OK I promise this will be the last post about this stupid phone for a while. After a little less than a week with the new G1 phone I’m pretty pleased with it. 3G service just rolled out in my area today, and I’m enjoying the speeds. Here are a few downsides I can see so far, though these have already been stated by like every blog on the internets:
- The ‘chin’ thing makes typing a little wonky.
- No headphone jack
- Battery life is pretty bad. I have to charge it every day, which is par for the course on a smartphone but I still don’t like it.
- Not a whole lot of software for it yet.
These are all minor quibbles though, and the whole package comes out as a net positive in my opinion. There are a few software things that I would like to see though, that could be either tacked onto the Android system itself or made by third party devs:
- SSH client – This one was solved by the very capable and slick ConnectBot which I installed yesterday. I will use it lots, no doubt.
- To-do list application – There are a couple in the Market now, and I guess I will try some out. But what I would really love is for to-do items to be able to be included in Google Calendar, and have that sync with iCal. But these are pipe dreams.
- Tethering App – It would be nice to be able to share the phone internet connection out to my laptop in an emergency.
- VNC viewer – I dunno, would be a neat trick?
- Better syncing with Apple’s Address Book, iCal etc. The current options are a bit hackish.
- A flash player plugin for the browser
- Google Docs interface – Any text editor would be nice, but something that syncs with Google Docs should be a no-brainer.
- PDF reader
Umm that’s all I can think of now. So get on that!
