Sliding the G1 open reveals a more-or-less standard QWERTY keyboard. While some might prefer the physical keyboard, I found myself longing for the iPhone's virtual one. The reason, for me, is that I, like most people, use my thumbs to type on small keyboards. Because the thumb is a rather large, imprecise digit, it can hit many possible buttons at once--more to the point, it obscures the keys when you use them, making it hard to tell exactly which key you're hitting or if you're hitting the wrong key. The iPhone solves this problem in a few ways: for example, by giving you a pop-up that tells you which letter you're on and by not allowing you to press two keys at once. It also features aggressive--occasionally too aggressive--error-correcting, a feature it shares with the G1. On the whole, I found typing on the G1 more onerous than on the iPhone, but that may simply be a matter of my longer experience using the iPhone. 

I have a second, more particular gripe with the G1's keyboard, and that's the fact that some design genius has moved the Delete key to the location usually occupied by the Return key, meaning that you frequently end up deleting things when you mean to enter them (the Return key is now directly below the Delete key and is only denoted with an arrow, enhancing the confusion). If the whole point of going with something as familiar as a QWERTY layout is not having to make users change their habits, then that's quite the misstep.

That's not the only annoyance with the G1's hardware. There's also no standard headphone jack on the G1; in order to plug in your headphones, you need to use the included extender cable, which plugs into the port on the bottom of the G1. At least the cable offers additional features; it has both a built-in hands-free mic and a control button that you can use for playing and pausing music or muting/unmuting your voice while you're on a phone call.

The obvious flaw here is requiring a separate cable to perform a run-of-the-mill function like listening to music. The first-generation iPhone took plenty of flack for a recessed headphone jack that wouldn't physically accommodate many third-party headphone plugs; the G1 seems to have willfully ignored that lesson. There's also a secondary issue: since there's only one port on the G1, you can't both listen to music on headphones and charge the unit at the same time.

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