So after a few weeks of owning the T-Mobile G1 with Android by Google (god, brand it concisely people) I can confidently say that it's unpolished, unfinished, and running on substandard hardware with a terrible battery.

I was really excited about the G1 at first. As you can see from my first review, I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of the system, playing with the third party apps, and generally having a glorious time. However, at that point it was still a toy. Now it's a tool, and it's driving me up a wall. Let's start with basic functionality. It's a smart phone, so it should be able to handle basic dumbphone functionality. I expect phone calls, text messages, contacts, calendar, alarms, etc. Android handles all this alright, but not great.

Contacts are managed on your gmail account as well as the phone itself. However, the phone is way too slow to manage contacts properly. The phone also has an interesting UI "feature": it queues clicks. So when you click on someone's name to edit them, sometimes nothing happens for 4-5 seconds. During that time, you start to doubt you actually clicked, since you're using a touch screen and not a real button, so you click again...and again. Finally the contact loads, but wait! You clicked twice more in the interim, let's process those clicks too! Oh you didn't mean to call your boss? Too bad, since you pressed "hangup" while I was loading the phone call, I'll just take you to the home screen, putting the phone call itself in a background process so now you've called your boss for no reason at dinner time.

Phone calls also take forever to connect sometimes. 4-5 seconds seems to be the norm, even when calling from the dial pad. Speaking of the dial pad, it has a 2 second lockout while you're talking and required you to double-tap the screen to unlock it, so most conversations involving phone trees sound like this: "Press 1 for english." "shit. what the. [bump] [bump] [tone]." I'm sorry, we did not understand, press 1 for english." "locked again!? [bump] [bump]" "I'm sorry..." This is especially frustrating when you're trying to set up your voicemail for the first time. Mine ends with 4 seconds of the sound of me furiously hammering the phone's screen.

The UI faults don't end there. Everywhere you look there's small decisions that should have been made differently. When you get call waiting while on a call, the screen changes to say "Press menu to see your options." When you press Menu, that message is replaced by a button that says "take other call." Why not just SHOW ME THE BUTTON right away? Why make me press two things when I could press one? The calendar and alarm alerts actually work right. The calendar is built into the OS so it doesn't suffer the random deaths of third party apps. Calendar alerts and alarms go off on time, and are easy to navigate and dismiss.

Gmail is almost as well designed. You get email alerts promptly (usually faster than the gmail web page, though not as fast as the google talk client), and they appear in the taskbar across the top of the device. However, when you click on "new Email from Daniel" you're not taken to the email itself, you're taken to the inbox. I could go on and on with the little failings.

One final complaint, the bluetooth. On my old $40 LG phone, pressing the button on my bluetooth headset activated the voice dial feature. On the g1, it does nothing. On my old $40 LG phone, voicemails, system alerts, and other SOUNDS would play on the bluetooth. On the g1, not so much. It means I can't use my bluetooth for hands-free calling, because I have to pick up the phone, turn on the screen, unlock the screen, go into my contacts, wait 30 seconds, click a contact, wait 5 seconds, click "call," then put down the phone. Bluetooth is useless without the ability to do hands-free, and google dropped the ball yet again on a non-trivial interface item.

Long story short, the device is far under powered for the OS they're trying to run on it, and the OS itself suffers from lack of cohesion and polish. Especially in a world where the iPhone is the model for the ultimate smart phone, you can't limp on with half-baked features and confusing interface designs. It's clear they didn't do use case analysis, focus groups, or even try to use the phone themselves. As much as I hate to say it, the Android team could benefit from a guy like Steve Jobs standing in the dev area calling them all morons until they get it right.

Right now, I can't recommend the phone for anyone as their primary/only phone. I recharge the battery once or twice a day, I have difficulties making and receiving phone calls, and it's frustrating to use in general. Third party apps help close the gaps, but since the OS auto-kills apps when it needs more memory you can't rely on them. The OS lacks a low battery alarm (something SOMEONE should have noticed in the 2 years since android was announced) so I have a third party app that runs all the time and will play a sound when the battery gets too low. The last 3 times my phone died, the app had been killed by the OS right around the time the battery got low, so I didn't get the alert. Unforgivable. Maybe if you're more forgiving of faulty technology than I am, you can buy the phone. If you insist on your devices working properly at all times, wait for Donut/Eclair and faster hardware.