Anyone worth staying in contact with is worth copying their data over, manually if needed. I used the occasion of my new G1 to manually consolidate all my contact information into Gmail. Now I’m awfully happy about having done that, since I have contacts synched between Gmail and my mobile device, which feels better and better each day. Well worth the effort!

Sincerely,
-daniel

Of course, I upgraded from a RAZR, so I guess the bar wasn’t too high!

GPS – About as good as my TomTom in terms of accuracy (might place me next door), so it is definately good.
VOICE – VERY nice! I can hear the others and they can hear me.
BUILD – The quality seems very good. The phone is heavy & just feels right in my hand. The phone keyboard slider, while not as cool as a sidekick is still very good & seems like it will stand the test of time.
EMAIL – This is great. Keep in mind, that if you are planning on SMSing people on the tmobile network, you can email them instead! NUMBER@tmomail.net and they’ll recieve it as a text message, so you can save those 400 texts for times when you can’t email them.
BROWSER – Very quick & nice. Can’t really complain, but it does take a little while to get used to.
APPS – I have found so many useful apps (GasBot, ShopSavvy, Caller ID by whitepages, ringdroid, etc…) that it is amazing.
BATTERY – Even under my heavy use, the battery will last about a day. Not great, but I am already used to charging my RAZR everyday, so it’s not too bad.
CONTACTS – I found a program gSyncIT, that will sync my gmail & my outlook contacts & calender together. This is great!

These have been my findings.

Initial setup was a breeze and first use was a breeze. I did not use and still have not read the manual. I usually don’t with most electronic do-dads until I am stumped or break something.

Not sure about your network coverage performance, but I am totally sold on the maps feature. I will admit, I am a Google Maps/Earth dork, and use any little reason to use it. There does seem to be a slight lag loading up initial location data, but nothing that overly annoys me. Once loaded, the map data has no problems keeping up with my virtual around the world adventures, even with satellite photos and full zoom. The directions given in mobile maps do leave something desired. Transit features would be helpful on a handheld devise. GPS is not accurate in downtown Chicago- it always seems to be one street off on the East-West direction. The North-South street locations are accurate though. However outside of the Loop, I found GPS was nearly dead on my location. There is a lag loading up Streetview. However once you get it going, it has no problems keeping up with me.

Using the G1′s email interface, I setup my Yahoo mail on my phone. No problems there. I wish there was a way to put a password on that just in case I loose my phone. I wish the email addresses would import to my contact book, but I forgot, this is a Google phone after all. I don’t really use Gmail for much, so I can’t comment on what benefits/pitfalls I may be missing out on there. Someone else may have to elaborate on that one.

The conversation setup for text messages is good. I can see what’s been written in previous posts. I also have to keep in mind that not everyone has a PDA phone, so I can easily blast out texts like no tomorrow. However my thumbs can perform just as well on a regular phone too, and probably faster. Nothing earth shattering, but it works.

The camera phone- decent quality for 2008. No zoom, no flash, no video, having to share your pocket with a camera when you go out- that sucks. In good to decent lighting, exepect good to decent pictures. But as the light disappears, so does the picture quality. A Nokia N-series, this is not. But I did not buy the G-phone for the camera. To be fair, before you delete any photos from the phone thinking they are bad quality shots, upload them to your computer. More than a few pictures I would have deleted actually look pretty good when viewed on a bigger screen. If the G1 rendered photos better on screen, this wouldn’t be an issue.

YouTube integration with the phone is good. When using 3G, the video seems compressed, but the sound quality is decent for playback on a tinny speaker. Use your headphones, the sound improves a little bit. In Chicago, watching a video during most day time hours is asking for at least one network interruption during the process. I’ve had no interruptions yet when viewing videos at odd times of the night. When connecting to wifi, the videos are the same quality as what you would see on a computer. When accessing Youtube, you can either use the built in viewer or the web browser to search for videos.

Finally, voice quality- It depends. I’ve had some crystal clear conversations and I’ve had conversations that sound like Yoda speaking through a toy voice synthesizer. If the phone is the problem, I will definitely not use this phone for voice critical situations, like my work for example.

All in all, the G1 is a nice little toy and has the potential to be a very useful information tool. Is it ahead of the time and cutting edge? Not really. Does it have the potential to be configured, tweaked to one’s liking. I’m sure the Android mods are out there and will sort themselves out. Yes, i’m sure some will be blow-ups, but some will be gems. Perhaps Google or someone else will put their reputation on the line and start to rate the more useful/popular/reliable ones, but I’m thinking too far ahead… in the meantime, time to go back to play with the phone. As soon as I’m satisfied with the stock phone, I will be searching the web for mods.

I don’t talk on the phone much at all. I hate telephones! So, uhm, don’t ask me.

The G1 has only three side buttons: camera shutter and the volume keys, right where the Sidekick 2 had them. I’m constantly bumping the volume. Not happy about that.

The ring tones should be open, or so I have read. I read there’s some application that lets you splice out a cut from an mp3, even. I just use vibrate.

No Java. JavaScript is flaky but it doesn’t come complaining that the JavaScript took too long to load . . .

-d

Also, the thing that drives me UP THE WALL about the sidekick is the 5 million tiny buttons on the sides of the phone which I always inadvertently hit, muting myself or putting someone on speaker.

Does the Android only allow proprietary ringtones? It really annoys me that the Sidekick came with the annoying tmobile ringtone and you could only buy replacement ones from them.

Finally, I agree re: the sidekick freaking out about Java–does the Android load Java fine?