nexus one phone

[bruce]

http://www.google.com/phone/?locale=en_US&s7e=

anyone try it?

[gosao]

It's already out? Too bad it doesn't have a physical keyboard like the one on the Droid.

[ashe]

shwing!

[GrahamB]

Haven't used it yet, but really it's just another Android phone - nothing special about it.

Main plus is it's not on AT&T(!) in the US, main downer is it only allocates a tiny 190MB for apps - (I've got about 2GB of apps & games installed on my iPhone)!

David Pogues Nexus One review:


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/techn ... wanted=all

Google sure does love shaking up the system. Remember the original Google search page? It made news because your search results popped up fast and weren’t cluttered with ads. Remember when Google went public? It made news because the founders auctioned off shares to the public. Remember when Gmail came out? It made news because it offered 1,000 times the free storage space of competitors like Hotmail and Yahoo.

And now Google wants to shake up the way we buy cellphones — by letting you shop for the phone and the service independently, on a new Google Web site (Google.com/phone).

To introduce this phone store, on Tuesday, Google took the wraps off what may be the worst-kept secret on the Internet: a brand-new cellphone, designed by Google and made by HTC, called the Nexus One. It’s pretty sweet, it advances the state of the art, and it’s a welcome addition to the catalog of great app phones like the iPhone, Palm Pre and Motorola Droid.

You’ll pay $529 without a two-year contract for service with T-Mobile, or $179 with one.

But the truth is, the Google news this week isn’t quite as earthshaking as Google seems to think it is.

First, the new phone. It’s almost exactly the size and shape of the iPhone. Like most HTC phones, it’s bland-looking. But it’s so thin and rounded, it feels terrific in your hand.

It’s loaded with gleaming, attractive features. It’s hard to choose which is more gratifying: the speed — instant, smooth response when you’re opening programs and scrolling — or the huge, 3.7-inch touch screen, which has much finer resolution than the iPhone (480 by 800 pixels, versus 320 by 480).

There’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, like an iPhone, but also a removable one-day battery and a camera with an LED flash, autofocus and picture settings, although the photos themselves are roughly on par with the iPhone’s.

The Nexus has no physical keyboard — only an on-screen keyboard, with a handy suggestion feature that I actually prefer to the iPhone’s: as you start typing a word (“unfo”), the Nexus displays an entire row of likely candidates (“unfortunately,” “unfortunate,” “unfolding”), which you can tap, thus saving yourself more fiddly typing-on-glass.

Radically enough, you can also dictate anywhere you can type. The transcriptions aren’t what you’d call miraculous — accuracy is maybe 90 percent — but if you have simple messages, speak clearly and remember to pronounce your punctuation, this “experimental” feature is often much faster than typing. (The free Dragon Dictation app for iPhone does the same thing with better accuracy, but you have to copy and paste the results into your other programs.)

As you’d guess, the Nexus uses Google’s own Android operating system, so it’s very similar to, for example, the Motorola Droid phone.

You get an impressive, free, turn-by-turn GPS navigation program, and soon you’ll be able to buy a bedside dock that automatically turns the Nexus into a terrific alarm clock/weather/music station.

Google did make a few updates to the software especially for the Nexus, though. For example, 10 of the available screen backgrounds (wallpaper) are animated; one of them plasters the screen behind your icons with tall blowing grass against a blue sky that actually darkens as the day turns to night. It’s totally pointless and even distracting, but very cool indeed.

There’s better integration all around: you can upload pictures and videos straight to YouTube, Picasa, Facebook and so on, for example, and you can tap a person’s name and choose how you want to initiate contact (e-mail, phone, text message). And you have five “home screens” to fill with the icons of your apps (up from three on the Droid). All of these changes will soon come to other Android phones as a software update.

Despite these goodies, the Nexus is missing some important features that iPhone fans take for granted. For starters, the Google app store is much smaller, featuring 18,000 fun little games; there are well over 100,000 for the iPhone.

Worse, even if you find a lot of good ones, you might not have anywhere to install them. The Nexus can accommodate memory cards up to 32 gigabytes (a 4-gigabyte card comes with it) — and yet, inexplicably, the Nexus allots only a tiny 190 megabytes of storage for downloaded apps.

The Nexus doesn’t come with any iTunes-style companion software, either. Enterprising techies know about the free DoubleTwist program for Mac or Windows, which simulates iTunes for the purposes of loading up your phone with music, photos and videos. But even DoubleTwist doesn’t let you shop the Android app store from the comfort of your computer; you have to do it on the cramped little phone.

There’s no physical ringer on-off switch (you have to do it on the screen), and therefore no way to tell by touch if the ringer is off, as you can on the iPhone and Palm phones.

Sadly, the Nexus One also lacks a multitouch screen like the iPhone’s. So zooming into photos and Web pages is awkward and hard to control.

Finally, the Nexus just doesn’t attain the iPhone’s fit and finish. The buttons under the screen (Back, Menu, Home, Search) are balky, often ignoring your finger-presses completely. One of the animated wallpapers freezes the phone with a message that says: “Sorry! The application Android Live Wallpapers has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again.” (Note to Google: I did. The same thing happened.)

But maybe it doesn’t matter if the Nexus One isn’t nirvana. Google says it’s only the first Google phone of many, with one store to sell them all.

