Nexus One: The Wordy Review

Ok, first off, I'm just going to get this out of the way: it's not an iPhone. Straight up not an iPhone-killer. Some features, yes, are lightyears beyond what the iPhone currently has. But the iPhone remains the easiest to use smartphone there ever was, and Android, in its current form, is no where close to being as easy to use as iPhone OS. Ok, now with that out of the way...

Unboxing

The packaging is gorgeous, mostly due to the fact that it's heavily Apple-inspired. It's basically a bigger version of the iPhone box, but completely white, with a basic "nexus one" logotype on the front, and a small "google" sitting closer to the bottom. Very tasteful and simple, and it immediately gave me a warm fuzzy. My favorite part, however, is the Google colors running around the sides of the box, against the back. A very nice touch.

The phone was presented nicely upon opening, sitting alone in a recess. You remove the cardboard face that holds the phone to reveal the USB cord, power cable and headphones, as well as a very cute little soft-to-the-touch book that contains useless usage warnings about how you can injure yourself using blah blah blah blah... the stuff they're required to tell you, basically. No documentation about how to actually use the little bugger, mind you, which would have been handy. The iPhone doesn't need such things... Android, however, does. I was able to figure out most things, but I'm a nerd. Most people aren't.

Hardware

Speaking of headphones, why is it that when you purchase a $500+ phone (Nexus One, iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS... you get my point), they come with the shittiest headphones they could manufacture? I swear... the iPhone headphones were basically too big to fit in any ear I've ever seen, and the same is true with the NO's (heh, I love that abbreviation). They look nice, sure, but I've since reunited them with the box they were shipped to me in. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to find that the pause/play button on my Apple iPhone in-ear buds works on the Nexus One! As for the cable situation as a whole, while these HTC-made cables are nice, the cables for the iPhone are a bit nicer, and they don't come pre-wrinkled (I hate hate hate that!).

Ok, so on to the phone: it's amazing. The hardware, in my opinion, is gorgeous. Very simple, very clean lines, and I actually like the trackball (although I only use it for notifications, as it lights up when you get an email, text, tweet, etc., which is all customizable). The screen is absolutely stunning. If Apple doesn't match this screen in the next iPhone, I swear to something holy that I will punch a baby kitten. I want to see iPhone OS on this screen–which I believe is the same screen used in the Moto Droid–badly. It's incredibly high-res–in fact, so high-res that when viewing web pages, the browser will actually up-res images so that they're not incredibly tiny. If the images were to be displayed pixel-for-pixel, they'd be indescribably minute. The up-res'ing does make images a touch fuzzy, but not horribly so. It's very acceptable.

One thing about the touch screen I do not like, however, is the "calibration" (for lack of a better term). With iPhone, Apple wisely made the tap area for an element just below where your finger hits. Google didn't do this. What this means is that I often tap on a screen element (web link, button, menu item, etc.), but end up selecting the element just below it. Annoying. I'd pay money for an application that would allow me to remedy this.

The power button is located on the upper left side, which is different from the iPhone, but the same as the iPod touch. As I don't have the latter–but I do the former–it's been a bit of an adjustment for me. It's no big deal, but I do, actually, really miss the "ker-shick!" of the iPhone when sleeping the NO. It was nice having that "yep, I'm cool, toss me in your pocket" sound.

Just above the trackball and built into the bottom of the screen are four buttons (back, menu, home, and search). I don't mind the presence of buttons, but only when they don't get in my way. I mind these buttons. I find myself tapping them inadvertently when going for the spacebar while typing, and I have to say it's aggravating.

The "back" button took some getting used to... Android relies on it heavily, as opposed to the Apple way of doing things, which is to have a "back" button in the GUI of the app you're in, in the upper left corner. It's... different. However, it's universal, in that when you hit back, it takes you back to exactly where you were before, across applications. So, if you're in your browser and a text message comes in, you hit the notification tray (more on that later), tap on the text message, which then takes you to the text. When you hit "back," you're back in your browser. If you hit "back" again, you'll head back to the other browser window you were in before this, or even back to the main screen of the application you were in where you tapped a web link to bring you to the browser in the first place when the text came in. It can be a bit confusing, but you pick it up pretty quickly.

