Yesterday when I got home there was a nice present waiting for me. My G1 Phone arrived! I ripped open the packaging and found a phone that was smaller than I expected from the images from the internet.
First tries
Popping in the sim card and the battery was easy, turning it on was a bit harder… I did not have much light and didn’t see the on-sign on the hangup button. After some messing around it turned on and it was booting! Next thing it asks me is to unlock the phone, “Damn!” i bought a locked phone. Luckily I knew that it could be unlocked and that it was just a matter of going to a website, entering some details and your emei code, oh and you need to pay 20 bucks too. The rest of the evening I was waiting for the unlock code to arrive. It did not arrive before I had to go to bed. Darn…
The next morning I got up on my usual time and turned on my laptop. After some morning routine stuff, I checked my email and to great satisfaction I found the unlock code! I turned on the G1 again and entered the code, and my phone was unlocked!
Sign in with your Google account please
To be able to use the phone at all you need to log in to your Google account. I tried that but of course that was not working because GPRS/UMTS was not setup for my provider, FONIC. Yet an other “Damn!”. Off to work I went and on arrival I spent some time there researching on how to set it up for FONIC, to no avail, nobody had the same problem as me it seemed. But, I knew that my provider was the cheap-ass version of o2. I found the details for that on plenty of sites, but with that information in my G1 I could also not sign in, seemingly… Back to do some work!
Later that day
A few hours later I tried signing in again, and to my amazement it worked flawlessly! Off playing with it some more! (not too much Mr. boss!). But the battery was dying.. seemingly the provided usb cable didn’t work for charging the battery, i pulled out an other usb cable and plugged it in, and charging commenced! I also moved the most important contacts from my old phone, the trusty p900, to the sim card, and mass imported them onto my phone without any problem. I hopped onto the company wifi and synchronized with my Google account so my contacts show up in gmail. This is an awesome feature, and in my opinion the killer feature. At my workplace the wifi signal was not good enough to hold a connection to the wifi network, so it switched a lot between wifi and GPRS. This has costed me a few dimes I’m afraid… I was able to call and send sms’s with ease. The search button works in a lot of the standard applications and it is a blessing.
When I arrived home serious play time commenced. I installed a few aplications from the android market. It contains tons and tons of apps, some good some bad. Locale is nice, but is lacking a lot of options that it could really improve it. And the battery wanted to be charged again… I also used the IM client, and it worked pretty damn well! So far I absolutely LOVE it. it is fast and responsive, didnt crash on me once (knock on wood) and it is easy to use after a short learning period.
I will write about my other experiences an other time.