G1 google phone manual

The phone, which goes on sale next week in the US and next month in Britain, was released too early. It's not a bad phone, but the software and hardware needed more time in the oven to bring them to a golden brown crispness.

Admittedly, it's not clear that Google would have been able to sign up carriers back when the original iPhone was released back in the pre-3G and pre-App Store days, back when Google assembled the three dozen firms that form the Open Handset Alliance, without the iPhone as leverage.

While Android's development predates the release of the original iPhone, phones based on the OS will be pushed onto the market in part because of Apple's exclusive carrier deals; carriers left out need an alternative. The G1 is burdened with a lot of issues that have little to do with the phone itself, but we'll see if we can get past that to explore the general inadequacy of the phone.

You notice the G1's ordinariness as soon as you unpack the phone, which comes wrapped in a small, neatly designed box. The cables are the kind you find accompanying any phone, which somehow makes the G1 appear bland even before use.

The G1 guides you through a simple and well-designed setup process for creating accounts and filling in basic parameters. Oddly, despite the inclusion of a WiFi radio, there's no option to add existing WiFi accounts during setup.

Instead, the phone defaults to using T-Mobile's limited 3G network, available in a few dozen cities right now.

Previews of the phone, produced by reviewers at national publications like Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal led me to expect a somewhat better piece of gear than what the G1 turned out to be. The G1 has a slightly rubberized case that's comfortable in the hand, but the fit and finish isn't all there. The phone's slide-out keyboard doesn't have a smooth motion—it slams into place.

The display portion wobbles slightly and doesn't lock solidly into open or closed positions. The bottom portion of the phone, when in closed portrait mode, has a slight raise and tilt, and feels exactly right.

Capacity - The bigger, the better! However, battery capacity is not the only factor that has an effect on battery life. Those include the chipset in use, the software running on the device, as well as the consumer's unique usage pattern.

Location - This field shows the positioning systems supported by the device. Every wireless phone device that is sold in the U. Date approved - Shows the date when the particular phone is approved by the Federal Communications Commission. These limits are given in terms of a unit referred to as the Specific Absorption Rate SAR , which is a measure of the amount of radio frequency energy absorbed by the body when using a mobile phone.

PhoneArena Score Review. User Score User reviews. Released Oct 22, It has a 3. The display resolution is by pixels and its contrast ratio is , to 1. The phone uses a 1 gigahertz Qualcomm processor and has megabytes of RAM. It also has megabytes of Flash memory and comes with a four-gigabyte micro SD storage card.

Nexus One owners who want more storage can upgrade up to a gigabyte SD card. It also has a Wi-Fi receiver that is compatible with The phone supports Bluetooth 2. It also has an assisted global positioning system receiver. The phone's 5-megapixel camera comes with an LED flash. It also has a digital zoom feature that provides a zoom power of 2X.

The camera can take video at 20 frames per second with a resolution of by pixels. The Nexus One launched with the Android operating system version 2. This version of the OS supports multiple contacts and synchronization applications, allowing developers to create apps that let users manage several e-mail accounts using one device.

Anyone wanting to buy an Android phone will have to create a Google account first. Google accounts are free and you can sign up at any time whether you own an Android phone or not. Android's designers built the platform so that it interfaces with these functions smoothly.

As hardware becomes more advanced, Google is likely to tweak the Android OS to support new features and functions. And if Google doesn't do it, someone else will. That's the beauty of an open-source system. The HTC G1 sports a 3. The handset also has a storage card expansion slot. One thing it doesn't have is a standard headphone jack -- you have to use a USB adapter if you want to use your headphones.

Since the phone has a media player, many reviewers felt the lack of a standard jack was one strike against the device. Google usually refers to the Android OS as a software stack. Each layer of the stack groups together several programs that support specific operating system functions. The base of the stack is the kernel. Google used the Linux version 2. Drivers are programs that control hardware devices.

For example, the Nexus One has a camera. The Android kernel includes a camera driver, which allows the user to send commands to the camera hardware. The next level of software includes Android's libraries. You can think of libraries as a set of instructions that tell the device how to handle different kinds of data. For example, the media framework library supports playback and recording of various audio, video and picture formats.

Other libraries include a three-dimensional acceleration library for devices with accelerometers and a Web browser library. Located on the same level as the libraries layer, the Android runtime layer includes a set of core Java libraries -- Android application programmers build their apps using the Java programming language. It also includes the Dalvik Virtual Machine. A virtual machine is a software application that behaves as if it were an independent device with its own operating system.

You can run a virtual machine on a computer that operates on a completely different OS than the physical machine's OS. The Android OS uses virtual machines to run each application as its own process.

That's important for a few reasons. First, no application is dependent upon another. Second, if an application crashes, it shouldn't affect any other applications running on the device.

Third, it simplifies memory management. The next layer is the application framework. This includes the programs that manage the phone's basic functions like resource allocation, telephone applications, switching between processes or programs and keeping track of the phone's physical location. Application developers have full access to Android's application framework.

This allows them to take advantage of Android's processing capabilities and support features when building an Android application. Think of the application framework as a set of basic tools with which a developer can build much more complex tools.

At the top of the stack are the applications themselves. This is where you find the basic functions of the device such as making phone calls, accessing the Web browser and accessing your contacts list. If you're an average user, this is the layer you'll use most. You do that with the user interface. Only Google programmers, application developers and hardware manufacturers access the other layers further down the stack. You can change the way your Google Phone works by downloading applications to it.

Read about a few of them on the next page. These days, it's not enough for your smartphone to be able to check e-mail and surf the Web as well as make phone calls. You need to have at your disposal a host of useful, fun, productive or just plain pointless applications. The iPhone 's success has proven that a strong application library can excite customers.

Google's Android platform appears to be following suit. The company created a limited software developer kit SDK and distributed it to developers. Here's a small sample of what made the grade:. And several developers for some of the better-known iPhone applications have expressed interest in developing an Android version of their apps. While the iPhone has a head start, Android has the potential to equal and perhaps even surpass it on the application front.