T-Mobile G1 and Carphone Warehouse Iphone tariffs

As promised i don’t plan to offer a full review of  the G1, just a few things that I picked up about it myself. (For some more general comments this YouTube video from PhoneDog  is not bad, while a more detailed review from the Guardian is quite interesting). First off, there can be no denying that the G1 is ugly whether in black or white. It’s worth mentioning here that I was told the white is exclusive to T-Mobile UK, while the Android software is exclusive to T-Mobile until sometime in January. Having said that I fund the Android software very impressive. Movement around the menus was very fluid and overall it was just a good user experience. One slight draw back was that there is only single touch movement on the touch screen, so no swanky zooming in and out by pinching like the iPhone.

 

Here are the things that I found interesting about the G1, and we will begin with drawbacks. Firstly, I was told that applications from the Android Market can only be saved to the phone memory, they cannot be moved onto the memory card. This is quite an issue which can only be resolved by ‘jailbreaking‘ the handset, which will almost certainly break a warranty as networks aren’t happy to have this happen to their handsets. An interesting article shows that Google are already working on a fix to prevent jailbreaking.

 

Another slight problem which many people complain about is that the G1 comes with very little on it to begin with, so these applications must be downloaded on the Marketplace. Some examples of those things which must be downloaded are zoom for the camera, video software for the camera, bluetooth applications. So potentially unless you figure out the Market very quickly then you are left with a very basic handset.

 

The G1 has a microsd slot, but it doesn’t like having a memory card any bigger than 8gb in as it will slow down rather drastically after that. There is a perfectly adequate music player on the phone, but it must be admitted it is no iTunes. There is the usual issue of only being able to access Hotmail through the internet rather than having email on Hotmail coming straight to the phone. I believe this is the case with any phone that doesn’t have Windows software (and possibly Blackberry reached an agreement with Hotmail). Well that’s about everything I had to mention on the G1.

 

Now for a quick bit of news on the iPhone.  I went with into Cardiff to with a friend who was after an upgrade on O2, but through the Carphone Warehouse. He was un-surprisingly worried about 500 texts not being enough, despite my assurances that you cut down on texting on the iPhone. Anyway, the sales assistant said he might be able to offer more texts. He went to check with someone else and came back telling us that they could do chargeable text message bolt-ons, which seems surprising given their advertised tariffs. He even said that given it was an upgrade and my friend was a reasonably high user they could offer unlimited texts for an extra £7.50 per month. This seems very odd, and I have never heard of adding text bolt-ons onto an iPhone tariff but worth asking about.

 

Final thing was that they tried to push The Geek Squad insurance onto my friend. All in all, rather expensive insurance, I think it was £11. More importantly from my point of view is that on the insurance they claim the insurance does things that the warranty does. Your phone will be replaced the third time it is sent away for repair, well yes it certainly should be by the manufacturer, not the insurance. There were a few other catches as well, not a very good deal.