The idea of the Google phone store is pure, giddy idealism: You’ll buy the phone you want, then you’ll shop for the cell plan you want, from the carrier you want. No more “You want an iPhone? Then you get AT&T.”

Well, it’s about time! Rise up in the streets! Power to the people! Truth shall triumph!

Or not.

I mean, it’s a great idea and all. It’s just that, well, apart from the iPhone, who really cares which carrier has a certain phone? In the list of complaints about American cellphone carriers sent to me by readers, that one is waaaaaay down the list.

Besides, the Google phone store doesn’t really do much to solve the problem. In this country, there are two competing network formats. There’s C.D.M.A. (used by Verizon and Sprint) and there’s G.S.M. (favored by AT&T and T-Mobile and most other countries).

The current Nexus One is a G.S.M. phone. So when you buy it online, you get the following vast menu of carriers: T-Mobile. (Or you can use AT&T, but you have to supply your own subscriber card, and you won’t get 3G Internet speed.)

Wow, that changes everything, doesn’t it?

Google says that a Verizon version of the Nexus is coming in the spring. And you could theoretically buy the $529 version and insert an AT&T service card, although you’ll get only super-slow (pre-3G) Internet speeds.

But still, how is this any different from the way current phones (BlackBerry, Palm Treo, etc.) are offered by different carriers?

Google offers the Nexus either with a contract (if you’re lucky enough to live where T-Mobile has a signal) or without one.

If you buy the no-contract phone ($529), you can get T-Mobile service for $20 a month less than someone who opts for the two-year contract. Which makes sense, since the whole point of the two-year contract is for you to reimburse the carrier for the full price of that phone over time.

But that’s T-Mobile’s brave policy, not Google’s. There’s no word yet on whether the Verizon version will offer the same no-contract discount, but I’m not holding my breath. (Furthermore, you can buy any T-Mobile phone at full price, with a lower monthly service plan. This, too, is not a Google exclusive.)

This is all supposed to be a huge break from the current way of doing cellphone business, but plenty of phones (from Nokia and Sony Ericsson, for example) are already sold this way: over the Web, unlocked, to be outfitted with cell service later. Google’s system makes this much easier — you do all of the choosing on one Web site, and your phone comes in the mail already activated — but it’s really not such a new idea.

Google hopes to expand its online phone store, to really shake things up, to put some fear into the entrenched industry players. It plans to sell more phones, from Google and other companies, each with a choice of carriers. It’s a noble ambition.

But at the start, at least, the results are a pair of head-scratchers. The Nexus One is an excellent app phone, fast and powerful but marred by some glitches and missing features — a worthy competitor to the Droid, if not the iPhone. The Google phone store is a neat, centralized place to buy phones, but so far, it offers zero advantages over buying a T-Mobile phone any other way.

Even so, you should root for the Google Store’s success, because the obnoxious policies and fees of the American cellphone companies have gotten out of control. Anything with even a fighting chance of putting power and choice back in your hands is cause for celebration.


E-mail: [email protected]

Personally I'm iPhone all the way, but I don't have to put up with AT&T in the UK...

[chud]

The current Nexus One is a G.S.M. phone. So when you buy it online, you get the following vast menu of carriers: T-Mobile.

See, that's what gets me...I'm on Sprint so as cool as that phone looks, it makes no difference to me.

[bruce]

i use t-mobile ... it looks pretty cool but i want to touch one and hear it before i buy...

[everything]

Haven't used it yet, but really it's just another Android phone - nothing special about it.

Main plus is it's not on AT&T(!) in the US, main downer is it only allocates a tiny 190MB for apps - (I've got about 2GB of apps & games installed on my iPhone)!

I spoke with an android developer who said something like (forgetting details) it uses Java so easy to develop for. iPhone uses Objective C. Harder to developer for, but better use of memory. Which one is a better strategy? Make it easy for developers so you build the app ecosystem or use the phone resources wisely so the user experience is better?

[GrahamB]

In terms of apps the race has already been won with developers (in favour of Apple). Too late to change that now.

Boy Genius gives Android a good kicking:

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/01/ ... -thoughts/

"But in the end, I found that the lack of any meaningful applications for Android really made it a no go from the beginning. I’m talking about quality — re-read the word quality — applications, here. The best VNC and RDP applications on Android are a joke. There’s not a single enjoyable Twitter application, and any application that’s on Android that is available on the iPhone pales in comparison. If you can find an application on the Android platform that’s better than the iPhone counterpart, I’ll send you a BGR Ninja hat."

[Craig]

Im kinda hanging out for the Sony X10...bring on february

[GaryR]

Well, I have the Nexus one, and I just switched from having an Iphone for 2 years. I can tell you the nexus one kicks its ass, the screen resolution difference is HUGE, it multitasks, navigation is awesome, voice recognition built into everything rocks, the processor is 40% better, camera is 5 MP w/flash, faster, actually usable, better video, etc. Plus I pay $60 less a month for T-mobile than ATT, Im in Los Angeles so coverage is the same, don't notice a speed difference. The only downside could be that iphone has 100000+ apps, google thus far has around 30000, but every app I had on iphone is available for Nexus one, so no complaints from me.

G