The G2 was/is a fantastic phone whichever way you looked at it. It had great premium construction, with brushed aluminum accents and matte gray soft-touch poly-like material. I woint go so far as to say it looked beautiful, but it was elegantly premium. and it looked like it meant business.

It's stand out feature was the slide-out keyboard... which to be totally fair i never ended up using. Not because it wasnt great, it was perhaps the best, slide-out keyboard period. The z-hinge felt flimsy, but was in fact very sturdy as time went on, it certainly proved it's worth.

The phone ran stock froyo on release and as such was extremely fast and responsive, even compared to higher end products with faster cpu's than it's 800mhz rumbler. When it was updated to stock gingerbread many months later, the performance was still fast... though not quite as fast as before, but the standby battery time jumped almost 2 fold. Where i was charging my battery every 24-28 hours, i was now charging every 36-48 hours. To be fair my use can be classified as moderate and not heavy. But The most noticeable difference was the standby discharge, which was now negligible even with wifi on.

It had a pretty decent 3.7 inch screen, if not as spectacular as the amoleds, but it had very accurate color reproduction and high levels of brightness. and a very useful optical trackpad for navigation, with a built in notification light that pulsed with new notifications, an example of the attention to the little things.

I was disappointed that it didnt have a front facing camera though... that would have been a nice (if relatively unused) feature that was becoming standard in most new phones of the time.