Boys that write poems and love new tech (the G1 has arrived…)

I was up at 4.30 yesterday. That’s AM. Had to schlepp my way down to Poole to run a couple of poetry classes at Corfe Hills School, and although I wasn’t particularly happy about travelling so early, the guys I worked with made the journey totally worth it.

I had two classes of year 8 boys (or was it year 9? I was still a little fuzzy around the edges by the time I got to meet them, after such an early start…) and put them through the abstract/concrete exercise I often start off with, followed by my ‘Jigsaw’ workshop. One of the guys wrote that “love is a bright yellow flower in the middle of a field of dry grass.” Another wrote of the blue band that his girlfriend had given him, something he’d left in his nan’s car (he had to take it off for boxing training) but that, even though it wasn’t with him there and then, it was on his mind, and he knew exactly where it was, the same way his girlfriend was always on his mind. We talked about the poetry, using specificity for strong writing, how to write poems without bursting a blood vessel, and the disparities between Xbox 360s and PS3s. Mighty fun was had by all.

2 hours there and back on the train via London Waterloo, and I was either sleeping or playing with the new phone. In the end, I settled for the T-Mobile G1. First impressions? I’ve been spoiled through using an iPod Touch, and I’ve been using my Nokia E61 for something close to two years now, so it’s going to take a minute to get used to the new hardware. My biggest problems with the G1 are the battery life and the management of contacts.

The battery life is, in a word, pants. I wouldn’t have made it through yesterday on a single charge, and that was with very light browsing and manual checking of email (no push), and only one phone call. I have to investigate tools for battery management– what battery hogging services can be switched off when I don’t need them to optimise power consumption. Compare that to the E61, which would quite happily grind away through moderate to heavy use for at least two or three days before flagging. The only good thing on this front is that spare batteries are quite cheap– £4 a pop on Ebay.

Management of contacts, however, is a real pain in the tender regions. Apples’s address book app can now sync to Google, but it’s not as straightforward as I’d like. One contact in my address book refuses to be pushed over to my Google contacts because there’s already a pre-existing contact record in Google contacts that shares the same email address. If that sentence sounds unnecessarily complicated, that’s exactly what it feels like. The Google contact record lacked all the other information like telephone numbers and notes, but simply ignored the incoming data. That’s not proper syncing, damnit! Deleting the record in Google Contacts doesn’t seem to fix things.

More troubling, the Contacts facility on the G1 itself doesn’t seem to be able to handle “companies” properly. All of my contact records marked as companies in my address book have been ported over to Google Contacts properly (as far as I can see), but on the phone, the Company Name field hasn’t been correctly populated, and instead shows just the telephone number. That’ll work great for caller ID, right? Sucks. Long story short, I don’t fully trust the contacts application on the phone, which is a big issue in a communication device.

Other minor negatives: the mail application (for external accounts) doesn’t yet allow movement of IMAP email between folders, and I can’t read PDF documents on the phone. The phone comes with a copy of the manual on the installed memory card in PDF format, and the phone itself can’t handle PDFs? I must be missing something there…

Having said all that, there’s a lot to like about the gPhone. Big screen, which really comes into play when browsing the web. I haven’t yet tested the quality of the screen with a video, but then I’m unlikely to be watching video on it anyway– that’s what the Touch is for. I love the range of interface methods– touch screen, trackball AND full QWERTY keyboard. The user interface is neat and easy on the eye, and I really coming to like the notifications tray and contextual menus. Finally, it’s fast. Lightning fast. With the way I live online, it’s an absolute joy to have the internet in my pocket.

It’s not perfect, but with a little work, I think I might be happy with the G1. That seems to be the common opinion floating across the net. Bearing in mind the way I’m going to be using the thing (make calls, check email, surf the web) I think it should do a fair job. I will say, though, there’s a voice in the back of my head that’s whispering for an iPhone…