Screen

The brilliant, capacitive touch screen on the G1 has the same resolution as the iPhone 3G, at 320 x 480 px. Unfortunately, the G1 falls short with 65K-colors, in comparison with the iPhone 3G's 16.7 million colors.

Similar to the iPhone 3G, the G1's application makes the most of the beautiful screen with brightly colored application shortcuts set against a black background. The G1 touch screen, which is capacitive like the iPhone, responds smoothly and promptly to finger touches and swipes.

The G1 touch screen does not allow the unique iPhone finger pinch technique to zoom in and out on maps, and the G1 instead relies upon "+" and "-" prompts to adjust the view when a map is open.

Unfortunately, the screen only changes orientation from portrait to landscape when the QWERTY keyboard is opened, although it is also convenient to tie the open keyboard to the landscape view because this is a convenient view in which to compose messages and accomplish other tasks. It would be nice to be able to change the orientation simply by turning the phone on its side, as the iPhone and BlackBerry Storm allow users to do.

Audio

Sound on the G1 is crisp and balanced, and the acoustics of several songs tested out on the phone came through clearly. The one shortfall of the handset's audio is that even with the speaker on the back of the phone, the sound at top volume was generally not very loud. When there was a lot of background noise, the phone had to be held near to the ear to actually catch the songs.

To access the music player, pull up the applications tab and select the music shortcut. Music files are organized into four categories: artists, albums, songs and playlists. If users want to download new music, they can select the Amazon MP3 shortcut which is also under applications.

The G1 phone supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, OGG and RM audio formats.

Messaging

There are two ways to email on the G1: Mail and Gmail, which is push-based. With mail, users can manage up to five IMAP and POP3 email accounts. For instant messaging, the IM application supports AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live and Yahoo. The G1 also allows users to create and send photo and audio messages.

As mentioned earlier, it is nice to have a full QWERTY keyboard but the keys are too flat to dial by touch. Also, the angled section of the G1 handset slows down typing, especially when the phone charger is plugged into this part of the phone.

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