The "menu" button typically holds the icons for an application that you'd see at the bottom of an application on iPhone OS (in blue on a black background, or in a "tray"). "Home" brings you home, and search brings up the universal search function, which is much like Spotlight on the iPhone, but on steroids.

The camera, which commands complete attention on the back of the phone due to the fact that it's huge, is decent. I really have yet to inspect the photos closely, but from what I can tell it's pretty darned good. And the video it takes is very fluid, probably because of the 1GHz Snapdragon processor (eat that, iPhone!).

Setting up the OS
This was very simple. You basically step through a few welcome pages, and are presented with a page to either put in your Google account credentials, or sign up for a Google account. Once you've done that, your contacts and calendars immediately push to your phone, and your Gmail application is configured for your primary Gmail account (and you can configure additional Gmail accounts as well, now). There are a plethora of global settings, such as what service to use for making calls (::cough!::), ringer and notification volumes and ringtones, blah blah blah. Basically, all of the settings you'd imagine would be in there are, including application management (which is how you uninstall applications in Android), the ability to manage SD cards, what the global search references when you perform said search, and other boring things.

You can also configure the OS, out of the box, with your Facebook account. Doing so allows you sync either all of your Facebook friends with your own contact list, or to sync just those in your contact list with your Facebook account (which is the default). It's nice scrolling down the contact list seeing everybody's pictures in place.

Another nice touch: your system settings get sync'd to your Google account. If you get a new phone, just put in your Google account creds, and voila, your new phone inherits all of the settings from your old phone.

Messaging and Voice Input
One thing I like about Android is a new feature Google brewed into the OS where, when presented with a "faceplate" or icon of a contact in your address book, when you tap on that icon a messaging "strip" pops up containing icons representing the various means of communicating with that person that they also support. So, if I tap on John's icon in, for example, a Twitter client, I'll get a phone (to call him), a message bubble (to text him), a letter envelope (to email him), and a Facebook icon (to send a message via Facebook). If that contact does not have a Facebook account, that icon won't be there, and the same goes with SMS (i.e. in cases where you only have a "home" number in your address book for that contact).

Texting is very similar to iPhone, as is email, with the exception that there is a dedicated Gmail application. The dedicated email application is nice, but I like MobileMail a liiiiittle bit more. One thing I do like about the Android email app, however, is that the colors of the message lists are inverted from iPhone: white text on dark grey. It's a bit easier on the eyes.

My favorite part of messaging on the Nexus One, though, is the voice input. It's awesome. It is, by no means, perfect, but I cannot tell you how much easier it is to dictate an email–even a long one!–via voice, as opposed to tapping it out on a miniature keyboard. I used to rarely respond to email on iPhone due to disliking the keyboard (this, mind you, not an iPhone thing, I just dislike tiny keyboards–physical or software-based–across the board). Now I respond to emails/texts without even thinking of it. I do have to go back and correct the transcription on occasion, but overall it's a massive time-saver.

Notifications
This part of the Android OS I love. And I can't say that enough. It is simply fantastic. Basically, the menubar of the OS is a notifications tray that applications spit messages into, or can actually display messages in. So, when you get a text message, you see the contents of the SMS scrolling across the menubar. When you flick the menubar down, it slides down to show you how many emails you've received since the last flick of the tray, how many texts, tweets, etc. Tapping on an item takes you into that items' corresponding application, and if there's only one email, for example, directly to that email. When you plug your phone into a host computer, a USB notification pops into your tray. Tapping on that presents you with a dialog that allows you to chose whether or not to mount your SD card on the host computer (that threw me off at first... I could not figure out, for the life of me, how to get the phone to appear in doubleTwist, which is the iTunes to Android phones).

This is an area that iPhone OS desperately needs to advance in.

Google Voice
I have to say that Apple really screwed the pooch on this one.

Android comes with the Google Voice app pre-installed. You launch the app, it asks you for your credentials for GV, then if you'd like to use it for your phone calls and SMS every time, when prompted, or never. As you might guess, I chose all the time. What this means is that when I make a call or send a text message, it will be done over the data connection, and not via AT&T's voice network. For free. All calls and SMS messages will be tracked in my Google Voice account. And the app has a great interface for viewing transcribed versions of, and listening to, all of my voicemails. Visual Voicemail on steroids. I f**king love it.

