I received the T-Mobile G1 running Android yesterday and played with it essentially all evening. A few thoughts below, for those who care. (Sorry regular readers, this is a post for those who find this blog from Google…)

• I thought I would be downloading games, but interestingly enough I haven’t even touched those yet. In fact, the application I’ve spent the most time so far is “Settings”
• This is the first time I’ve had a data plan on a phone. While the possibilities are endless, I wonder how much value I will actually get out of it over time. I bike to/from work and don’t travel much, so I don’t get a lot of the entertainment value that others might. We’ll see how I feel in a month
• I would love to start writing apps for this thing, but unfortunately my old laptop has only USB 1.1, which is unsupported

More specific stuff:

• As is well documented, the POP/IMAP email client is a train wreck
• I keep pressing “Menu” when I mean “Back”.
• Task switching is annoying. I would love part of the Notification bar to be a list of open apps.
• The included headphones and USB-to-headphone extension are really really annoying! The combination is massive, with overly long cables, and the included headphones sound tinny and get tangled in everything.
• SSH and FTP seems straightforward (ConnectionBot and AndFTP). Nice touch to be able to log into any of my servers from my phone. However, there is an annoying ConnectionBot bug – all of my private keys need to be in the root directory of my SD card
• New version called “Cupcake” coming out soon. On-screen vertical-orientation keyboard seems like a good thing. Hopefully it also fixes email
• Google Voice Search seems like a gimmick. First, it doesn’t really work well (I said “Chocolate Grape” and got back “Chocolate Cake“). Second, to use it I have to 1.) Enter my password, 2.) Bring up the applications menu, 3.) Scroll down, 4.) Press “Voice Search”. Too much effort.