Google’s G2 Smartphone Review

There is something exciting about the new T-Mobile G2 phone with Google, but I cannot say it’s the phone itself.

Maybe I’ve gotten far too accustomed to the niceties of Android phones to be impressed with the new G2. But there is one thing that comes with the G2 that you don’t get with any other phone, and that is the T-Mobile HSPA+ network.

HSPA+ is a faster version of T-Mobile’s existing system. It isn’t really 4G, but it does get close to 4G speeds with the right phone and in the right place. At the moment, the right phone is the G2, the only phone that works at maximum available speed. And where I live, in Baltimore, the right place is less than a mile from my house, so it was easy to give the phone a thorough workout.

First, the phone. The G2 is a trim half-inch thick phone with a 3.7-inch touch screen, a spacious flip-out, backlit keyboard, and a mini track pad for screen navigation. It has a very solid feel for its 6.5 ounces. The touchscreen required some work to use—it was not as sensitive as some others I’ve used recently and required several taps to operate small control buttons on some screens.

The phone comes with the Android 2.2 operating system, which means you will be able to see most Web sites and animations that use Adobe Flash, a program very commonly used to add movement to Web sites. All the usual Google goodies are well integrated as well, like Gmail, and the OS includes Voice Actions, Google Goggles, Maps, Navigation and more. The music player can play most common audio files.

The G2 comes with a 5 megapixel camera with an LED flash and can record video in 720p.

These are all features that can be found on other Android phones. What makes the phone special is the network. T-Mobile is at work improving its HSPA network into something called HSPA+. The speeds it can achieve in theory are fast — including 21 megabits per second downloads. That means a two-hour movie would download in about five minutes, which is twice as fast as WiMax, a true 4G network.

Now for a dose of reality. Networks seldom — if ever — reach their theoretical speeds. And HSPA+ is greatly affected by how close you are to a tower. T-Mobile gave me two “optimal locations,” one within a half mile of my office, the other about one mile away. In my office, the average download was .7 megabits per second. A movie would take more than two hours load at that speed. It is possible that I was not even on the HSPA+ network. When parked in the “optimal location,” the average download speed was 5.7 megabits per second. A two-hour movie would load in about 20 minutes at that speed. Interestingly, it was faster than Wi-Fi, which averaged 3 megabits per second.

To understand how fast that is, compare it to the HTC EVO, the first WiMax 4G phone, on which I got an average speed of 3.7 megabits per second (Sprint said it should have been faster). The advantage with the EVO was that I could get that speed in more areas than I could get the fastest speed of the G2.

But T-Mobile’s HSPA+ adds no extra cost to your contract. You can think of it as a bonus: You’ll sometimes be surprised with extra speed, and the rest of the time it’s like a normal phone. Not so with the EVO. Sprint charges an extra $10 a month for WiMax service, with no guarantee that you’ll get it. That’s not a bonus, it’s a gamble.

The G2 is $200 after rebate and with a two year agreement.

source: nytimes