T-Mobile G1 First Impressions

I've been patiently waiting for the Android-powered phone for quite a while now and last night my G1 arrived a whole 12 days earlier than expected. I was like a little school girl with her very own pony. I've now given myself a little over 24 hours to actually use the phone, talk on it, play games on it, etc., and wanted to provide some early feedback for anyone considering the phone.

Setup

Using my old SIM from my previous phone, the G1 came with a weakly charged battery, enough to get me up and running. I was instantly prompted with a Google login screen (or you can create an account if you don't already have one). Once past there, you're in and ready to use the phone. The next thing I had to do was get my contacts setup. Since the G1 uses your gmail contact list, and I've been using contacts stored on my SIM, I had a lot of work to do. This process was painful because although the G1 provides an "import from SIM" feature, you have to add contacts one at a time. This sucked. Somebody will probably tell me there is a bulk-add feature and that will be funny.

The next step once I got all my contacts from my old phone into my gmail contact list was to merge records together. This was another painful task because I had previous contacts in my gmail contact list with email only and no phone, and now I had many duplicates except they only had a phone number. So I had to merge them one by one, always having to delete the duplicate contact before saving the primary because gmail won't let you have two contacts with the same email address. Luckily, this can all be done on a computer since the G1 auto-syncs your contacts.

So that entire process took me about an hour, but it is actually something I've needed to do for a long, long time. Many people more organized than myself probably already have well-maintained contact lists, in which case this setup process will be a breeze.

That was about all I did last night, once finished I plugged it in since by then it was ready for a full charge.

Daily Usage

Before I left the house in the morning I had enabled the wifi feature and had all the auto-syncing (gmail, calendar, contacts) running. It was about 9am when I unplugged the phone from the charger. I'd say by about 11:30 my battery life was at 40% which was pathetic. So I plugged it into my computer with the handy USB cable provided and let it charge while I worked and played with the phone. As an aside, when plugged in via USB, the phone is treated as a standard USB mass storage device to your computer. What, you can just drag and drop music, videos, pictures or whatever onto your phone? Yup. Awesome.

So the battery thing turns out to be a big deal. Guess that's a good thing because it means (cross my fingers) that there will be an update to Android and/or the G1 to conserve battery life. In the meantime, I picked up a few good tricks for preserving battery life:

1. Turn off the auto-sync of your contacts (I have found this to be the single biggest consumer of battery life)
2. Don't leave the GPS on
3. Reduce screen brightness to 30% or so. It's still plenty bright at this level.
4. Set the screen timeout to 30 seconds or leave it at the default 1 minute but be diligent about locking the screen when you're done with it.
5. Don't leave the wifi on, although I'm not convinced this is a big offender, still need to do more testing.

So why is the auto-sync of the contact list so bad? Well, because it is CONSTANTLY polling gmail for an updated contact list. It's fucking ridiculous how often it checks. You can go to the auto-sync settings page and with contact sync enabled, you can watch the damn thing sync (which takes anywhere from 5-20 seconds), wait for not more than 1 second, then sync again. And again. And again. Ummm, hello, can I have a sync frequency for the love of god? If you're not going to utilize data push technology, you've got to let me adjust the frequency.

Anyway, once I turned off the auto-sync contacts, my battery life improved dramatically. It has been unplugged for more than 8 hours and I still have 50% battery life left, and that's with wifi turned on. My contacts don't really change very often, and if they do I can just hop over to the sync settings page and force a sync, no problem.

Everything else is pretty normal, phone works good, audio quality is good, dialing on the screen is easy. The web browser is great (WebKit-based) though a bit tricky to use at first when trying to click tiny little links on a page, but now that I can zoom quicker and also found out I can use the scrollball to navigate my click focus, I'm becoming better at using it.

I also setup a separate email account (IMAP+SMTP) so I can check my work email from time to time, though I chose not to have it auto-check this account. I've read some complaints about non-gmail email not working reliably, but so far I've had no issues.

