For reference, I will be responding to this post.
The above post was written by JGoods after we had a discussion about all of the new phones coming up in the next weeks/months. As you can take away from his post, JGoods is a Blackberry fan. And so am (was?) I.
Up until this past Saturday, I was an owner of a Blackberry 7130e. So, right off the bat, you know that pretty much anything would be an upgrade:
I owned that phone for 2 full years…and had nothing but love for it. It worked great, and served my purposes well, but let’s face it…a BB 7130 is a fossil at this point. So when my contract with Sprint expired earlier this month, I wanted to get something that was gonna be completely new and different.
One of the main things that I was SURE I wanted was an actual keyboard. I have owned an iPod Touch for about a year at this point, and I hate typing on it. I can’t stand misspellings or grammatical errors (call me a nerd, but I fucking can’t STAND them), so I knew that to not get frustrated 20 times a day, I had to get something with a keyboard. This narrowed things down considerably.
I could have stuck with the more traditional (obviously significantly updated, but traditional in terms of the Blackberry “style”) Blackberry Bold (coming out beginning of Nov.):
The fancy new HTC device, the Touch Pro (also coming out beginning of Nov.):
Or get with the wave of the future, open source hackfest that is the G1:
And ultimately…I had to go with the G1. And honestly, one of the first reasons why is the price. A new T-Mobile customer that signs a 2 year contract gets the G1 at $180. The Bold and Touch Pro both start at $300. I have no doubt that the Android OS for the G1 will make it on to much fancier and cooler phones in the somewhat near future, but I am okay with that…because I paid so (comparatively) little for the G1.
Second, I was paying $40 for voice, $40 for unlimited data, and $5 for 300 texts on Sprint. On T-Mobile, I’m paying $40 for voice, and $25 for unlimited data + 400 texts. I am saving money on my monthly plan AND getting significantly more for it. I love that.
Third, I love Google. Everything they do is fucking awesome and I don’t care if I get called a fanboy for saying that. They put out good products and don’t give up on them until they are exactly right. I have no doubt that Android will be the same.
So the full keyboard + the above 3 reasons are essentially WHY I went with the G1 over anything else. Now I’ll tell you my first impressions of the phone after playing around with it a couple days.
I am still a complete rookie with this thing. I’ve probably gotten to about 1/4 of what this is capable of (and that’s completely separate of any outside apps).
Programs like Shazam and Compare Everywhere are fucking amazing to me. Shazam is a program that will listen to a song that’s playing on the radio, on the TV, etc. using the phone’s sound recorder and then tell you what that song is. It’s fucking incredible and the fact that such technology even exists blows my mind. Compare Everywhere uses the G1’s camera as a barcode scanner, and when you put a product up to it that has a barcode, it’ll tell you how much that thing costs at any stores in your area as well as online. I’m never buying ANYTHING again with a barcode that I haven’t first scanned myself. It’s fucking awesome.
Other programs: Gmote can basically control everything on your computer using your G1. Ringdroid takes songs you’ve loaded on your G1’s memory card, which is just done by plugging the G1 into your computer as a portable drive, (or any other sounds you’ve got on your phone) and can cut them into 30 second ringtones. And the coolest thing about all of this is that everything so far is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of programs. I can’t wait to see what is available in the coming weeks.
Having a full keyboard is awesome, even though I am still getting used to having one letter a button. I think that won’t be too difficult to shake though…
Things are easy to get to, easy to find, and easy to use.
Anywho, I could keep going, but I think you get the point. I’m not gonna call this an iPhone-killer or anything so played out as that. I will say that I think the Android OS has infinitely more potential than what Apple is doing with the iPhone currently. As for now, I’m loving the G1 and I am very excited to see what else is in store for it.
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