In addition, you can pan and move Web pages and other documents by holding and then moving your finger around the screen. Unlike the iPhone, however, the G1's touch screen isn't multitouch, so you can't zoom in and out of pages by pinching your fingers apart. Admittedly, we really missed this feature, since it makes viewing Web pages and pictures easy, but it's not necessary.
Overall, the T-Mobile G1's interface is clean, fun, and easy to use. You have the freedom to customize the Home screen with your favorite apps, and you can do this in a couple of ways. For example, you can do a long press on the Home page, which will bring up a menu where you can add shortcuts, widgets, or change the wallpaper.
Alternatively, there's a little tab along the bottom edge of the screen that you can touch and then pull up, which will reveal a full menu of applications. From there, you do a long press on an icon and then drag it to the Home screen. To remove it, perform the same touch action and then drag it to the trash can.
Note that this action simply removes it from the screen and doesn't delete the application from your device. There are also sliding panels to the left and right where you can add more shortcuts, and there's a notification bar at the top, which you can pull down like a window shade and view missed calls, new messages, downloads, and more.
There's a lot to like about the G1 interface, with its glass touch-screen display, the slide-out QWERTY keyboard although we don't like the small keys , and the Pearl-like trackball for navigation. We would even say that the responsiveness of the touch screen is on a par with that on the iPhone's. But we have to say its overall interface just isn't as intuitive.
For example, as with most every other phone, the need to dip into the menu layout every time we wanted to access something can get a bit clunky. Yes, it's possible to drag out your favorite applications as shortcuts, but that means you need to spend quite a bit of time setting that up. With the iPhone, there is no home screen at all; you're brought directly to the menu.
We realize that the iPhone is a very unique phone in this sense, but in a strict comparison between the G1 and the iPhone, the iPhone's interface wins out. Also, though we like the aforementioned trackball and menu bar, it just isn't quite as smooth as the multitouch gestures on the iPhone, especially for zooming in and out of pictures.
This is even more apparent in the browser application, which we'll explore later. Similar to the touch screen, the Menu button is contextual to what application you're in at the time. For example, if you're in the Web browser and press Menu, you will get options to open a new window, go to a URL, bookmark a page, and so on.
Because of this, we ended up having to unlock the screen frequently, which got annoying. The left spine holds a volume rocker and a microSD expansion slot. To access the latter, you have to push the screen open in order to remove the protective cover. We actually preferred this method, since the dedicated camera key was a bit small.
Plus, when holding the phone horizontally, our thumb had a tendency to keep nudging the screen upward while trying to take a picture. On the bottom of the unit, there is a mini USB port, which is protected by an attached cover. This is where you can connect the power charger and sadly, this is also your only option for connecting a headset. There's no dedicated headphone jack, 3. We've asked HTC about this decision, but again, have yet to hear back from them as of press time.
Yes, there's a headset included in the box, but you don't get the same comfort and quality as you would with a nice pair of headphones. If you want the privilege of using your own 'phones, you'll have to spend extra money to buy an adapter. Last but not least, the camera lens sans flash or self-portrait mirror is located on the back, and the G1 offers a user-replaceable battery. For more add-ons, please check our cell phone accessories, ringtones, and help page.
Well, it delivers a lot of the basic core functions and of course, tight integration with Google's products, including Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Calendar. Wireless options and multimedia capabilities are also well represented on the G1, but there are also some glaring omissions and restrictions that need to be called out.
The T-Mobile G1 is a quad-band world phone and offers a speakerphone, voice dialing, conference calling, and speed dial. There is not support for visual voice mail; that's not a service T-Mobile offers anyway. The address book is limited only by the available memory, while the SIM card can hold an additional contacts.
One nice convenience is if you have a Gmail account; all your contacts will automatically be synchronized to the phone book. Each entry has room for multiple phone numbers, e-mail addresses, IM handles, postal address, and more. For caller ID purposes, you can assign a photo to a contact as well as a group ID and one of 33 polyphonic ringtones. There's even a setting to send a contact's phone call directly to voice mail every time -- good if you really don't like someone, we suppose.
