Here at Trileet we like to keep our eye on what is going on across all platforms, and that means playing with some of the new phones as they come out. Today, we picked up our very own HTC G1 loaded with Google's great hope for a consumer phone OS, Android.

I must admit there was a good deal of excitement in the office over this phone and OS. It seemed to combine what we loved most about the Sidekick (great messaging, physical keyboard) and the iPhone (incredible browser, clever touchscreen). Sadly as can often be the case, the G1 in our eyes is worse than both, somehow failing on almost all fronts.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the fault doesn't fall on the hardware. Although it has a few odd design decisions, such as the upturned 'tail', overall it works well: the screen is excellent and the keyboard almost up to Sidekick standards. Having dedicated 'back' and 'menu' buttons is a welcome change from the iPhone and they are usually put to good use.

The real failure falls on the software, primarily in the quality (or lack thereof) of all the essential and built in apps.

The browser, which is perhaps the best app on the phone, is still frustrating for anyone used to an iPhone. That Google didn't pick up on how well done the zooming was on the iPhone is incredible. When viewing a full website on an iPhone, you first see the entire page zoomed out. From there it is easy to double tap on a block of text and have it instantly zoom in to exactly the correct size for reading. This works incredibly well across various sites who all put their content in different places. Although the gPhone supports a similar experience, it is more frustrating than useful. The zooming and navigation buttons only appear after panning the page a bit and are awkward to use. Sadly, this is the best app on the device, and even here I find the experience lacking.

When it comes to messaging, the G1 really can't compare with the sidekick. Even gmail, which you would expect to be a slam dunk has many obvious features missing. Why can't I archive a message using the delete button the keyboard? The gmail threading view carries over from the website, but doesn't work as well here, having to scroll to the bottom of the screen to see the latest reply is ridiculous on a mobile device. As for IM, I was at first excited to see the inclusion of all the big networks, but again, the implementation leaves a lot behind. It seems that although they run in the background, there is no proxy in between as there is on the Sidekick, so disconnects are frequent and you will miss messages entirely when in a tunnel instead of just having them delayed as you would on the Sidekick. Their implementation is better than the iPhone which suffers from the lack of having background apps, but light years behind the Sidekick.

The G1 to me feels like a Gnome or KDE desktop of five years ago. Ambitious, but without a unified view of how things should work, without polish. It is correctly said that the last 10% of any software project takes 50% of the work, I can't help but feel that Google stopped well before reaching that 90% mark, there are just too many rough edges. Little things such as the 'spring' that the iPhone uses when having scrolled past the top or bottom of a list are little, but incredibly powerful as interface guidelines that your interaction is being recorded.

In many respects, Google has really given itself a huge amount of rope when specing these handsets. Making a UI that makes it obvious when to use the screen and when to use the keyboard without frustrating the user is hard, and here they have done horribly. That I can't type in someone's phone number in the address book without opening the keyboard is ridiculous. The list of places where they failed in the UI department is long, too long to list, it does not feel like a production device or OS.

It will be interesting to see whether they manage to improve this. My experience with other open source projects is that the UI never matches what you get from a commercial product guided by a dedicated design team. This seems to hold true here. Just as Windows fails on phones because it tries to be Windows, Google fails here. They went for minimalism but left out a lot of utility.

It's a neat device, but incredibly immature and not something I would ever recommend.