Wednesday, November 5, 2008

initial disappointment with the T-Mobile G1

I'm starting to dislike the G1. It is not nearly as strong as the BlackBerry line for email and contacts, and it is not nearly as fun as the iPhone 3G for everything else. I'm hoping for OTA (Over The Air) software updates to resolve many buggy issues. Here's a copy of an email I sent off to my representative at T-Mobile about my experiences so far:

So what are you getting for feedback on the G1, Brian? I’ve got to tell you, I want to love this phone, but so far I don’t like it at all.

Problems:
• Doesn’t open a lot of attachment file types (Excel being a big one).
• No Outlook Sync / requires Google “cloud” contacts / calendar (we knew that before you sent it).
• Spotty Wi-Fi connectivity, and I’ve yet to get it to automatically connect to a remembered network.
• Email attachment handling is odd [...and inconsistent].
• POP3 email needs to be [...manually retrieved]. Although I’ve got it set to [automatically] check every 5 minutes, but it doesn’t seem to do that. I have to go into “email” and select "load."
• I read an email, and when I return to the list of emails, it’s still tagged “unread” (sometimes).
• I delete an email, and then when I go back into email later and “reload” new messages, it comes in again?
• Battery life is poor.
• Right now I am connected to my office Wi-Fi, and I’m still getting a “connection error – retry loading more messages” when I try to retrieve my POP3 email… again, this should happen automatically every 5 minutes anyway.
• Here’s a real odd one… I received an email from my sister-in-law last night (obviously personal). I hit “reply” and it created an outgoing email to her with a bunch of work colleagues CCed, and the body of the quoted text was a completely different email. I had similar experiences twice, and I’m no novice… this isn’t a “computer illiterate user” error.
• There are more issues, but at this point, I can’t remember them. If you’re interested, I will continue to update you. I intend to use this phone through next week to see if any updates change things

Brian, I’m not asking you to fix any of this or even research any of this. If you’ve heard of any of these problems before and know of a solution, let me know. If you know of any major OTA updates from T-Mobile or Google, please let me know.

Otherwise, please just consider this customer feedback.

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