For the past couple years, I’ve had the T-Mobile Dash Windows Mobile phone.  It’s been a nice phone but not great.  It’s broken a couple times, crashes too often, requires me to carry an extra battery around just to get through the day and gives me an inadequate browsing experience based on the IE4 browser it is running.  It also only has Edge so it’s pretty slow.  On the plus side, it does a great job with Exchange and IMAP email which is 90% of what I do with it so I’m pretty happy.  The keyboard works, the form factor is good and, not to mention, it works very well as a phone.

I’ve been envious of my friends with their 3G IPhones.  They can browse any where on the internet they want at reasonable speeds, seems that anything they want they tell me there is an app for that, they say the lack of a keyboard is not much of a problem (they lie), and the fact that it does crash and it is not a very good phone, also doesn’t seem to bother them.

As a “what the hec” type decision, I stopped by a t-mobile store and bought a new Android G1.  they come with a 30 day return policy so I figured I could see if I would fall in love with it.  After all, it’s made by HTC who makes great phones, has a full keyboard, a nice form factor, 3G, wifi, GPS, tilt, etc.

Well, back it goes tomorrow.

Bottom line, the keyboard is awkward, it has no auto completion so typing is really slow on the awkward keyboard, there is no on screen keyboard (yet) which means to reply to an email to just say OK means you have to open the phone, position your hands perfectly, type the message, then close it again.  It lets you take pictures upside down (what is the good of a title sensor if you can do that) as well as other show stoppers.  Battery life is better than my DASH, but not much.  Bluetooth doesn’t work that well and the most amazing thing is that the gmail reader just totally sucks.  No where can i find a next or previous message button which means reading more than one email at a time is a huge hassle.  You think Google would have at least gotten that right.

Anyhow, I just thought I should share.

Anyone have the perfect phone?  Comment below!