More Hands On With Android and T-Mobile’s G1

After a hectic morning running around trying to just get our hands-on with a G1 device, we finally had a chance to sit down one-on-one with it for a long time to really get a feel for what it is going to bring to the consumer. Since we’ve already gone over the build quality, keyboard, and design in our first look, we wanted to focus on the user-interface and applications this time around. Here’s a quick summation, and a few small videos, of gaming on the device, browsing the Amazon mp3 store, and Web surfing. Gaming There weren’t any games pre-installed on the G1 test device we were using, so we booted up the application store and quickly found the Games menu. On the first page, we saw a few games were available and settled on Pac-Man. It was free, so we clicked download, and carried on. We liked how the application downloaded in the background, and that when it was finished, there was a small notification pop-up that said Pac-Man had been installed. We weren’t sure where to find it, but sure enough, it was right there on our application home screen. Pac-Man on the G1 was just as fun as the original arcade game. We were able to use either finger strokes or the track ball to tell Pac-Man where to go. As with the iPhone, consumers will love the ability to quickly find and install applications directly from their device’s homescreen.

Amazon Mp3 Store We weren’t able to download an Mp3 because there wasn’t a Wi-Fi hotspot available where we were having our hands-on. However, we did appreciate the easy menu for searching, or finding popular artists, directly from the homescreen. The music menu was about as good as the iPhone music store, but there’s the added pleasure of knowing that every track is DRM free. It is also much faster and easier to navigate than other menus from the likes of the Sprint Music store and Verizon Wireless’ VCast Music store.

Web Surfing We already showed you a small snapshot of the Web surfing capabilities earlier, and overall, we weren’t incredibly impressed. There isn’t support for Flash yet (Nokia still seems to be ahead of that game with its S60 v.3 devices that support updated versions of Flash light). It’s easy enough to navigate around a Web site, and you can quickly zoom in or out. It’s not as much fun as the iPhone, though, since the G1 doesn’t support multi-touch. We love that you can have multiple windows or tabs open using an option inside the Web menu. You can quickly switch between them by hitting the menu button at any time during your browsing experience. Unfortunately, we couldn’t enter any text while the phone was in vertical mode. If you want to quickly enter in a username or password, or navigate to a new site, you’ll need to switch the phone into landscape mode and use the keyboard. A simple onscreen keyboard would have made this more efficient.