I had mixed results using the phone features. I found it easy to misalign the G1's speaker against my ear, which made it hard to hear the other party and some people I talked to noted that the sound quality of my voice was not as good as it was when I used my iPhone. 

In messaging, the G1 bests the iPhone in sheer functionality, since it's capable of receiving and sending not just text messages, but also audio files, pictures, and even slideshows as well. 

Web of shadows

Android's built-in Web browser is based on the same WebKit engine as the iPhone's version of Safari. As on the iPhone, you can open multiple windows for browsing, bookmark pages, and share pages via email. But Android's browser has a number of features you won't find in Safari, including the ability to download files, remember form data (including logins and passwords if you choose), clear cookies, open links in the background, disable image loading, and more. There's also built-in support for Google Gears, a framework that allows you to use Google Documents and some other Google applications even while you're offline.

Unfortunately, the usability of Android's browser is limited by a few factors: among them the lack of multitouch functionality. There's no pinch-and-zoom as there is on the iPhone; instead, when you scroll, you get a translucent bar at the bottom of the screen with zoom in and zoom out buttons, along with another button that gives you a full-screen view of the page. In that mode, you can drag a loupe-like viewer around; when you release your finger, the view will zoom in on that section of the page.