G1 × 2

Anna with her two G1 phones
Originally uploaded by viralbus

Complexli got new mobile phones for all its directors today.

After looking at the various options, we decided to go for the G1 (also known as the gPhone or Google Phone) because it’s got a nice keyboard, a decent camera, 3G and a nice interface for Gmail, which we both use.

We thought the Blackberries had slightly too narrow keyboards, and there didn’t seem to be a model with both 3G and a 3 megapixel camera.

The iPhone is quite nice, but the lack of a keyboard would be an issue for emailing, we thought, and the plan is that we should be able to answer any emails while away from the office.

Marcel wanted us to go for the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, but the keyboard looked a bit flimsy in the shop.

Now we’ve spent some hours playing around with them, and I really like it. There are a few shortcomings, though:

• For some reason Phyllis’ phone has upgraded itself to version 1.5 during the day, while mine is still running 1.0. That’s annoying, because 1.5 has many more features, such as video capture. It’d be nice I could somehow force mine to update, too.
• The Bluetooth support is incomplete, so my old phone can’t connect to the G1 to upload its address book.
• The battery life is bad, but I gather that’s a problem with most current smartphones. This also means that lots of features, such as Wifi, Bluetooth and GPS, are disabled by default to save power.
• There’s no flash, and the camera doesn’t seem to be well protected, so it’s likely to scratch.

But all in all it’s a nice device, and Anna and Léon really love watching YouTube videos on it – the quality is just so good.