The G1 supports T-Mobile's MyFaves service, giving you unlimited calls to five contacts, regardless of carrier. Bluetooth is onboard, but the supported profiles are limited to wireless headsets and hands-free kits.
However, as with the iPhone 3G, there's no love for stereo Bluetooth or tethering, so you can't use it as a modem for your laptop. The latter is a lesser issue for us, but if we can't get a 3. As of this writing, T-Mobile has rolled out 3G to 20 markets. The carrier plans to expand coverage to a total of 27 markets by the end of And as we know, T-Mobile has now backed off its initial 1GB data usage cap, after numerous complaints. As we noted in our iPhone 3G review, the 3G experience is all relative and depends on a number of factors, such as the number of people on the network at a given time, the type of Web pages you're trying to load, and so forth.
Before buying and investing in a 3G handset, it's always a good idea to ask any friends and family with T-Mobile service and a 3G-capable phone about their experiences to get a better idea of what to expect.
Also, make sure you have adequate T-Mobile 3G coverage in your area. T-Mobile won't be selling the G1 in stores in areas outside of its 3G coverage.
In those places you'll have to buy it online. The 3G speeds were good during our preliminary testing. As we did with the iPhone 3G, we checked out graphic-intensive sites like WorldofWarcraft. Downloading applications from Android Market was also swift, with each application taking no more than 10 seconds. Meanwhile, YouTube clips over the 3G network took some time. We'll continue to test in our labs and will update the review as we get results.
In fact, the smartphone's YouTube application will only present videos in high resolution when you're using Wi-Fi and play the low-res version when using the cellular network, in order to optimize the load times. There is an application in the Android Market called iSkoot for Skype, which allows you to make Skype calls via the phone's radio rather than Wi-Fi, but we imagine there will be VoIP clients added to the database.
There's also a wireless manager under the Settings menu where you can turn on and off all the radios and set up connections. To save battery life, you can turn off 3G and revert to the EDGE network--a good idea if you don't need to surf the Web or download apps or music. The T-Mobile G1 uses Webkit as the basis for its browser, which is also the core of the Safari browser found on the iPhone.
You can pan across the screen by using your finger, and even though you can't zoom in via pinching as you can on the iPhone, you can bring up onscreen zoom controls at the bottom of the display. Similar to the iPhone, you can also double-tap on a Web page to zoom in on a particular section. Of course, you're not limited to the touch screen when navigating the browser; in fact, we preferred to use the trackball to scroll around pages at times. You can also tab between multiple browser windows, and we like the fact that the browser settings are easily accessible via the browser menu itself.
With the iPhone, you have to dig into the Settings menu to find the Safari settings. As with the iPhone, you can view the browser in both portrait and landscape modes. But there are a few hiccups with the G1 browser that keep it from being a totally seamless experience. For example, we didn't like that we had to go in and out of the browser menu to do basic browser navigation such as Back and Forward. Yes, there are keyboard shortcuts for these functions, but we don't want to have to remember shortcuts all the time.
And even though we like having the physical QWERTY keyboard, we wish there was some kind of onscreen keyboard so we can enter text when holding the phone in portrait mode. And though this is more of the fault of the hardware than the browser itself, we found the G1's smaller display makes browsing a bit more troublesome since you need to scroll around a lot more. While the interface for the browser leaves a bit to be desired, we like that it has quite a number of customizable settings.
They include text size, the ability to block pop-up windows, the option of turning off image loading, the option of auto-fitting the pages to the screen, the capability to enable or disable JavaScript, the option of not accepting cookies, and of course, the option to clear out the cache, history, cookies, and passwords.
Perhaps the most intriguing browser option is that you can enable "Gears," which are potential future applications that can extend the browser functionality. What this means is that Google might develop a way for you to take some of your Web stuff offline--imagine being able to edit your Google Docs without a signal, for example, and then sync it back online when you do have a signal.
This isn't available yet, but we think it has quite a lot of potential. Perhaps in a move to compete against the built-in App Store on the iPhone, Google has also come up with a mobile application store of its own, called Android Market. It's laid out a bit differently than the iPhone's App Store. For example, instead of having a page to themselves, the Featured applications are lined up at the top of the Android Market front page. Underneath that are shortcuts to the full list of applications, games, a search function, and a page of your downloaded applications called My Downloads.
