Structure, speed, menu system video

T-Mobile G1 is a touchscreen handset, it’s hard to categorize it as a smartphone or a PDA – let’s just say that it’s simply Android. Where should I begin… maybe with the video of the menu, this might make it easier to have a full view of things.

Android has a kind of standby screen that can be scrolled left or right. It’s very spectacular because the background moves as well, and it might also be practical because we can organize our icons on the three interfaces. Yes, we can put icons over here, or a clock and a Google search bar, but this list will surely expand with the external applications – by the way, we can’t put stuff just anywhere, like in the case of TouchWIZ, the area is split in to sections, so there’s no risk of overlaps. The taskbar is on top, this has the status icons and also displays missed events – it’s awesome how the whole thing can be pulled down like a shutter, this is how we can see event details. The menu is on the bottom, we have to push the grey button up in order to make it visible.

Android is very easy to use. The thing is that it has a bit of everything, it doesn’t have such a simplified structure like iPhone, but it’s far from being as complicated as Windows Mobile or Symbian. We will be using three buttons: Menu lets us access the submenus and local menus of menu items or programs; the Home button takes us back to the standby screen, while the Arrow takes us one step back in the menu. It’s practically the same thing as on iPhone, but here these two functions are accessed with hardware keys, not by tapping the screen.

The system is quite mixed in terms of eye-candy. The icons of the main menu are quite plain, but there are all kinds of fade effects and animations, which pretty much spice up the overall image. Part of the popup windows make the background blurry, but it also happens in some cases that a window appears and then disappears by itself – for example when setting the alarm, there is a window, displayed for only a couple of seconds, that tells us how many hours there are left to sleep. When opening the keyboard the screen is rotated 90 degrees, there is no animation in this case, but the process is very fast, just like the whole system. Many have told about the handset that “this is as good as iPhone”. I’ve asked these people what are they talking about exactly, and the answer has always been the same: “Speed, of course!”. Still, the hardware is nothing extreme: a 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A CPU, 192 MB RAM and 256 MB ROM, of which we have about 60 MB free for storing data.

PIM functions are just okay at first sight, but a more precise diagnosis could only be told after a couple of weeks of use. The alarm works even when the phone is turned off, the calendar has month, week and day views, it’s transparent and fast. There is a calculator that doesn’t only have basic features, we have some more advanced functions like sine or cosine as well. There are, however, some serious lacks as well: there is no voice recorder, stopwatch, countdown timer and there isn’t even a file browser. Of course we will surely have dozens of free apps to choose from, but they could have installed some default set of programs. I won’t detail software expandability for reasons I’ve already mentioned in the introduction, but I can say that the beta version of Android Market is already accessible from the menu, while under Settings we can see all installed programs. I have to note one of the greatest features: one day I have been connected to a WiFi network, and the system told me that there is a new software update (ROM update) available and asked me if I want to install it. Of course I’ve answered yes, it took about 3-4 minutes for the software to download, it has been installed in about the same amount of time and everything went on fine, all of my programs and settings have remained unaltered, just the OS has been updated. Wow. I think this should have been working this way on all handsets for years…

A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!