T-Mobile G1: 11 Things I Hate About You

I’ve had my G1 for a week now. (You can see me walking through the setup here

Whilst I was quick to document the little things I liked about the G1, finding the stupidly annoying things has taken a bit longer.

Here we go.

1. Build quality. It’s a bit plastic. Don’t get me wrong, the actual internal hardware appears to work — but it’s very, very much like a plasticy sidekick. This does render it a bit of a cheap looker compared to the likes of a Blackberry Bold or a Sony Ericsson Xperia.

2. The Pop-Out Screen. I don’t like the way that when the screen pops out, it’s ever so slightly lopsided. It flocks me right off at times.

3. The battery is rubbish if you actually use the device as it’s intended. It’s near-iPhone 3G levels of uselessness. I suspect this because it is a ‘connected device’ – i.e. I am continually connected to Google Talk for example. All the connected goodness does inevitably take a toll on the battery. This won’t last your average mobile user a full business day. You’ll be hitting ‘red’ on the indicator by about 4pm if you give it any decent level of use. I am thinking of buying another battery. Not sure where you can get these yet.

4. The marketplace sucks. T-Mobile or Google (I don’t know who’s in ultimate control of it) need to sort it out. I want a lot more choice. Perhaps it’s because it’s only using ‘free’ apps. I’m also wondering if we’ve been given the shit version here in the UK. Whoever’s in control, take note: You’re doing a rubbish, rubbish job. Case in point: I can’t see any fooking decent feedback because half the application comments are filled with folk having racist arguments about Barak Obama. Total bullshit. Fix it.

5. Here in the UK, there’s no Amazon MP3 shop. For whatever stupid bureaucratic reason. Again. FIX it, someone.

6. A USB headset is a bit annoying because it has a habit of coming out or becoming loose.

7. The touchscreen doesn’t match the Apple iPhone. This is HTC we’re talking about, they’re normally pretty good at these things having had bloody years to get touchscreens working with goodness knows how many Windows Mobile devices. Or maybe it’s an Android OS screw up? Try dragging your finger as you would on the iPhone and the handset won’t respond. You need to be heavier and a lot more deliberate with the touching. Arse.

8. Zooming is a bit crap. Pinching as you do the iPhone… that’s the way ahead. Zooming on pictures and maps is limited to pressing a plus or a minus button. Not that ‘intuitive’. I know it’s Apple IPR … well it’s not that graceful.

9. You can only add one Google Talk account. Class-A bollocks. I’ve got three that I use and I expected to be able to have them all ‘online’ at once. Rooobaaaaash.

10. Google Mail isn’t calibrated for folk with a lot of mail. Whilst it does sync beautifully, if you get a lot of mail, you’re going to have trouble viewing it swiftly. You typically get about 5 emails on a screen, depending on how you use the screen (landscape/portrait). This necessitates a lot of scrolling all the time. I’d like to see the option to display one email per line. Perhaps that option exists. I couldn’t find it.

11. Contacts. The black sheep of Gmail is contact management. The syncing does work nicely. Add a contact in Gmail and woosh, it’ll be accessible on the device momentarily — but expect all sorts of annoyances trying to get your Outlook to synch over-the-air. I eventually imported everything into Plaxo and used the Google Mail Contact Sync function for the Apple (ONLY works when using the iPhone to sync) to sync these contacts with Gmail’s contacts. PHEW. Now it’s working.

Have you got any more additions?