Dinhternet

So I got the G1 a while back, but it had frozen pixels on the screen. I tried to free them up with the “Strobe Light” app, which rapidly flashes lots of colors in a disco/Chocolate Seizure Robot mode, but it didn’t work on all of them. I got the replacement and have been playing with it for about two weeks now.

It is a very cool phone. I love having internet available at all times. I remember when Vince and I would watch TV and say, “Hey, that person looks familiar” and then compulsively look them up immediately on IMDB. Now, I can do that all the time. I can Yelp for places to eat around me. And of course, there’s all the official Google apps, which are mobile versions of their core services, like GMail, Talk, Maps, Reader, and so forth. I think I’ve become more reliant on Google because of the phone, converting from Pidgin, my previous chat application, to GTalk, as well as using Google Reader instead of the Mozilla RSS program I did before, so I can maintain consistency between desktop and mobile. gOS needs to hurry up and get an official release so I can be seamless! Of course, having Google as the gateway to everything we do has some people worried. I do wish Google had stronger privacy language, but I doubt that will happen short of Google buying an island and building a true Crypt.

However, there are some more immediate downsides as well. The battery life is a joke if you want to take advantage of all the features. Keeping GPS and wi-fi turned on is guaranteed to drain you in under a day. There is an app called Locale that helps by allowing you to set up “profiles” of what features you want on/off, ring and/or vibration, screen brightness, etc. based on your location and the battery status, but it can only do so much. The other problem I seem to be having is that the phone multi-tasks apps, and leaves them running in the background, so after a while, I feel the phone slowing and need to power cycle. I wish there was a way to kill apps from within the OS.

But yeah… I was pretty die-hard Google before, but I’m even more so now.

Tags: Internet, Phone, Son, Will, Work

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 13:46 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.