My job often takes me on a combination of Up in the air wobbling on the DLR at Canary Wharf to Underground Tubing at Bishopsgate, to confusing station layouts at Hammersmith, which are all places in London where to be served at a wine bar you first have to place down your shiny App-filled Iphone or your flashy-blinky Blackberry, with its permanent chirping off other Blackberry users never, ever leaving you alone.

Some of my colleagues like wine, so they have conformed to the required codes and invested in either of the above. I've played with both, and whilst my fingers like the Iphone, the Iphone doesn't like my fingers and we will never really get along until the screen gets less facetious. And the Blackberry is too work-like for me to be able to choose to ignore emails and it ringing and stuff, so I didn't want one of those either.

This left me spurned by barmen, and reading the Metro newspaper from cover to cover until my cosseted research resulted in me taking a delivery of a T-Mobile G1, or HTC G1, or Google Phone, depending on where you look online.

In the UK, they are only available with the T-mobile network, which was handy for me, as I've been with T-mobile since the days when O2 were One2One, and I'm something of a creature of habit. It also means I can pull faces in the T-mobile shop and say things like

"I've been with you for years, don't make me go to another network now"

Or

"But I don't want to change my contract, just my phone"

And I get to leave the shop with my new G1 in its unnecessarily posh packaging, on my ancient £20 a month contract for a mere 12 and not 18 months, as advertised. It pays to be grumpy, and the older I get, the more successful I'm finding myself with using its power.

Inside the box comes the phone and battery, the instructions, a CD, a charger (look after this one), some other wires for connecting your phone to other stuff, earphones, and some completely ridiculous fairy stickers that made me question why they'd given me the girl version and not the boy stickers with Tanks and Pele.

I quickly abandoned decorating up my phone and began the ritual followed every time anyone gets a new phone and first struggled to put it all together, decided it was too big and heavy, got a little bit disappointed, found and pressed the On button, and became all excited again as the phone lights up with a little Android man, and as he already knows the correct day and time, only asks me to set up a Google email account

-Why Mr Phone? I already own a Gmail account, thus I can skip this part and immediately synchronise my email account to my phone and begin play.

I chose, set up and instantly regretted my new Email address, and could begin play with a slightly bitter taste.


By far my most favourite thing in those first few hours was the satisfyingly clunky sturdiness of the slide action that reveals the qwerty keyboard and turns the 3.2 inch screen widthways, not long ways, and means for people like me that the touch-screen becomes something I only have to jab at with my finger, rather than anything too accurate like sliding or trying to get a text box to drop down. For really fiddly times, the G1 has a tracker ball that behaves like a mouse for your thumb.
There are all the expected features of these modern times like contact lists with groups and it's really easy to enter the X-factor vote thanks to the ease to write texts on the keyboard, after you've trained your thumbs. There's also a calendar, a calculator, and a 3Megapixel Camera that can be improved by downloading the FXCamera Application, for free.

The phone supports 3G and Wi-Fi and GPS, and when you have this sort of coverage, the phone is much more fun to use as with Wi-Fi, the apps like BBC Iplayer or Youtube look and sound great, incredible when you consider it's on a telephone, and it means you can watch Top Gear over a coffee in MacDonald's and sneer at the jogging types.
The GPS means the pre-installed Google maps can tell you where you are right this minute or where you are going to be if you follow its directions, which is great if you're lost obviously, although on one particularly difficult trip to Luton, my phone thought I was on the runway of London Luton Airport. Nobody's perfect.

Other Apps that use the GPS amongst the many are likes of the speedometers and Sat Nav, but if you plan on using any of these functions for any sort of period of time, let's say for a drive from London to Edinburgh, be prepared to have to guess the route beyond about Darlington as using the GPS is like Kryptonite for the battery when the phone is not plugged in, as is having any sort of Twotter feed or MyFace updaters, as these require constant connection to the internet, and this costs electricity, which is bad news for long term friendly dullness.

The Android operating system that this phone uses means absolutely nothing to me, but to clever computer types it means they as third parties can write applications themselves and make them available in the Android Market, much similar to the App Store for Wine Drinkers, and this creates a wide variety of both quantity and quality of available apps.
One simple prod of the finger opens up the Market for you to search for Games or Applications and most of the applications and games are available for no cost at all to the user. Tidy.


Some of the more popular Apps are things like Shazam, who is a man in your phone that will tell you the name of a song that sounds a bit like the song playing on the radio, Google Search by Voice, which while utterly pointless is great for practising your local accents with, the Papi range of games that utilise the gyro-motion in the phone so you control the characters through leaning your whole body to the left or to the right.

Aside from the woeful battery life, where a normal charge will last about 18 hours for normal use or 15 minutes when you're lost and wanting to know how fast you can run back to your own fiefdom, the only glitch I've had with this phone was after about 7 months of use when every incoming call was showing as "Unknown number", which usually means it was work and thus should be ignored, but I was getting in trouble from friends and relatives and wives and parents who all thought I was in a ditch, when it became apparent that something inside my chunky dog and bone had gone funky on it's bad self.

Some complaining to the T-mobile man in Mumbai followed and I was eventually left with no option but to perform the most dreaded of actions for all phone users, the Master Factory Reset.

Surely, I thought, by doing this I would lose every bit of contact data and photos and music that I'd collected over the past few months, so with reluctance I followed the reset procedures with vain hope it would mean I would now know who was calling me but also with a sad and heavy heart for the loss of lots of half-hearted photography.

But observe! The master reset does make you lose your downloaded applications from the market, and any background themes you've set up, and all your text messages that you keep but never read anyway, but the important stuff like phone numbers of people you've not spoken to for years and blurry images taken when drunk are all still there, saved soundly on the 2gb miniature Sandisk-compatible SD card that I'd forgotten about until that point of relief.

Overall, I'm happy with my phone as I can poke about online when on the train, or play chess or poke-a-mole when I'm in underground Tubes, and I have as yet not managed to break it, which can only be a good thing.

If you would like specific details about memory size and the like, visit http://www.t-mobileg1.com/ and follow the links for the official figures, but turn your speakers down first if you're in the library.