I basically have the mobile phone I want, and that is awesome

My G1, in its rooted gloryI just real­ized that I, basi­cal­ly, have the mobile phone I want. I use a T‑Mobile G1 (HTC Dream), root­ed, SIM-unlocked, and run­ning the great Cyanogen­MOD.

I could not real­ly say this about my pre­vi­ous phone, a Palm OS Treo. Though it had its strengths (read: the orga­niz­er fea­tures), I bought it pret­ty much right before the first iPhone was announced, which, for bet­ter or worse, rede­fined what a smart­phone would be.1

My affin­i­ty for the G1 re-occurred to me as I opened the Ter­mi­nal app to check some­thing. I slid the screen open with a sat­is­fy­ing click, typed su and checked that some­thing. I want­ed to go back a bit through my shel­l’s com­mand his­to­ry, and a quick flip of the track­ball made easy work of that.

Sure, I have my gripes… it’s a lit­tle slug­gish some­times, com­plete­ly short on app stor­age space (root­ing fixed that) and takes the crap­pi­est videos I’ve ever seen (worse than my circa-2001 Nikon CoolPix). And now that new­er Android devices are out, I com­plete­ly have 1 GHz CPU-envy, high-res screen-envy, and Android 2.1‑envy (Google Earth, want!).

But for the fore­see­able future, my G1 and I are cool. Its form fac­tor is per­fect. Its phys­i­cal key­board is unmatched by new­er devices with cramped lay­outs. It’s clear­ly no svelte iPhone, but it’s not too chunky either.

My sat­is­fac­tion is matched only by my antic­i­pa­tion for what­ev­er could mate­ri­al­ize in the future and top this. Bring it, future!


  1. By this, I most­ly mean “have a real web brows­er,” not “have no native app sup­port and a charis­mat­ic CEO try to con­vince you that you don’t real­ly want apps on your smart­phone, any­way.”[]

5 thoughts on “I basically have the mobile phone I want, and that is awesome”

    1. Well, I prob­a­bly would have stayed on Sprint until the Pre came out and assessed it at that point. Thanks for mak­ing me make the hasty (albeit cor­rect) decision!

      (You know, the Pre runs Lin­ux as well, and has been root­ed. Seri­ous­ly tiny key­board, though.)

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