Fascinating new thing

So, you all know how I love gadgets; I've commented before on the awesomeness of my current phone and its model successors. Well, I think I've found a new object for my phone lust: the T-Mobile G1 with Google.

Pros:

• The carrier. The sexiest thing about this phone for me may be the fact that it's for T-Mobile ... I'm darn tired of buying phones made exclusively for other companies that I have to get unlocked on eBay, and T-Mobile's plans - especially for data - are way too affordable to think of switching to crazy expensive AT&T.
• The keyboard. I can't give enough praise to phones with full QWERTY keyboards; I wouldn't be able to text, email or blog on my phone nearly as much without this feature. I also like the particular way this keyboard slides out, although I do have some concerns about the durability of that mechanism over time with heavy use.
• The price. $179.99 with a 2-year contract that I'd sign up for in any case no matter what phone I have? Sold! There is an additional $18 "upgrade fee" they throw in there that I think is kind of BS, but it's still far more reasonable than most other phones hot off the presses, with these features.
  
• Google integration. Google continues to take over the world, but they make the experience of their conquest so pleasant! The most amazing of the Google features on here is the Google Maps with street view (seriously awesome) but the quick access to GMail and Google searching is also a huge plus.
• It's pretty! Following the form of the iPhone, we've got nice pure black or white for the color, and a big, beautiful touchscreen. The additional thickness compared to the super-slim iPhone is for the functionality of the keyboard, which I'd totally rather have.

Cons:

• No video recording capability. While the phone has a 3.2 megapixel camera, which is great, it seems that you can't shoot video with it. And although most of my PDA-based photography is stills, I do shoot an occasional video. Not a deal breaker, but it is a flaw, in my opinion.
• So-so picture quality. At least in low indoor lighting, this phone doesn't seem to take the best quality of pictures, and I had better control over options related to lighting settings with my 8125's measly 1.3MP. With good lighting the photos seem fine, but I wish the camera was just a bit better.
• No headphone jack. Exactly what it sounds like; although you can connect a headset via Bluetooth, but not stereo Bluetooth. I do have a Bluetooth headset, so this isn't the worst issue ever, but it's kind of an odd thing to leave out.
  
• No stylus. This is a problem common to many of the new touchscreens, not just the G1; the designers seem to assume that you won't ever want a stylus. However, stylii provide greater touching accuracy when your fingers aren't doing the trick as well, and they also allow me to still do touchscreen stuff in cold weather with gloves on. The stylus might be the backup instead of the primary touch tool, but I still think it should be included. Again, probably not a deal breaker, but very annoying.

Questions:

• PDA functionality? I am an extremely heavy PDA user; it's the main reason why I have a phone with that kind of function included. I need a strong calendar, contacts list, tasks and notes - much more than the entertainment and info features of a PDA phone, delightful and useful as they are. The G1 is set up to draw the PDA information from your Google contacts and calendar; but software isn't yet available to sync with Outlook (although developers are working on it). I also find that the PDA functions on the phone don't have the same level of detail field as I currently have in Outlook both on my PC and on my phone; you still get the basic info that I need most of the time, but I like the additional details Outlook gives. There isn't a task list at all right now (although, to be fair, I'm hardly using my task list at the moment), and there also isn't a notes application (which I use fairly regularly). I expect that these things will be developed soon ... but can I wait? I did find that there is pretty inexpensive software out there that will let me sync my Calendar and Contacts from Outlook to Google pretty effectively, and those are the two ones that I absolutely can't live without.
  
• How much storage space? If this was in the specs listed on the G1 site, I may have just missed it; but I need to make sure that there's a good size base memory on the phone as well as the option to expand with a memory card. It does come with a 1GB card included, which rocks ... expandable to 8GB.
  

My last question was also about whether or not I really needed the phone; at the time that I started to look at info on the G1, my current phone still worked very well, even if it was banged up (from about 7 too many drops) and required a restart more often than I'd like. It still has plenty of life left, despite being a little slow ... but this morning, the sync port on my phone broke, rendering it basically useless as a PDA. Initially, I wasn't going to go buy the G1 immediately, although it was the first phone that got me so excited that I really wanted to be an early adopter. But while I'd normally wait for user reviews and more tech analysis prior to any final decision, I need a phone that syncs ASAP, so I'm ordering this Friday.

Honestly, I can't say that I'm too disappointed ... even though I wasn't planning to purchase a phone just yet, I was also hoping for a good excuse. Some of the reviews are saying that this is really more of a phone that geeks are getting excited about, because it doesn't yet have all the features that would make it easy to use and appealing for the mass consumer; but I'm a total geek, and all the talk about the open source operating system does, in fact, make me really excited to be supporting this phone over the proprietary platforms of Palm, Microsoft or Apple. I can't wait for all of the apps that are going to be developed, and I love so many of the features of the phone that the ones it doesn't have I can definitely live with. You'll be hearing more from me within the next few weeks about my soon-to-be new phone - stay tuned!