I’ve had the G1 for a while now, and have found a few things that are must-haves both in hardware and software.
First, the Innocell 1400mAh Extended Life Battery from Seidio is a must. The original stock battery would not get me through a day unless I plugged it in at least once at my desk during the day. If I turned WiFi or any other options (location, Bluetooth, GPS) on during the day, and did a moderate amount of surfing in meetings, I was done. This new battery seems to last a lot longer, and allows me to use the phone off and on throughout the day, with WiFi, and without any problems. Much happier. Too bad T-Mobile didn’t ship this with the phone…
Next, for work email, the K-9 mail application. This app works far faster with remote IMAP servers than the default one, and has a lot of good support for Exchange server. It’s also got a great interface for quickly deleting and reading messages, and actually supports deleting messages on a remote IMAP server, which the default app doesn’t either. It has a streaamlined interface especially if you have the phone opened with the keyboard exposed – one line per email message – very efficient.
Of course, Anycut is a must for creating shortcuts to other apps elsewhere.
Another great application is dgAlert Prefs – it allows you to customize what happens when you get an SMS. The default sound choices for me, and lack of repeatability and control were always a bother. I get a decent amount of SMSes for work related purposes, and want to make sure if I miss one, it re-notifies me. dgAlert does this, as well as allows you to control the LED color and blinking when a message is received. It takes a bit to set it up as the UI is a bit rough, but it has worked very well for me since then.
Another one for SMS is Chomp SMS. It has an iPhone like interface and works even with the keyboard hidden – nice for a quick SMS. The screen space and key size in that mode are a little hard to use sometimes, but it’s better than opening the whole keyboard.
The last one is PixelPipe. This app allows me to snap a bunch of pictures, and then add titles and details and upload to Flickr with a quick click. It’s also capable of sending photos a lot of other places.