My only other minor gripe is the touch screen doesn't seem to register my finger press from time to time. Maybe it's my fat fingers or maybe it's a dirty screen, or maybe I'm just not good at using a touch screen (this is my first), but I will say that I've noticed less and less "dead clicks" as I use this phone more. It's one of those things that frustrates the hell out of you for the first hour or so, then after a few days you say to yourself "this is a piece of cake, what was I whining about?".

I could go on and on about general usage of the phone, but by now we've all played with an iPhone right? Yeah, it's like that. I want to talk about the Android Market.

Android Market

This is the shit. I will be honest, I barely got my phone running and I was in the market downloading all sorts of stuff. You've got apps you might have heard about like Shazam (music identifier) or iPhone similar apps like Tunes Remote among loads of others. There's also about 5 (and growing) different "flashlight" apps. So silly. What's really cool about the app marketplace is not so much the apps themselves, but the fact that ANYBODY can put an app in there without needing to approve it. Plus, with a setting on the G1, you can run unsigned apps on your phone which basically (at least as I understand it) means you don't have to go through the official Android Market to install an application. This is very cool.

What really makes this all possible is the Android platform is open-source and their development SDK is available for download right now. Sure, it requires you to write code in Java, which for me personally, is not a pleasurable experience, but I went from downloading the SDK to running Hello World in no time at all. I'm really excited about this.

I don't really know what more to say, I've only had the phone 1 day so these are some really early impressions, but I am very impressed. Despite the battery thing, which I think I've taken care of with the contacts syncing bullshit, I am very pleased with my new toy.

What are you waiting for? Go get yourself one now. Hey, they're cheaper than an iPhone (with a 2-year contract) and instead of being with a notoriously bad customer service company you will be with one of the highest rated customer service companies (in the world of cell providers). That doesn't suck. No I'm not marketing for tmobile, I was just scarred by att/cingular after being with them for 6 years. That's why I'm talking about the G1 right now instead of the iPhone a year and a half ago.

Update: It's been about 3 days now since I got the phone and there is no doubt that the contacts list auto-sync feature is what was draining the battery quickly. I leave wifi on all the time and I still have half (or a little less) battery left after the end of the day. The contacts list will force sync itself with gmail when you edit anything in the phone, so as long as you manually force a sync if you change things from within gmail (away from your G1) then you can disable the contact list auto-sync and have no side effects.

Written in Informational / October 30th, 2008 / 4 Comments

Online Driver Safety Courses, You Have Failed Me

I have a story that is still being played out. It's interesting, funny and pathetic. And it's about taking an online driver safety course. These are courses/classes you take when you receive some type of moving violation in your vehicle and you don't want the violation to go on your permanent record. You also might take a course like this to reduce your insurance premium.

When I moved to Texas nearly 3 years ago, Geico told me that if I took this defensive driving course I would receive a 20% reduction in my premium. 6 hours behind a computer taking an online course? No problem. They even had a recommended vendor for the course, so the process of notifying Geico that I completed the course would be automatic since the two were "linked up". Even better.

So in November 2005 I paid my money and signed up for a driver safety course.

And then I did nothing for a long time. You see, I'm a pretty lazy person when it comes to this types of things. Those things that "get in the way" of life.

A silly amount of time goes by, and then in March of 2008 I received a speeding ticket. Cited for 5 MPH over the limit. First moving violation in 14 years of driving. I start looking into the classes offered to keep the violation off your driving record, so my insurance rates don't go up, and I quickly figure out that the course I already paid for 2 years ago will apply to this ticket. Awesome I think, kill two birds with one stone.

Well, I pay my $110 to the City of Austin to allow me a 3 month period to complete the course, if I lapse in taking the course then I have to pay the difference on the ticket ($41) and then I supposedly get a point on my record and my insurance company will of course find out about it and my insurance rates will undoubtedly increase. My June 5th deadline comes a little quicker than I anticipated, so on June 6th (the 5th was a Sunday) I go to the downtown police headquarters, visit a walk-in judge who allows me a 3-week extension on my deadline. I needed that 3 weeks because to prove my completion of the program I needed a certificate, which can take up to 2 weeks to receive, they say.

