Hardware

On the front of the device, the glass, capacitive screen is surrounded by a silver band, and HTC has chucked off the trackball for a BlackBerry Bold-esque optical trackpad. You've got the standard Android hard touch buttons here, and we can attest to much better tracking on these than with the Nexus One. On the right side of the phone is a two-stage camera button and release latch, on top is a power / sleep button and 3.5mm headphone jack, and the left side of the phone sports a volume rocker and micro USB slot. Around back is the 5 megapixel camera's lens alongside an LED flash.
Of course, this isn't just a touchscreen device -- the face of the phone slides and pivots up (using HTC's "z-hinge") to reveal a full QWERTY landscape keyboard. Now a lot of fuss has been made about this hinge design, and we can tell you that the reports are mostly true. The hinge works beautifully, but if you tilt the phone so that gravity is working on the screen, it will slide back down or dangle. It just doesn't lock tightly into the "open" position. This wasn't really a problem in nearly all of our use, but it will be a major bummer if you're planning on laying down and holding this above you while typing. Besides the very minor hinge issue, the keyboard itself is one of the best landscape QWERTYs we've ever used. The keys are excellently sized and shaped, and have a good bit of space between them. The tactile feel of the keys was just clicky enough to reassure, but not too stiff to move quickly. Additionally, HTC thoughtfully has included three dedicated quick keys which can be user assigned to just about anything, and the keyboard has a standalone "www / .com" key -- a big help. If you like landscape keyboards, it'll be tough to find a superior choice.
Overall, from a visual standpoint the G2 is a handsome phone which is well made, but it won't appeal to all tastes. It's a serious device, and we're fairly confident that for many in the Android community, this hits a lot of the right notes.
Internals

The G2 packs in a 1300mAh battery inside, and we found that it performed excellently in daily use, even with constant Twitter updates, lots of pushed email, browsing, and phone calls. You'll have to get the phone on a charger come nighttime, but for us that was pretty late in the day and we'd only just tapped orange on the battery icon. We were impressed by the phone's ability to sip juice even though it was pushing quite a bit of content over the network.
On the display side, we're happy that HTC went with an LCD panel for the G2, but there are still some visibility issues in direct sunlight. It's not impossible to see the screen, but it's not that easy either. Otherwise, colors looked far more balanced than what we've seen on a lot of AMOLED screens, blacks were deep, and text looked especially crisp.
Overall performance on the device was extremely speedy -- we never saw lag or stalls when switching between apps or opening tabs in the browser and loading pages. Don't let the 800MHz number fool you, the G2 is as fast or faster than most top-end Android phones we've used.
Phone / speakerphone / call quality
The earpiece on the G2 sounded excellent to us, and the most of the people we spoke with said it was all clear on the other end. We had a few calls where the other party said we had broken up, but it was unclear which phone was responsible. The phone software seems to be working better on the G2 than any previous Android 2.2 device we've used. Maybe it's the proximity sensor, but sensing when we had it against our ear or away was way faster and more accurate, and the phone just seemed to be generally snappier.
The speakerphone, unfortunately, was downright painful to our ears. It has a tinny, shrill sound that made taking hands-free calls unpleasant, and was a total non-starter for music. In a pinch it'll do, but we'd suggest getting yourself a good Bluetooth headset instead of having to hear the audio this phone puts out over the speaker.
Camera

Video recording suffers from artifacting, however, and lacks autofocus. Like other HTC phones, the G2 camera uses low bitrate codecs (like AMR), which result in visible compression artifacts and poor audio. While video recording improves marginally upon the Incredible / EVO 4G, it still falls short of the Galaxy S / Wave, the Droid X, and the iPhone 4. The G2 camera interface is stock Froyo and is shared with the Nexus One. It covers the basics, but we prefer the Sense interface, which features tap-to-focus and additional settings. As we said previously, the screen washes out in direct sunlight, making it difficult to properly frame shots. Overall, the G2 camera is solid but not mind-blowing. It's capable of excellent still shots and acceptable video, but it's not necessarily going to blow you away.
Software

Admittedly, there isn't anything here that's overwhelmingly offensive, but to have a phone that's so close to "pure" Android and have to be saddled with software you might not want is frustrating. Adding to that frustration is the fact that Google's Froyo-standard ability to use the phone as a tether for your laptop has been clipped out, and there's no Mobile Hotspot here either. That last point is doubly insulting considering the fact that T-Mobile's Cole Brodman made claims during the launch of the G1 that the company wouldn't stand in the way of tethering, and Verizon is throwing around hotspot apps like they're going out of style.
Other than those added or missing elements, this is Android the way Google intended it, which in the case of 2.2 means fast, significantly cleaned up, but still carrying around some 1.0 baggage, like the exceptionally bland music app. If you're looking for a fast, clean Android experience, the G2 more than delivers, and we're happy to see at least one device in the market that actually retains some of the natural spirit of Google's OS.
Network performance / HSPA+

When taking the phone out and about in NYC, we did experience a small taste of HSPA+, garnering slightly faster downloads on a few occasions (with most of our downstream speeds peaking at around 6 or 6.5 Mbps). The uptick was impressive, though not barnstorming. Of course, that's nowhere near the "theoretical" speeds of up to 21Mbps that T-Mobile touts, but again, the company is still building out this network. On 3G to 3G, the G2 did better than any CDMA handset we tested, but when it comes to HSPA+ vs. 4G, there's still a considerable gap.
Wrap-up

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