So there it is, the Google Phone, or more commonly known as the T-Mobile G1. And to be quite honest, I was hoping for a little bit more. Especially from a company like T-Mobile. Who seem to have a good grasp on the mobile service. They’ve got great plans, good service, a nice selection of phones, they do things right over there. 

But I guess my beef comes from Google. Great search engine, love the email service, YouTube is nice (but they bought it that way), Reader is good, but essentially everything else, just kinda lacks for me. Especially when it comes to interface. Google, including the services I just listed, always seems to lack in the interface aspect of their products. They all look like they were made by some high school student that hasn’t taken a design class in his life and kind of throws the basics in there and leaves it alone. I think as consumers we come to expect more. Especially with the capabilities that we have today to make such beautiful graphics and interfaces. 

I’m a huge advocate of the iPhone, not only cause I own one, but because Apple has paid very close attention to detail. It’s a very smooth and enjoyable experience using the iPhone. On top of that the functionality is there as well. So not only do you have this awesome phone that can do almost everything you’d like, but it’s all built on this system that works and also is very attractive to the user. 

Just as an example here, lets look at the photo above of the G1. What do we see? Ugly and bulky icons in the menu bar at the top which are reminiscent of of early nokia phones from the early 2000’s, you have a gray box on the right, a background image, a few icons to some applications and a big clock. Let me ask you something…is it really necessary to have two clocks on the home screen? Right above the one clock is the time in digital format…what’s the purpose of having these two clocks? They’re not even synced up properly. Maybe if it’s another time zone, fine, but that’s not the case because the minutes are off as well!

It’s these little details that get to me. I don’t quite understand who the genius was behind this one, but I’m thinking it might be this guy…

Google, T-Mobile, nice try. I don’t think this is going to do all that well. It’s 20 bucks cheaper than the iPhone, it’s open source, sure that’s nice, but at the end of the day, detail and quality will prevail. Let’s see what happens. 

update
Just two supporting blogs with similar points that i just found…

• Gizmodo
• Silicon Alley Insider