wasn't the thing that everybody else had was a little you know contrarian with my views if you say that I remember the g1 being a little clunky and bulky which is funny when looking at it now it looks absolutely tiny at that time physical keyboards you know they were still pretty common you know we haven't gone to this virtual only world Apple came out with the iPhone only virtual keyboard I know a lot of people that it just couldn't get into that for a long time and I tried typing on an iPhone a bunch of times that screen keyboard really messed me up so I loved this larger physical keyboard with buttons actual numbers you know a spacebar the whole nine well I really loved buttons at the time so this was a big deal for me there is a physical camera shutter button and on a phone this size and on something like with this sturdy hefty design it's actually pretty stable one of things I really liked about the operating system was it was actually pretty easy to use I mean all the apps are right there just like an iPhone but you could slide down this notification thing from the top and get things for pop-ups for like your Wi-Fi and when you had incoming email stuff like that at the time that was pretty revolutionary it all sides GPS what was the first to have turn by turn navigation which was fantastic since most the GPS systems back vineya to pay for and this is free I would have used search I would have used maps Slacker Radio definitely the Opera Mini browser because the browser just had a lot of you know extra features and I reviewed a lot of browsers so I reviewed the Dolphin Browser too that's on here Android was really important because it offered choice it offered a choice of handsets so you know you could go all these different types of handsets where the keyboards what they didn't whether they're big whether they small it's because of Android you've got smartphone makers you know making $100 of smart phones not necessarily thousand dollars smartphone so really this Android brought the mobile experience the full mobile experience to the masses