Hands On With the New GPhone by in Technology / November 9th, 2007
Last week, Google announced the new GPhone, their entry into the mobile phone market. While some pundits have worried about the state of their wireless software standard (“Android”), most have overlooked the hardware aspect, and how it impacts the user experience. PTTBT got a pre-release version of the GPhone from our anonymous Taiwanese insider friend, Jimmy Phong, and took it for a spin…
The GPhone is considerably thinner than most modern phones. Coming in at about 5mm thick (1.5 inches), you can actually bend it into a shallow “C” shape if you try hard enough. The only thing preventing it from being the perfect tight-fitting-jeans phone is that its edges are lined with razor-sharp aluminum plating (it looks cool, but hurts like the dickens).
Along the top of the device are the standard phone buttons: on/off, mute, speaker, handsfree, redial, flash, pause, rewind and I’m Feeling Lucky (each button is about half the width of your finger). The entire front of the phone is a gorgeous 1080p HD plasma display, which unfortunately makes the phone come in at about 15 lbs.
The casing is a polished white, with a fold-out full-size keyboard at the back. Unfortunately, the positioning of the keyboard means you can’t see what you’re typing as you write it, but sources indicate this may be part of a larger social-networking scheme Google has planned to combat Facebook.
The GPhone has no hard drive, but instead connects wirelessly to Google’s new interstellar server array orbiting Venus. Despite the distance, the response time was good, and we had no trouble editing a PowerPoint document while driving to the office last week. Receiving emails was somewhat problematic at times, as GMail’s new IMAP server is more skittish than a meth addict cashier at a drug store.
But perhaps the biggest value of the GPhone is that it’s an iPhone killer. Literally. When the GPhone detects Apple hardware within a 5-metre radius, a small high-power laser beam fires out of the IR port to obliterate the competition. At first we thought it just didn’t like Reggie, our Sales Manager here at PTTBT, but when we brought it to Starbucks, the GPhone reduced half the tables to smoking piles of molten MacBook in just under half a minute.
All in all, the GPhone is a welcome addition to the fast-paced mobile landscape. They should be start selling in North American stores near the start of December, possibly under the same development branding we saw: “DARPA: Top Secret”.
