Nexus One Review

An article by chrisbellman    5 Comments

The Nexus One.  Fast.  Sleek. Light.  Durable.  I purchased the Nexus one the day I could and received it two days later.  And yes, I paid $530 for it.

Upon taking it out of the box, I was immediately amazed by how thin it is.  It’s so sleek and fits in the hand so nicely.  Every edge is gracefully curved and the screen is HUGE and gorgeous.  The light up trackball is also a nice touch.  So far, I’m not digging the power button on top too much because I have to reach my index finger up, press it, then slide my thumb across the screen, whereas on my G1 I merely had to hit menu twice in a row.  It’s just a minor quirk I have, nothing too terrible.

Service on this phone is not as good as the service I got on my G1.  Especially, I think, for data.  Apparently other users are having this problem and I expect HTC/Google to fix this by sending out a radio update for the phone.  No one wants to DOWNGRADE the service their phone gets when UPGRADING their phone.

I can deal with the virtual keyboard.  The pre-installed one is decent…a little worse than the iPhone’s but not bad at all.  I also installed HTC_IME from XDA-Devs because I prefer that keyboard to the stock one.  However, as of right now, it’s not customized for the N1’s resolution, and so looks stretched/landscape is kind of messed up.  It also seems to lag for me just a tiny tiny bit.  I installed Swype tonight and let me say IT IS AMAZING.  I have a really early build but I can say I’d probably be willing to pay up to $5 for this keyboard.  When you think of just sliding your finger across the screen and not actually typing, it seems like it would be hard and not work well.  It, however, is EXTREMELY easy and VERY accurate.  I’m impressed.

This phone is FAST.  Ridiculously fast.  At one point I had around 18 apps open and it didn’t miss a beat.  I love Android 2.1, and I love having a headphone jack.  The battery life is also better than my G1’s was.  So far, it can definitely last a day.  However, I don’t ever really have 3G all day long, so maybe that would make it die faster.  But being in the same locations with both N1 and G1, the N1 gets better battery life, especially on stand-by.

I don’t know what else to say about this phone.  It’s really really really fast and the experience while using it is great.  It’s a great multi-tasker if you learn to hold the home key to get to recently used programs.  I downloaded apps from the market (Dolphin Browser and a 3rd party gallery) which add multi-touch, although I expect Cyanogen to add it (multi-touch) to the stock applications soon.  But the 3rd party apps I’m using for multi-touch use it BEAUTIFULLY – on par with the iPhone, for sure.  My last complaint is that the touch buttons on the bottom sometimes don’t register as easily as I’d like them to.  You have to hit the upper half of the button in order for it to register.What else to say about this phone?  I guess this isn’t really a full REVIEW, I’d leave you to go read Gizmodo or some other blog’s extremely hateful and biased review of the phone for that.  Engadget straight up bashed it, so don’t go there.  Apparently BGR also did not do it justice.  I read Gizmodo’s and I think it’s the least critical.  (Not that it’s UNDER-critical in any way, the other blogs are way over-critical and focus on minor things that won’t affect your experience).

So there you have it.  This is a great phone.  It’s super fast.  It’s beautiful.  Go out and buy it.  Android is just getting started.