Reblog: G1 at the Races

This weekend I was in Homestead for NASCAR's Ford Championship weekend. While maybe we might think that gadgets and NASCAR don't go together but you'd be surprised. Between the radio scanners and 'FANVIEW' (a great handheld tv screen to catch all the action)... and then the variety of cameras, and binoculars... and then the phones. NASCAR premier league, the Sprint Cup Series is sponsored by Sprint (was Nextel before the merger, and historically the Winston Cup). So Between Sprint advertising the Samsung Instinct everywhere, the numerous people with iPhones (and there were a lot) and then almost every make and model of phones out there... well I think my point is made, gadgets and NASCAR tend to go hand in hand.... This said, I was probably the only person I saw with a T-Mobile G1 at the track, and I did notice a number of 'curiosity' looks from people around me anytime I pulled out my phone.

So like I said, this weekend I was back home in South Florida for the NASCAR weekend. My first surprise was the phone reception... historically I've been with AT&T (well Cingular and Bellsouth Mobility before that) and I always had great reception, then last year when I went down after switching to T-Mobile, my Treo 650 had no reception (it worked perfectly fine the year before). So this year when my new G1 worked flawlessly I was amazed, I even had 3G.

Then secondly, I've heard many a complaint about the G1 and the camera, and actually I've heard similar complaints about the iPhone camera. Most of these complaints I heard relate to speed of taking a picture... well what do you expect a DSLR experience... so anyways I was not worried. I'd taken a number of pictures from the G1 already and I new that it was slow but it worked. At the same time, I like to watch the race with both eyes not through a camera lens... so I wasn't worried about taking a regular digital camera with me. Then when there I decided, heck why not try the camera out. This was my big surprise... well it didn't work well when the cars went flying by at 130MPH, but overall I was pleasantly surprised... the 3MP camera took some great shots, not perfect, but I can definitely live with these.

here is a collection of photos I took this past weekend, all from the G1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickc_321/sets/72157609359728904/