Android Market opens up and the G1 Achilles heel is exposed
By my last count there were 47 applications and 15 games available on Thursday afternoon. There are now even a couple of tip calculators ;) I downloaded a couple of new applications (official Twitroid release, JogTracker Beta, Ringdroid) to try out on my device and now have 27 applications and games loaded on my G1. My internal storage available currently shows up as 17MB so I don't have much more room to add applications. I hope that someone comes out with a utility to store applications on the microSD card or the benefit of having an "open" device with 3rd party application support may be lost.
I don't know if it is directly related to the large number of applications I have installed (requires further testing), but my G1 will often just sit there with a blank Home screen after I press the Home button or go back to the Home screen. It seems that the G1 doesn't cache the Home screen and dynamically builds it or something. After much use this weekend I also found it started to drag and have the pop-up warnings appear that I could force quit or wait for an application to respond. While I like the G1 for the most part, I don't think it is quite ready for the power user who wants to load lots of applications.
I also noted that a few games are now appearing with the word Demo in the title and and read the comments that indicate these games are extremely limited in functionality. I assume these games may eventually be released as paid games, thus the word demo in the title.
In addition to the limited amount of storage capacity for applications, I have also discovered what the real Achilles heel is to the G1 and that is battery life. I found I have to charge the device at least once during the day to make it through a full day with my standard, power usage practices. This covers about 1.5 hours of surfing in the browser (on my daily commute), Gmail/Calendar/Contacts sync enabled, no WiFi and limited (15 minutes) of Bluetooth, just over an hour of music/podcast listening, and about 20 minutes of phone calls. With WiFi or GPS enabled the battery goes down even faster. It would be nice to have time profiles for syncing with the Google servers as your device may actually die overnight if you don't plug it in. The good thing is that it used standard miniUSB to charge up and it charges very fast. I think we will eventually see 3rd party batteries with higher capacities come out, but it would be nice if HTC/Google would improve power management.