CDMA and GSM

T-Mobile G1 with full QWERTY keyboard

The T-Mobile G1 is made by HTC. We’ve been closely following HTC’s rise to fame as the premier Windows Mobile smartphone manufacturer on the planet. HTC makes some seriously high-quality hardware that never fails to impress us - with solid build quality and a penchant for the high-tech, HTC devices deliver on sensory and practical aspects. As such, we expected the HTC-made T-Mobile G1 to be a robust handset packed with the latest mobile technology.

Did the T-Mobile G1 live up to the high standards that we’ve set for HTC smartphones?Specifications: Read the rest of this entry »

Augmented reality using Wikipedia and Panoramio landmarks

It’s not every day that we come across game-changing technologies. With the pace of development in the mobile world, it takes a lot of ingenuity to really capture our attention. Today we bring “augmented reality” to the forefront with Wikitude. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s right, folks. T-Mobile has just officially kicked-off the Android OS party! Today marks the first day that T-Mobile is officially selling their Android-powered T-Mobile G1 at select retail locations and online. Sure, pre-ordered T-Mobile G1 units have already been making their way into loyal T-Mobile customers’ hands, but it’s more exciting to have the G1 going public.

The T-Mobile G1 launch announcement culminates months, nay a year, of speculation on mobile phone powered by a new mobile OS from Google. At first we were mis-guided in thinking that the Google had a new piece of hardware, the Google Phone (or gPhone, if you will), would be manufactured by the likes of smartphone-making experts HTC. It was unclear at the time whether the Google Phone (gPhone) would hit market with a tried and true mobile OS like Windows Mobile or make a play at creating a new mobile platform. Read the rest of this entry »

Probably the most anticipated handset since the iPhone 3G, the T-Mobile G1 is the first smartphone to use the Android platform announced last year by Google and a number of other partners. Android is based on Linux and is in part an open-source initiative that has hundreds (perhaps thousands) of developers working on different applications that an Android phone can use. But what Google have done with the T-Mobile G1 is to come up with a handset that tightly integrates into Google’s online services.. and perhaps pose a direct challenge to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and the Apple iPhone experience.

T-Mobile G1: Hardware

Before we look at the software, a quick tour of the hardware. The T-Mobile G1 is made by HTC who have a long history of making Windows Mobile devices, often in partnership with T-Mobile and other carriers.

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The T-Mobile SDA (not to be confused with the older Euro T-Mo SDA, but rather their SDA II) was released in the US in Feb. 2006 and it wants to be your everything… almost. While it lacks the serious editing skills that its QWERTY keyboard-ed, touch screen-enabled big brother the MDA offers; the SDA wants to be your pocketable phone, business tool, PDA, WiFi hotspot surfing buddy and MP3 player. Oh yes, and your camera phone, your streaming video player and your GSM world phone. Cross the older Audiovox SMT6500 with a Sony Ericsson W800i and throw in a little Pocket PC and you’ve got the multi-faceted SDA. Read the rest of this entry »

The T-Mobile Wing is the successor to the discontinued T-Mobile MDA, bringing the slide out keyboard form factor back to T-Mobile’s lineup. The Wing is based on HTC’s Herald/Atlas reference design and brings several upgrades, including Windows Mobile 6 and a new slimmer form factor The Wing is compatible with T-Mobile’s myFaves service, with a handy Today plugin that allows you to quickly dial your five faves. The battery life of the Wing was outstanding: we measured the call time at an incredible 14 hours and 15 minutes. But this is tempered by the slow operation of the device and poor camera quality. Screens take seconds to be updated, and it is generally sluggish. The Wing’s 2 megapixel camera scored poorly in almost all of our standardized tests. This is a problem that makes us reticient to recommend the Wing; while the design, battery life and call quality are great, the Wing is something of a pain to use. Read the rest of this entry »

The T-Mobile Shadow is one of the few Windows Mobile devices on the market that makes use of the slider form factor. The design allows the Shadow to use a massive 2.6″ main display while still having enough room left over for a full control cluster and a 20 key alphanumeric keypad. The Shadow isn’t small, at 104mm x 52mm x 16mm (4.1″ x 2.0″ x .6″), but it is pretty light for its size: only 108g (3.8oz).

The display itself is a 65k color unit with QVGA (240×320 pixel) resolution. There is no brightness control, automatic or otherwise, on the Shadow, but it does have a power saving dim mode that it enters after a user configured number of seconds. After a second user configurable timeout, the display turns off completely. When the display is on, text is crisp and bright and very easy to read. Read the rest of this entry »