HTC Google Phone

Hardware

Like the iPhone, it can be used in either a vertical or horizontal orientation, but the top slides open to reveal a physical keyboard when the phone is used horizontally. As a result, horizontally is the only way to type anything. Never having used a Blackberry or similar, I’m not used to typing on a keyboard like this. I personally find the iPhone’s software keyboard easier to use but that’s just due to experience and familiarity; plenty of Blackberry users disagree. The physical buttons for the phone and home screen take a little getting used to as well; I keep looking on-screen for these controls.

There’s a design on the back instead of the Google logo seen on the T-Mobile models, and of course there’s no T-Mobile branding anywhere, either on the hardware or software.

Software

The Android OS does pretty much everything the iPhone does — not as well, but it does them. In the course of my playing around with it, I used the maps and GPS, e-mail, SMS, the Marketplace (the Android version of the iTunes app store), the web browser, and, of course, made some phone calls. The phone is wifi-capable out of the box, so everything but the phone and SMS just worked as soon as I joined the phone to my wireless network. And because the phone isn’t carrier-locked the way most US cell phones are, I was able to just pop in the AT&T SIM from my iPhone to try out the phone features.

There were two problems with that last bit however: First, the phone is only configured for T-Mobile data service by default and using it on AT&T’s network required manually setting up a new data access service. The second problem is that once this was done, data access worked, but I was restricted to Edge rather than the faster 3G. This apparently has something to do with either AT&T or T-Mobile using non-standard frequencies for 3G service but I’m a bit fuzzy on the details.

E-mail and the web browser worked pretty much the same as they do on the iPhone (unsurprisingly, because the browser is based on Webkit, same as MobileSafari). Setup was a pain though — there’s no way to sync data from my computer, so I had to input all my mail settings by hand. I was really annoyed by the inability to sync my Mac’s address book until I found that I could work around it by syncing Address Book to my Google Apps account and syncing the phone to that. A bit convoluted, but it works, and Google syncs any changes over-the-air just as Mobile Me does for my iPhone.

Overall, this phone is a pretty nice piece of work. What failings it has are all in software, which can be fixed as new Android releases become available, so it’s bound to improve over time. I don’t plan to give up my iPhone so the real value from this phone comes from its being unlocked and therefore usable world-wide. I mentioned just a few months ago that I keep my old unlocked RAZR around as a travel phone, so I can buy a local SIM from anywhere I go outside the US. With wifi, GPS, maps, and everything else in addition to being unlocked, this phone is miles ahead in usefulness as a travel phone. The RAZR has been replaced and is now for sale on Ebay (too bad these phones have almost no resale value).