Google G1: A first look at the first phone

Neither Google nor T-Mobile would even pronounce the name of their obvious rival at the launch event for the search giant's first mobile phone today, but anyone picking up a G1 when it comes to the UK in November will immediately compare it to the iPhone.

Firstly, the G1 looks more like a phone than its rival - it has the traditional red and green call buttons, plus helpful 'back' and 'home' buttons if you make a mistake - and a track ball like a BlackBerry which can be used as a mouse for anyone who finds touchscreens too confusing. The biggest difference, however, is the full qwerty keypad that appears when the screen is slid to one side. The buttons look tiny but are remarkably responsive and generate fewer mistakes than the iPhone's virtual keypad.

But the G1 is heavier and bulkier than the Apple device and, frankly, just not as physically attractive. The technology in the G1 is at least as good, and in some cases better, than the iPhone - the G1 is faster at downloading from the internet and its camera is better - but it lacks the wow factor that the Apple device had when it appeared last summer.

The G1's touchscreen, for instance, is as responsive as the iPhone's and the G1 has some clever innovations, such as press and hold to drag icons and photos around the device and a useful magnifying glass that can be dragged across web pages to increase the size of individual portions of the screen. But the ability to enlarge pages by just pressing two fingers on the screen and moving them apart as you can on an iPhone is, for want of a better word, cooler. Making calls, sending emails and texts, chatting on instant messenger, surfing the web, using contacts and calendars are all just a press of a finger or click of the track ball away on the G1, just like on the iPhone.

It has a music player which will take MP3 files as well as tracks from iTunes that do not have digital copyright protection. When it launches in the UK, the phone will have a removable 2GB memory card, which should be able to store several hundred songs.

The real difference between the two devices, however, is likely to come from the openness of Google's operating system, called Android, which enables tech-heads to design 'widgets' for the phone. There is a button on the G1 that takes users to an application marketplace (think iTunes without the music) where they can download anything from a virtual compass to a barcode reader that uses the phone's camera to read barcodes on items and then connects to the internet to find the cheapest price for them.

As the name shows the G1 is the first phone that uses Android and it is a very good effort, but for the time being the iPhone still seems to have the edge.