T-Mobile G1 smartphone

Google’s Android phone system has been keenly awaited for some time now, and it has made its first appearance in the UK in the shape of the T-Mobile G1, manufactured by HTC.

It’s a similar size to the iPhone, though somewhat thicker, with a large screen and a panel below sporting five buttons and a small trackball. This is angled slightly forwards – though whether it makes any difference to sound quality is debatable.

The keys are for dial, home, back and end, plus menu – which you’ll be using a lot. The rest of the interface is managed through the touchscreen, though it doesn’t support multi-touch gestures.

The battery is charged through a mini USB port on the bottom, covered by a plastic flap. Startup time was lengthy – and at around a minute you’ll prefer to keep the G1 charged and running, if you can.

Setup was simple: enter your Google account details and your address book will be synced automatically. You can even use the Gmail application to check your messages.

That was about the first thing we did, and also the first inkling we had that rather than being a great phone this is more like a work in progress. As with many applications on the phone, pressing the physical menu button displays a row or two of icons at the bottom of the screen for common tasks. One of these will be a ‘more’ option, popping up a longer on-screen menu through which you can scroll with your fingers, then highlight a message. You can also go straight to this menu by holding down your finger on a message until it pops up – pretty standard fare, so far.

What’s annoying is that – as many Gmail users will know – you have to spend a lot of time marking messages as junk. So, why not put that option on the short menu, so you press the physical key and then tap the Junk button? Instead, it’s the last option on the pop-up menu, so scrolling is inevitable. It’s the sort of simple UI mistake that becomes irritating very quickly.

Other email accounts are supported, though some users report problems with mailboxes updating. Our complaint is somewhat different: mobile access to every Imap folder on the server is great, but if they’re in a hierarchy, they should be shown in a hierarchy, complete with collapsible folders rather than as a very long list to scroll through – 150 items in our case.

The G1 has no on-screen keyboard, aside from the numeric pad for dialling numbers. For texts and emails, you have to open the screen. It moves slightly towards the top, then to the right, leaving you to turn the device and use the thumb keypad in landscape mode. It’s a reasonable keypad, and you can get up a decent speed typing, but it’s not always convenient, so we’d like to have seen the option of an on-screen keypad.

There’s a rear-facing camera, though no front one for video calls, and a dedicated shutter button on the side. It’s none too quick to start up, and you’ll need pretty good light to avoid grainy photos. We’ve seen much better, including on Nokia’s N series handsets. After snapping, an on-screen menu gives you the option to send by email, among other things. But while you get a blank email with the photo attached, you can’t simply scroll through the address book – you’ve got to open up the keyboard and type instead.

There are, of course, good points: the interface is easily customisable, and you can have different sections of the home screen, scrolling from one to another, perhaps to differentiate work from play.

Installing apps via the online store is easy, as is web browsing, and using the built-in GPS, which found our location extremely quickly. And given the Linux base of the system, many of the quirks and niggles may well be addressed by ports of better applications.

But considering that Google’s phone platform has been treated in some quarters with the near-messianic zeal usually reserved for Apple products, we expected better – better battery life, a more responsive touchscreen and far fewer loose ends with regards to user interface. To be fair, this is the first phone with the Android operating system, so glitches aren’t completely unexpected. It’ll probably be very good when it’s finished.