MacMost Now 153: Google G1 Android Phone

Gary Rosenzweig talks to Jay Shaffer (http://jayshaffervideo.com) about the new Google G1 Android Phone. The phone has iPhone-like features and works best with Google's Web-based services like Gmail.

Video Transcript: GARY: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today let's take a look at the new Google G1 Android Phone. So with me today is Jay Shaffer, whose- has a Google G1 Android Phone. 
JAY: Yeah.
GARY: Let's take a look at it.
JAY: So, y'know, one of the things that came with it is this neat neoprene uh, sock you can put it into to protect it. Heh, you don't get that with an iPhone.
GARY: Well, you take what you can get.
JAY: Okay.
GARY: So here it is, it looks pretty cool. It- the flip-out keyboard, show us the, uh, keyboard everybody's talking about.
JAY: Yeah. Well, the cool thing is that it's got a 'QWERTY' keyboard and, uh, you can do thumb-typing on it, or set it down on the thing and actually use your finger.
GARY: Right.
JAY: Uh... Has some function keys, and the other cool thing that a lot of people don't realize is that you kind of - on your right hand, you can use this track-ball on, on the, on your thumb.
GARY: So it's got a track-ball and the touch-screen.
JAY: Yeah. So that's a, kind of a really cool feature. And so when you're actually in this kind of a landscape mode, is that being able to thumb-type and then just being able to select things with this track-ball, you know, it's only a two dimensional track-ball, but it does do select if you push down.
GARY: Excellent. Okay. So. So, now, this is the Google phone. 
JAY: Right.
GARY: So... It works with Google applications.
JAY: Yeah, that's basically the whole idea is to keep it on the cloud.
GARY: Okay.
JAY: Is.. Is... You could almost call it the Cloud Phone.
GARY: Cloud Phone. I like that.
JAY: Heh, they, they like cloudiness. Alright, so it's that basically all your contacts are your Google contacts, your GMail is free, uh, your Google Chat is free, but SMS is not. So-
GARY: Right. So you've got GMail, you've got Google Calendar, you've got GChat, uh, you've got your contacts in GMail. And these are all free services that a lot of people have been using for a long time.
JAY: Right. And then it's got its own web browser, which of course you can use the Google applications on, for example, if you wanted to use Google Docs or Google Spreadsheets, you can actually use that.
GARY: Ah, okay.
JAY: And one of the cool features is that this has is cut and paste, actually.
GARY: Heh, Wow! what an innovation. So it's pretty comparable to the iPhone in a lot of the hardware features.
JAY: Right.
GARY: But it really differs in how the software implementation works.
JAY: Yeah.
GARY: And with, uh, the iPhone, you're going to use all the Mac applications or Exchange and Outlook if you were on Windows. With the 'gPhone', you're going to actually use all the Google applications.
JAY: Right.
GARY: So a big of advantage the Android operating system of course is the ability for third-party developers to create their own applications.
JAY: Right. So they call that the 'Market' instead of the 'Store' and so you can go to the Market at any time. Whoops, let's see, I went, I actually went to the Map there... And, uh, I've got kinda big fingers. And so we can look at Applications, it has games, of course, the big one, of course, is being Namco's Pac-Man, that was their their their biggest score.
GARY: Pac-Man, yeah, they feature that. Another great innovation. Cutting edge, 1982.
JAY: Right? And then, and then they have a bunch of uh, all this stuff for Twitter, social networking, you can get weather, uh... Stuff like that. And so the applications, uh, the whole market place, is kind of growing. It's, uh, it's not bad.
GARY: Any Mac-specific applications?
JAY: One of mine've got here is called TunesRemote, which allows you if you have music sharing set up on your iTunes, is that then you can use this as a remote control to play the music from your computer from across the room, or something like that.
GARY: So, with this phone, of course you can't really sync with mail or contacts on your Mac. The idea is if you use those programs, you would sync with Google's applications, and there are a lot of ways to do that that're already pretty well established. And then you would use GMail. Now, can you use like POP email on the phone?
JAY: Uh, one of the things is you get basically one POP account with the phone. So there is an email application that you could either make as an IMAP or a POP account. And of course the way that the T-Mobile account works is that they count those messages the same way that they would count an SMS message or as a chat message. So you get, ah, 400 messages, uh, with for, uh, as part of the basic plan.
GARY: Basic plan. But you can do an unlimited plan, too.
JAY: Yeah, you can do an unlimited plan for $10 more.
GARY: But it doesn't sound like it's very strong if you- if you're actually using POP email, you'd want to use GMail with this.
JAY: Right. What I did is I basically took my POP account and I forwarded it over to my GMail account. And so, but with the GMail tags, I basically know this is all of my POP account's coming into my GMail account and it sorts them really nicely with the tags and that sort of thing.
GARY: Now if you do plug that into your Mac, via your USB, do you get anything?
JAY: Uh, yeah, well, you, there's actually this see uses a compact SD card, a micro SD card, so you can go up to, uh, 8 gigs on it, and I don't know why you can't go to 16 gigs, I've just read that you can only go up to 8 gigs, and so it just sees it as a USB drive. And so that you manipulate all of your music, your ringtones, that sort of thing, ah, just as if it was a USB drive. One of the cool things is, that for ringtones, for example, is I took the MacMost ringtones, the MP3 ringtones.
GARY: Okay. Our free ringtones. Yeah.
JAY: Our free ringtones. And I went and I put those into a directory called ringtones in my music folder in here, and they're all available on the phone.
GARY: So you took the MP3 versions of them.
JAY: Right.
GARY: Not the M4R versions, we have both, and put 'em on there. Great.

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 153: Google G1 Android Phone”

Wesley

15 years ago

Hi Guys,

You're supposedly (I say supposedly because I haven't tested with an actual g1 yet, i've just talked to tmo's customer service about it) wrong about pop/imap email on the g1; it does not count against the 400-message limit. It is billed as data and is part of the 'unlimited' data with either of t-mobile's plans. I can see how you got confused because the 24.99 plan on their web site calls "email" part of the 400-message limit. It's very misleading. What they REALLY mean is that people emailing your phone via traditional email-to-sms will be charged as if a text message; REAL email, be it gmail, imap, or pop, is unlimited.

hadleyreichert

14 years ago

I have a G1 and its amazing I even had the choice for a my touch and personaly I believe the G1 is still one of the best androids

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MacMost Now 153: Google G1 Android Phone

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 153: Google G1 Android Phone”

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