However, there doesn't seem to be a place where you can download updated versions of your applications as on the iPhone, but perhaps that might not be necessary. When you go into the Applications list, you will find them arranged in categories, like Productivity, Lifestyle, and so forth. There's also a category called Demos, which will presumably feature demo versions of paid software, which is certainly lacking in the iPhone App Store.
At the time of this review, all the applications in the Android Market are free anyway, so the issue is moot for now. But hopefully the Demos category will be put to use when for-pay applications appear in the future, since it would be nice to try before you buy. Each category then lists the applications by popularity and by the date they were released.
We like this a lot, especially since the applications in the iPhone App Store can't be listed by date. Another nice feature of the Android Market is that each application has a list of warnings stating whether or not it'll have access to the Internet, the phone's GPS functionality, or your personal data. We downloaded a few applications from the App Store. Since the App Store isn't tied to a program like iTunes, you don't need to enter in any log-in or password information to download the applications.
This is a huge plus in our opinion. After downloading them, the applications will appear in the menu as well as the My Downloads folder. Since the Android Market is so new, it's hard to compare the applications available with the ones on the iPhone.
However, we think it shows a ton of promise. Already there are applications like ShopSavvy that lets you scan bar codes for comparison shopping, and BreadCrumz, which allows you to create routes for your friends using photos as visual aids.
We'll update this section as the Android Market develops. The G1 offers support for several e-mail account types. There's full HTML support, so you'll be able to view photos and graphics along with the text.
You'll have access to all of your folders and any action that you perform on the smartphone, such as deleting an e-mail, will be reflected in your real account. To the delight of many, we're sure, you get copy-and-paste capabilities, and there's an attachment viewer to open Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF documents, but note, you can't edit said files the iPhone is also view-only.
We successfully set up our review unit with both our Gmail and Yahoo accounts simply by entering our log-in ID and password. Our Gmail contacts seamlessly transferred to the G1, and mobile e-mail delivery was sometimes faster than on our PC, but attachments took a while to download.
Sadly, there will be no Microsoft Exchange Server support at launch, so no synchronization with your Outlook e-mail, Calendar, Contacts, and so forth. We think this is a pretty glaring omission.
We assume all parties involved would want to attract both consumers and business users, and given the inclusion of a full QWERTY keyboard, the G1 would make a good messaging-centric device for the mobile professionals.
However, without that Exchange support, it could be a turnoff for a lot of those customers. You can keep IM chats in the background while working in other applications. The smartphone also offers threaded text messaging and yes, multimedia messaging. You get Calendar, Contacts, a calculator, and an alarm clock.
The advantage of the T-Mobile G1 is that Contacts, Calendar, and Gmail are updated over the air, so you don't have to synch up with your computer every day.
Her Research Unit is involved with clinical research, epidemiology and operational research, and is a treatment site for HIV infected adults and children. Her research interests include HIV vaccine research, microbicide research and other biomedical and behavioural interventions, and she is an investigator in testing two HIV vaccine regimens in late stage clinical development.
He has been an author on over manuscripts in the field of infectious diseases and has an extensive track record in infectious diseases research and practice covering clinical, laboratory and epidemiological aspects. He is an HIV and TB immunologist focused on studying the immune response to these pathogens in affected tissues, and how this relates to what can be observed from the blood. The research goal is to improve understanding of the immunopathology of TB and HIV, using this information to aid in developing novel therapeutic approaches and diagnostic biomarkers.
His research has centered on understanding the mechanisms by which the human immune system recognises the Mycobacterium tuberculosis M. His work has a strong translational component, asking if both classically and non-classically restricted T cells are associated with infection with M.
The translational significance of this research is centred on informing the development of novel vaccines and diagnostics for childhood TB. Her current research focuses on HIV broadly neutralising antibodies and their interplay with the evolving virus. Recent studies published in PloS Pathogens, Nature and Nature Medicine have highlighted the role of viral escape in creating new epitopes and immunotypes, thereby driving the development of neutralisation breadth, with implications for HIV vaccine design.
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