News-Record.com

On beauty vs. utilitarianism:

"Call me shallow if you must, but I'd call myself human: we respond to physical elegance in people and in objects and the G1 is a lumpen, crooked, creaking slab. (That creaking comes from hinges on the flip-up screen that reveals the keyboard, which makes an altogether more appealingly solid clack.) And the ugliness extends into the operating system itself, which at a minimum needs to update its icon set. The colorful, rounded icon have never been Google's most attractive corporate hallmark, but at least on the web they indicated a down-to-businessness that had a certain charm. On the phone, however, they just look chintzy."

On websurfing:

"The web browser, while marred by the inexplicable lack of multitouch support in the touchscreen, is very good, rending most web pages like its real, grown-up desktop counterparts."

On Google integration:

Integration with Google services, of which I am a heavy user, is excellent, as was instant messaging. (Although the G1's IM experience still does not match that of the years-old Sidekick, it's getting close.)

On the much hyped "Compass Mode":

"My most anticipated feature, the "Compass Mode" that makes Google Maps' Street View into a sort of augmented reality, did not work very well at all, operating too slowly and too imprecisely to serve as even a demonstration of the phone's whizbanginess to friends."

Overall:

"For now, the T-Mobile G1 is a solid, utilitarian phone, which I can recommend without question to those looking for a basic modern smartphone."

We've all had our hearts broken by gadget hype -- and Johnson does actually address the continuum of gadget love in the review itself:

"Products are not simply loved or hated, but appreciated over time on a scale which terminates with perfection at one extreme, failure to operate at the other. That scale can be broken down in any number of metrics, all of which are useless: what matters to the owner of a product is not where a reviewer, a single sample, has chosen to mark his opinion at an arbitrary point in time on the scale, but in what direction that point is heading. (And to a lesser and murkier degree, for how long that trend will continue.)

What's lost in the review — the direction of love — is critical. Like romantic love, a slide towards increasing love helps us overlook flaws, remember only the best aspects of our products' features, and gives the relationship between a product and its owner time to flourish and grow. Hidden delights will show themselves after a time, reinforcing the relationship, even as unaddressed incompatibilities might, after a measure, begin to tilt affection towards declination."