G1 Google Phone vs iPhone

Guest Post by SEO RockStar Aaron Kronis Director of SEO at Wpromote.com

After owning and using both the G1 & iPhone, as well installing enough software to crash them both, here are some real experiences comparisons – not Internet research.

I purchased the 16 GB NON-3G iPhone the week it was released in early 2007 and had it for several months before losing it at a Dodgers Game …. then I purchased the G1 Phone and have been able to really compare the two personally with all my work and business habits.

So without wasting any more time, here are some of my findings for you:


Network & Support – G1 vs iPhone

• Living in a loft in downtown LA, I was very surprised that T-Mobile and G1 vastly outperformed AT&T on the iPhone with regards to coverage. I can use the G1 in my loft which has concrete walls and ceilings, etc. I had trouble calling with the iPhone from home and had better luck outside.
• T-mobile is not the ’swiftest’ when it comes to A) doing anything quickly, including waiting for them to serve you with no obvious queue or ‘take a number’ style service in their stores. B) Doing what they say they will do. For Example: When I bought my G1, T-Mobile had put one aside for me to come and get it – they never told me it was in (was expecting a call from the store, but the person I dealt with was ‘off the day it came in so someone else sold it to make commission) and I had to keep going back, but they would sell the phone that was put aside for me and I didn’t get to choose the color. This was poor service and very annoying.
• AT&T is large enough that it isn’t that hard to get support on the phone but has terrible customer service at times. Very disconnected communication between departments and if you ever have to call back you have to start over.
• When I lost my iPhone, I had to pay $200 to cancel my service still with no help from AT&T in finding it.
• T-Mobile had better signal service but even worse customer support. I guess you can’t win, but at least we can move past the flip-phone era!

Battery and Charging – G1 vs iPhone

• G1: USB Charger for the G1! AWESOME. I can borrow friend’s chargers when they have USB ones for their Blackberries, etc.
• iPhone: Charger is Apple’s Proprietary iPod Charger. Unless it is for the Ipod or iPhone specifically, you are out of luck.
• The iPhone battery lasts more than a day when fully charged but the G1 would be lucky to last that long.
• The weak 1150 mAh battery with the G1 was almost a deal breaker, but apparently they are working on several fixes, as Mike posted first about the T-Mobile G1 Battery Replacement Program in another section of this blog. If you are out late without a car or wall charger, its tough to get people’s contact information on a phone that won’t turn on after midnight, reminds me of ‘Gremlins‘.
• iPhone by a nose

Audio Quality – G1 vs iPhone

• The G1 Headset and microphone attaches to a USB cable that is all provided, but you can only use a standard headset with the provided USB converter so this adds extra wires you have to carry around.
• iPhone has a standard headphone jack so its just grabbing some earbuds and go
• On the iPhone Calls often drop and it can be difficult to hear people. I’ve had complaints from friends who asked me during calls while driving to unplug the headset and use the regular phone speakers instead.
• When making calls on the iPhone the speakerphone option only is allowed once the call is connected. Can be destracting and annoying if driving and trying to call using some type of foreign calling card with a pin number, etc.
• Without the headset the G1 call quality and speakerphone is excellent as its clear and the speakphone option is allowed at anytime.
• Overall audio quality is much better on the G1

Touch Screen – G1 vs iPhone

• The G1 works much like the iPhone which I am used to as I had the iPhone first. You won’t accidentally pinch anything as it is not offered, however there are zoom buttons that appear as well as a ‘compass looking’ 4-way arrow that shows up to allow you to zoom a specific area of the pages. It is NOT intuitive and kind of hard to get the hang of. I wouldn’t recommend buying this for a senior citizen.
• iPhone touch response is great and has pinching resizing, So if you can’t get a link, just zoom in.
• The trackball on the G1 allows you to scroll through the links on pages and ‘click’ it like a mouse.
• The iPhone lacks something in addition to the touch screen to play games with, or to scroll through links on the page. Sometimes a really poorly built (for mobile) page can be nearly impossible to navigate.
• The responsiveness of the G1 touch screen feels less accurate then the iPhone and the scrolling is not very intuitive or easy to learn initially. You get used to it, but then you miss the ability to zoom in by ‘pinching’ with two fingers like the iPhone.
• I find that when scrolling through contacts, often it will call them accidentally if you are not careful on both the iPhone & G1, but the scrolling feels a little ’stickier’ on the G1, less smooth than iPhone.
• Overall the iPhone has a better touchscreen