This is where it gets interesting.

That night, as soon as I get home I sit myself down and start taking the course. At about midnight, 4 hours into this 6 hour course, their website crashes. It crashes hard. Not responding to pings or anything. I think they let their domain name registration slip, but who knows for sure. Luckily the next day I found out that you can stop the course at any time (they don't tell you this) and you can resume pretty much right where you left off. So the next night I finish the course and all is well. Until I get to the page that says "your certificate will be mailed to XXX" and realize that they have my old address (remember, I signed up over 2 years ago). So I call to straighten that out before the certificate is shipped (it was after hours any way), but the person I talk to has no record of me in their system. They tried everything.

Hang up, check the phone numbers and make sure this website is legit. Seems to be, so I call back and get a different person, this one still not finding my info in their system. They were, however, able to use my login credentials (I reluctantly provided them) and verify that I did indeed complete their course and that my certificate would be mailed soon. So this helpful person makes special note of my account (or lack thereof), takes down my new address and assures me that the certificate will be mailed out to the proper address.

In case you're wondering, yes I had the USPS forward all my mail to my new address, but that was over a year ago and they've long since stopped forwarded mail from the old address. So I knew that if the mail went out to my old address, it would be rejected and returned to sender. My situation did not afford me the extra time to facilitate all these round trips with my certificate.

A few days after this experience I left on an 8-day vacation, returning expecting to have a certificate at my house. It wasn't there. By this point I was getting close to the end of my 3-week extension and quite antsy about getting this damn certificate. That Monday I called the American Safety Council to ask about my certificate and found out that they had indeed mailed my certificate to the old address and they received the cert back, rejected. What was really interesting about this call was that they were able to find my records no problem (it was during business hours), something I initially attributed to a previous lack of records, so somebody created them for me. I assumed they pulled my records down from their WWW DB (it clearly existed since I could log in to the website). This turned out not to be the case.

At this point I started getting real pissed off, and insisted they send my certificate out immediately, using 1-day express at no charge to me. They keep insisting they cannot do it, so I ask to speak with a supervisor, I go on hold, she comes back and says they'll ship it 2-day express at no charge. OK, good. Now it was time to call the City of Austin Police and find out when my deadline was. As luck would have it, my deadline was June 25th, two days away and an evening when the APD was open until 10pm. Perfect. Life just works out sometimes, right? Well yes, but not quite yet.

When Wednesday evening rolls around and I'm sitting at home with no certificate I decide it's time to call my friends at American Safety Council again. Hmmm, they can't find my records. It's after hours once again and they assure me there's no "Justin Perkins" of Austin, TX in their system. So it appears they have a daytime customer service system and a nighttime one, which aren't necessarily using the same database. That's lovely. Since these after hours folks have proved their incompetence once already, I decide it's best that I hang up and call during the day. That's today, Thursday. One day after my deadline.

I call my friends again today and of course during business hours they have my records. They tell me that they didn't ship my certificate out (the one that they 2-day expressed to me at no charge because they plead guilty to incompetence with the previous certificate mailing process) because they didn't have my driver license number and couldn't send the certificate without it. Yes I was livid by this point, shocked and amazed that incompetence levels could be lowered further and further, far below my expectations.

My certificate will now be here on Monday, which is 5 days after my deadline. So tomorrow morning I'm heading back into APD to see a walk-in judge again and let them know what's going on, pleading for a meager 3-day extension. I hope they agree. After all this, it would be such a shame to have done all this work for naught.

If you do business with American Safety Council, don't expect much. If you take an online course vs. an in-classroom one, don't expect it to be more convenient. If you speed, you will face a punishment of some variety or the other.

Written in Informational / June 26th, 2008 / 1 Comment