The keyboard, however, had nice, comfortable feel to it; Think leather sofa rather than cheap and nasty, second-hand floral design given to you by a relative.
We're not sold on the fact that the screen only flips into landscape mode when you activate the keyboard and felt that the spring action could get users in trouble, with our right thumb's skin getting pinched by its speedy Gonzalez-like action more than once.
We're still a bit miffed by the snubbing of Exchange support, but what support the G1 does offer (POP3 and IMAP) it does well. We were expecting to wait for it to sync up with our Gmail account, but everything was on a plate for us within 30 seconds, which is pretty impressive.
The fact that new email messages and texts to boot appear via a notification in the top left of the handset is still a winner as far as we're concerned. Just pressing the icon alone doesn't activate it; you have to press down quite hard to drag said message out of the rafters and into the main spotlight. Wave goodbye to accidental commands through trigger-happy touchscreen swiping.
With HSDPA connectivity of up to 7.2Mbps, surfing the web on the G1 is a pleasant and speedy experience. In our tests, the BBC news homepage rendered well, appearing in its entirety akin to a desktop - but a mini one. It did look a little squashed and far away like we'd just put on a pair of glasses with the wrong prescription but zooming in and out thankfully - was easy using the magnify and minimise buttons.
The G1's Android-based UI was as slick and easy to use as we remembered from our first look and dragging icons to the desktop - with the reassuring buzz of haptic feedback is done with the greatest of ease.
We became a little addicted to the back and home buttons below the screen but almost unhealthily obsessed by the menu button, which brings up context-sensitive menu options depending on what you've got open at the time.