Interface – G1 vs iPhone

• The G1 is SO much easier to type on. G1’s keyboard has an ‘@’ button so you don’t have to press ‘+2′ to write an email address, although I wish there was a similar ‘/’ button for web addresses that didn’t require pressing the ALT key.
• Essentially the G1 Menu Button is similar to a PC’s ‘Right Mouse’ button that activates context menus or properties of whatever you have running. The trackball is great, like a mouse and you can push it in to click it and use it as a joystick for games (like Pacman which runs great on G1 btw).
• The only real frustration with the G1 keyboard is the short backlight duration which can’t be adjusted so I often type an incorrect character just to get it lit up again, or simply move the trackball, to avoid having to look for the delete key. A real pain while at a red light. (Not that you should be texting while driving but we all do it – i.e. TXT: I’m at such and such intersection be there soon – note as of Jan 1 2009 it is now against the law here in California, like talking without a headset)
• The biggest problem is with applications and websites that don’t work properly with the G1 trackball. For example: I can’t use Facebook to send messages to people, the trackball highlights the ‘TO:’ field but whenever I type in someone’s name, facebook’s mobile or even FULL site doesn’t work properly. VERY frustrating. I end up doing wall posts instead of direct messages just so it will work. This is annoying as personal messages shouldn’t be on people’s Facebook wall – now I am aware that this is a Facebook mobile site design issue but it still affects G1 use.
• The iPhone has a compact design as everything is done via the touch screen, and learns how fat your fingers are (so it seems) and suggests corrections as you type based on previous usage.
• The ‘x’ to get rid of suggestions on the iPhone can be hard to hit, especially while doing something such as driving. I’ve accidentally typed while in a hurry, “I’ll Pik U up” just to have it ‘corrected’ to “I’ll Oil u up” because P changes to O, i stays and K changes to L. Stupid.
• It is really annoying trying to text on the iPhone, and next to impossible to do without looking. I can text on a flip phone really really fast without looking, but it sucks cause you have to use the number pad, but not bad if driving.
• Hands down – I’m glad I now use the G1.

Applications – G1 vs iPhone

The main thing is to find USEFUL applications that work properly and I’m currently testing many Android applications, some great, some not so great. Here are some highlights of what has worked well for me with the Android apps so far:

• IM: works fairly well, offers YAHOO, AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger. In combination with other apps that display notifications, you can tell nicely when someone is trying to contact you.
• andFBChat – You can use the facebook chat without having to have a browser window open. This is great. Would be nice to see this integrated with AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.
  gmail: – Native to the phone, works very well as it should. Google made this!
• Messaging: – Text messaging. Works great. There are some custom apps available to make this more to your needs and likings. So far with the keyboard attached, i don’t mind the texting on this at all.
• Google Maps: - Now while the GPS is not 100% accurate (i.e. at Cap’n Crunch’s place in Burbank, when you hit ‘Current Location’ it is almost 2-4 miles off) it is still very useful for driving. I just drove from Los Angeles to San Diego and simply used the ‘Current Location’ to guage how long it would take me to get there. Easy to type in ‘directions needed from current location to a saved address, without fumbling a lot with the phone or keyboard’. NOTE: there is a GPS location application that will activate via SMS to help you find your phone, however its likely that the battery will have died before you can use that. Mike also informed me that you can simply use the IMEI number with T-Mobile to locate the phone – again it would need to be prior to losing battery strength. So don’t lose your phone!

So things are much different now than pre the 3G era for the iPhones. I never owned a 3G iPhone, so I can’t really give you too much information about 3G on iPhones other then the people I know who have them claim it works similar to the old iPhone when connected to a hi-speed wifi connection.

Here is what i did, I used ziphone.org to crack the iPhone and install the applications I wanted from the open source community. Android on the G1 simply allows this anyway so no cracking is needed. After this, you may not trust your phone to function properly so you have to be ready to re-install everything if you mess it up with some rogue application or poorly designed app. This is not good if you can’t make calls. With the G1 phone, you can simply uninstall problematic applications with the application manager. The iPhone required me to crack it and install a ‘finder’ application (Mac’s version of a file explorer similar to ‘explorer’ for windows users) in order to do anything useful.

I very much enjoyed the iPhone guitar applications (see my cinco de mayo on iPhone guitar post for fun!). Also there are some great apps for mobile blogging, however at this time I’m not 100% on what people are using now that the iPhone application market has changed and you can install things that are ‘apple approved’ or what have you. I like the fishtank app, backgammon, guitar apps….my friends are often playing the table hockey app now.

As each day goes by, more and more applications are becoming more stable for BOTH phones and some are less useful (i.e. iFart, yet gaining traffic!) while many are being revised to work better.

I think from a business perspective the G1 is better, from a seemingly ‘hipster’ attitude a lot of folks are still big on the iPhone as it shows that you can afford it to have it. – Mine cost $500 – dammit. Now the newer ones are under $200 in order to compete with the G1.

It will be interesting to see which phones emerge as winners, but my vote is currently with the Google phone and I just wish they would fix the battery issues sooner than later.

Thanks for reading, follow me on twitter @kronis!

KRONiS of Digital Vegetarian Rockstar SEO