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.