{"id":2751,"date":"2010-11-23T00:01:54","date_gmt":"2010-11-23T05:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2751"},"modified":"2014-03-19T17:51:40","modified_gmt":"2014-03-19T21:51:40","slug":"first-impressions-of-the-g-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2751","title":{"rendered":"First impressions of the G-2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As a very happy user of the G-1 back when it was the only Android phone available, I was keenly looking forward to what HTC and T-Mobile would do for an encore in the G-2. Especially when T-Mobile promised it would run stock Android with no skin and no unremovable crapware.  I was seriously planning a first-day upgrade when the G-2 came out, just to get the higher data speeds.<\/p>\n<p>Great was my disappointment when they shipped a crippled phone. T-Mobile kept the promise not to add crapware, but they disabled tethering and hotspot &#8211; two absolute must-haves for me.  By the time  these features were un-disabled in a firmware  update, I&#8217;d discarded my plans to upgrade.  The Nexus One is still a very nice phone and a pleasure to use.<\/p>\n<p>But, quite by accident, I now have a G-2 for evaluation.  No, T-Mobile didn&#8217;t send me one; I ran into a friend at the Philadelphia Science Fiction convention who&#8217;s replaced his G-2 with an Android tablet  and wants to sell the former.  So he lent it it to me to try for a while; the theory is, if I like it after a couple of weeks, I&#8217;ll give him fair market minus 15% for depreciation and we&#8217;ll both be happy.<\/p>\n<p>The surprise is that, rather to my own bemusement, I&#8217;m leaning towards giving it back.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Oh, it&#8217;s chock-full of Android goodness.  And the higher-speed browsing on the HSDPA network is nice. But I find that one feature  I was really looking forward in the G-2 isn&#8217;t such a win after all, and that a misfeature I didn&#8217;t think would be a big deal is bothering me more than I expected.<\/p>\n<p>When I was using my G-1, the thing that griped me most about it was the crappy physical keyboard.  Still, my biggest issue in moving to the Nexus One was the screen-keyboard-only design.  One of the things I was most looking forward to about the G-2 was having a physical keyboard again, and with good fortune a better one.<\/p>\n<p>Now I&#8217;ve got it&#8230;and I&#8217;m barely using it at all.  I got used to tapping the screen on the Nexus, and seldom find that I enter enough text to make the delay while I rig out the G-2 keyboard worth incurring.<\/p>\n<p>What that keyboard does do is exacerbate the G-2&#8217;s size and weight problem.  It&#8217;s about an ounce heavier and half-again as thick as the Nexus, and quite to my surprise I find this makes a significant ergonomic difference.  The Nexus feels slim, elegant, and is a good fit for my hand; the G-2 feels a bit clunky and oversized and brick-like.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s actually an index of progress that I notice these differences.  Both phones run stock Android 2.2, so they&#8217;re not differentiated much at the software level and the software ergonomics is good enough for anyone not a fully-inducted fanatic of the Apple cult. This means that small differences in the hardware platform matter more.<\/p>\n<p>Jury&#8217;s still out on whether I&#8217;ll keep the G-2 &#8211; I&#8217;m leaning against, but more familiarity could change my mind.   I&#8217;ll post reports here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a very happy user of the G-1 back when it was the only Android phone available, I was keenly looking forward to what HTC and T-Mobile would do for an encore in the G-2. Especially when T-Mobile promised it would run stock Android with no skin and no unremovable crapware. I was seriously planning&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2751\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">First impressions of the G-2<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-2751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-smartphone","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2751"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5583,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751\/revisions\/5583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}