Working with Media
This is... not so great. As you probably know, iTunes only works with iPhones and iPods (unless you're on Windows machines, which can use the open source tool iTunes Agent to fool iTunes into working with other devices). Therefore, I use another application called doubleTwist to manage the phone. Luckily, it acts like an iLife app by referencing iTunes for your music, movies and playlists, and iPhoto for your photos. However, I'm not sure if the dynamic playlists update automatically. We'll find out this weekend when I make some changes.

You can tell doubleTwist to sync all of your music, or just certain playlists, and the same goes with your photos. It's pretty straightforward and simple, but it's not iTunes-simple. I strongly prefer being able to just plug in the phone, have it backed up, applications and music/media sync'd, done. Sync'ing Android is not complex, but it's definitely more work.

Calendaring
"&$*#&@!" I exclaimed when I found that the built-in calendar application, which is nice, does not support CalDAV. Thus, I cannot attach it to my work email in a read/write form. I really really hope Google rectifies this... CalDAV was one of my favorite features of iPhone OS 3.0. Other than that, the calendar is pretty normal... it does everything your normal calendaring application does. Moving on...

Home Screens
Android has a great home screen scenario. It's definitely different than iPhone, in that instead of having x-many home screens, plus the 4-item-max Dock, you have 5 home screens, plus the "everything" grid that you invoke when you need an application that you didn't add to one of your home screens. Much like iPhone OS, you can arrange your home screen items wherever you chose, but they don't arrange contiguously as they do on the iPhone (there can be spaces between them, they can all be at the bottom with some at the top, etc).

Android home screens, however, have a killer feature that really needs to make it to iPhone: widgets. A widget is essentially a miniature version of a Dashboard widget, a living application on your home screens. I was incredibly pleasantly surprised, for example, when I went hunting for the Settings application to change the brightness of my screen, and happened upon, on the second home screen, a widget that Google had pre-placed there for me that allows one to disable/enable WiFi, your cell radio, GPS, Syncing, and, of course, adjust your screen brightness! To do this on iPhone you have to find the Settings application, open it, tap Brightness, and drag the little slider. You also have to dig through menus to get to your wireless settings. On Android, it's right there on the home screen, no application required. Other widgets include a combo weather/news widget that automatically updates to show the weather in your location, as well as allow you to change the industries for which to show news for, a stock widget (you can have multiple, so I obviously have one for AAPL and one for GOOG), a music widget that controls your media player, calendar widget, Facebook widget, a clock, Pandora controller, and a YouTube widget. Third party devs can make their own, as well. You can also add icons for web bookmarks (uses the site's favicon for the icon, not the iPod touch .png (if it exists), unfortunately), and playlists, an direct dial for a contact, folders, etc. (so you could, for example, make a folder, and toss direct dial shortcuts to workmates in it, or best friends, etc.). The home screen is quite extensible, and I plan on learning more about it this weekend!

Web Browsing
The browser is just about on par with MobileSafari, but not quite there. This is mostly due to how zooming is handled by Android: with iPhone, when you doubletap a page element, it zooms the page to fit that element to the width of your screen. Android doesn't do this... it zooms to a specific zoom level, which you can adjust. This wouldn't be so bad if the browser supported pinch-zooming, but it doesn't. Bad, bad, bad, bad...

Other than that, pages look absolutely mother-effing stunning on this screen. And holy shit is it fast. Many orders of magnitude faster than iPhone 3G (and I've heard a bit faster than the 3GS, as well, probably due to the 1GHz processor). The Google web apps feel like native applications (which I love, since I use them quite a bit, especially Reader). I don't think this is an area that speed can really be deciding factor, though, as both platforms use WebKit for rendering, and processor will pretty much decide the battle.

More Later
I'll write back with more this coming week (Android Marketplace, Voice Control, etc), but so far I'll say that while I'm enjoying the experience overall, I have to repeat: the iPhone is certainly still the leader. It has a certain smoothness and consistency that Android just doesn't have yet. I will use this phone for, well, who knows how long, as my primary mobile device, but who knows... I might bop back and forth between this and the iPhone every so often.

I do like having my feet dipped in both ponds.