Hardware is mildly disappointing. Not as nice "feeling" as the iPhone (though the 3G iPhone also now has a plastic back and doesn't feel as nice as the first-gen iPhone, so I guess things are tough all over). When taking the back off to put in the battery and SIM card, I felt like it was going to break. It didn't, but it felt like it was. Likewise for the little covers for the data/charge port and the SD memory slot...they're plastic and tiny and feel fragile. The one exception is the keypad, which feels very nice to me. Since I used a Sidekick for many years, everything feels very intuitive to me (where, as usual, "intuitive" means, "what I'm used to"). But, keeping in mind that the G1 is dramatically cheaper than the iPhone 3G ($179 up front and cheaper per month for the plan--though I haven't actually looked at different plans, I just kept the one I've been on, which is about $10 cheaper than iPhone--so $240 over 2 years), I think it's a great buy, and a whole lot of hardware for a very small price. Price wasn't my primary deciding factor (openness was), but it certainly didn't hurt that I wouldn't have to pay more per month to upgrade to the G1, while I'd pay out $240 more over 2 years for the iPhone 3G for the same service. I'm going to see if I can drop down to a smaller voice plan--the Sidekick I had before had minimum plan requirements, but I didn't see any such requirements when signing up for the G1, so I might even be able to save $10 per month with the G1 over the Sidekick, since I never use the phone. I use maybe 100 minutes per month of a 1000 minute plan.

Software-wise, it's plain awesome. I find it pretty intuitive...the lack of two-finger gestures, as found on the iPhone, is somewhat disappointing, but it's no slower to use the popup magnifier buttons, once you're accustomed to it. Dragging and such is smooth and accurate, so I guess the touch screen is pretty good quality.

Contacts works well, the phone sounds good and clear, having Google mail, contacts, calendar, etc. is sweet (my old phone couldn't handle more than about 500 messages via IMAP, and I get more messages than that in a week, and obviously GMail just works great with practically infinite mail). Web pages look great, and browsing is fast. WiFi was quick and easy to setup. YouTube videos work great, both on 3G and on WiFi. It's my understanding that T-Mobile's 3G network is still somewhat small...so if you don't live in the valley, your mileage may vary, but it works fine for me here in Mountain View.

I installed an Open Source ssh client off of the web--no jail breaking required...this was a big issue for me with the iPhone. I don't want to have to have permission to install arbitrary apps that I've written or someone else has written. I also installed Compare Anywhere, and a bubble game from the app store, and the quality of everything is really slick. Really impressive for a launch day catalog, especially since everything is free right now. I haven't spent a lot of time with the apps on the iPhone, so I don't have much to compare to. But, I'm excited to play with stuff.

Also, it worked right away when I plugged it into my Linux desktop. No futzing around with weird stuff to get songs onto the device. The iPhone/iPod is a bitch in that regard. That one thing made me ecstatic in ways I haven't felt over a device in a long time. Coming off of years of screwing around with iPods and an iPhone, and it never quite working right, having a drag and drop music experience is miraculous. (Take this with a grain of salt, as I may be strange. I find iTunes incredibly confusing and difficult to use, so on those occasions when I've given up on getting Linux to work and rebooted into Windows and run iTunes for the purpose of putting music onto the device, I've ended up spending a long time futzing around anyway, because I never could figure out what all the syncing options meant or how to use them...so every time I would fiddle until something happened, and occasionally it would just end up deleting all of my songs either on the PC or the device, and I would give up in disgust. I also have trouble using several other Apple software products, and find them hard to use, so I could just be a retard.)