Android Portal

As of today, T-Mobile Germany is accepting preorders for its new flagship phone, the G1. Prices range from 1 Eur to 59 Eur for the device, depending on which data plan you choose. T-Mobile offers four different plans:

“XS”, monthly fee of 25 Eur + 59 Eur -> G1

“S”, monthly fee of 45 Eur + 1 Eur -> G1

“M”, monthly fee of 59 Eur + 1 Eur -> G1

“L”, monthly fee of 120 Eur + 1 Eur -> G1

So make sure you order “one” before they are all sold out :)

A few days before before christmas we received a white box labeled “Android Dev Phone 1″. Early Santa indeed. After seconds of unpacking I held the Android handset in my own hands. The first impression of the device was: robust, brown colored and with a slightly smaller screen than my current Iphone. Of course I had to take a blurry picture of the “process” with my Iphone:

After freeing it from its box, I immediately inserted my O2 Germany SIM Card. After a few seconds of booting I was prompted to touch the “Android” (Whoaaaa) ;) Now it was time to enter my Google Account. I was a bit disappointed that I could not use my Wifi access point. So I had to do some online research to find out the correct APN settings for O2 Germay because the device itself only has predefined APNs for T-Mobile, obviously. For all people looking to use the Dev Phone or G1 with O2 Germany please use “surfo2″ or “internet” as APN Name. That’s all the info you need to get a working connection to Google’s server.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m current using an Iphone, so the big question was:

How do I get my contacts and music from the Iphone to the new Android phone?

The solutions were relatively simple:
For music, just connect your Mac/PC via USB and simply copy all your music folders to the external drive (YOUR Phone). No DRM, no Itunes, just copy and paste to your heart’s content. This is one of the features I missed with the Iphone: Transferring data from Mac/Mobiles to Iphone without having to install a bunch of additional apps.

For contacts, if you are using  MAC OSX, just use the built-in sync utility and you are fine. If not, and you are using a PC with Windows just sync your Iphone with Itunes. Then you have all the contacts in your Windows address book. Now the only thing you have to do is: Export the contacts via CSV and upload the generated CSV file into your Google Mail account.

Now you should have your contacts inside your Gmail Account. Now wait a couple of minutes with your device connected either via 3g or WIfi and Android will sync your Gmail Data with your Android phone. Or if you don’t want to wait: Just enter the settings menu of your phone and trigger a contacts sync manually.

That’s all for the first part of my “Android Dev Phone testing experience”.

Next part will be about everyday use, battery life and the installed Android Market.

PS: Thanks to Open-Xchange.com (Raf in particular) for making it possible to test this really cool mobile device.