My Nexus One User Review

Well I went and dumped my old Samsung flip phone I’ve had for a few years in exchange for a Nexus One when they came out. I had been waiting for a good Android phone to come around that didn’t require me to switch providers, and the Nexus One finally came out and I bought one. It took a bit of work to get it through T-Mobile, I had to switch my phones to an individual plan and then buy the Nexus off the Google website. The phone arrived pretty darn quick and all I had to do was swap the Sim card from my old phone to the Nexus One and there I was with a shiny new smart phone.

UPDATE 4/29/2010: In case your curious, the Nexus One still does not have support for the multi-color ball, thumb ball, navi-ball or anything else you would like to call it.

I have owned smart phones before, a Palm Treo way back when, the Blackberry Storm through work, and while not a phone, I do have an iPod Touch which runs most of the iPhone apps that don’t require phone, camera or mic. I have also worked with iPhones for work. I really didn’t want to wait for Apple to distribute the iPhone outside of AT&T and likewise did not want to switch to Verizon to get a Droid.

I’ve had the Nexus One a few weeks now, and for the most part it’s a great little phone, I’ve not run into any ‘showstopper’ issue personally, nor have I really run into any functionality issues in general. It feels comfortable in the palm has a bit of a rubberized grippy backside so it doesn’t slide around and overall the user interface is very easy to get around. After spending a couple of hours one evening with it I was pretty comfortable with most of the features.

When you first turn the phone on it’s asks you for an existing Google account to link to. This is optional but I went ahead and set it up. It automatically imported my email, contacts and calendars, etc from Google with no hassle at all.

The phone works fine as a phone, my dad said it sounded a little ‘hollow’ like it was missing high and low frequencies off the mic. I was a bit dissapointed to hear about that. I haven’t tried it with a blue-tooth headset to see if that improves the way it sounds. It was clear, just lacked depth. When you hold the phone up to your face, it senses that and shuts down the display and touchscreen. When you move the phone away from your face it turns them back on.

The buttons are pretty straightforward with power on the top, and volume on the sides. Like the iPod Touch and iPhone the volume buttons can get in the way when in portrait mode, but it just requires a bit more training to hold the phone right so you don’t bump them. I don’t get a lot of use out of the trackball yet as I mostly use the touchscreen. I was told it was a multi-color LED under there, but so far I’ve not seen any apps that let you manipulate it so I’ve only seen it glow white. If there is an RGB LED under the trackball it’d be nice to be able to set different colors for different alerts. Right now when you have a new notification it just slowly pulses white every few seconds. According to a post on androidcommunity.com this is in the process of being remedied and the recent software update may have solved that.

The AMOLED display looks amazing and crisp for a 3.7″ display. The touch screen is responsive, however you have to be careful not to let the edges of your phone-holding-hand touch the edges of the glass part of screen or it will mess up interaction and make it seem likes it’s not being responsive at all. This is not so much a hassle, as just training yourself to hold the phone properly.

The camera works alright, the quality is what one might expect from a cell phone camera. The Nexus One camera is 5 megapixels and accompanied by a super bright LED for a ‘flash’. I’ll attach some photos from the phone to this post so you can see the quality yourself. There are some apps that let you use Android camera flash LEDs as strobe lights or flashlights, but the LED in there is not meant to be powered on for long periods of time in and such use may result in failure of the LED.

Additionally the Nexus One has Google’s voice recognition software which works well in my experience. While there will always be some things that just don’t translate well for speech recognition, for the most part it pics up things very well. If you click the mic button on the Google Search bar that is on the main apps page of the phone, it will google search your request. With the maps you can give it a command to ‘Navigate to <address>’ and it will process, then ask you to verify your request with a high success rate. You can also enter your SMS text messages by voice, though it’s a bit redundant to use a phone to do speech recognition in order to send a text message to someone.

The Nexus music player works fine for listening to music though there are no outstanding features from other players. The ability to just attach the phone to your PC and upload your music onto the SD card is great. I don’t think I’ll be using my iPod Touch too much in the future as this phone provides all of the same functionality of the iPod Touch

As of today I downloaded the update for the N1 and manually installed it using these directions. The update adds multi-touch to certain applications of the Nexus One, and is supposed to improve the G3 problems some people have been reporting with their phones, although the latest reports show there may still be some bugs to work out in that sector. If it’s a concern for you I would recommend doing a search about it and reading recent posts on the subject.

THE APPS

There are around 20,000+ applications available on the Android Market, it works pretty much like the iTunes App Store for the iPod Touch and iPhone. There are many free applications, games and other things available, and plenty of pay apps as well. I’ve found a few great apps and games so far and I’m sure more will come out.

There are some apps pre-installed in the phone. One of my favorites aside from all the basic tools is Google Sky. Google sky takes your GPS position and uses the compass and accelerometers inside of the phone to show you in real time where all of the stars are. If you sit in a room in your house and find the moon on your Android screen it shows you exactly where the moon is in relation to yourself. Very cool to play with.

The built in maps and navigation will let you find anything, and you can use the voice recognition to find locations as well. If you press the small microphone button and say ‘navigate to Radio Shack’ to the phone, it will pop up a list of Radio Shacks for you to choose. Same with other stores or businesses. Very convenient and easy to use.

Work Apps

Network Discovery by Aubort Jean-Baptiste is also free and lets you scan your local LAN or WLAN to find other devices and do port scans as well. It’s a handy little network tool.

Remote Desktop Client from Xtralogic is $20 but I think it’s worth the price. It’s an excellent remote desktop client, the screen works as a track-pad on a laptop. Rather than direct cursor positioning where you touch, you drag the cursor around by dragging on the screen. Additionally there’s a pop-up keyboard that lets you send extended key commands to the remote system.

ConnectBot by Kenny Root and Jeffrey Sharkey is a nice little SSH app although it’s not loaded with features, and may not be for everyone.

Personal Apps

Gmail Unread Count by Andrew Blom is free, and just replaces the gMail icon on your phone’s screen the gMail icon with the number of unread messages in a little red circle next to it.

Trapster from trapster.com is a great integrated app with live updates from other users as to the location and types of speed traps, traffic cameras and other troublesome things one might encounter while on the road. This app will probably be more useful when an actual Nexus car dock is released.

wpToGo from Roundhill Labs is free and lets you update your WordPress Blog from your Android phone. While I find phone entry for a blog is not convenient, I know others blog on the go and may find this valuable. Perhaps one day I’ll shoot a photo while at the flying field and write a short little article to go with it. Time will tell.

Foxy Photo Editor by DeckEleven Entertainment is a handy little tool that allows some basic manipulation of your photos. Take the photo and then modify or crop as desired. It lets you transform, rotate, touch up with brushes, title, add clipart, etc.

Utility Apps

Advanced Task Killer Free from ReChild works pretty nice. It’s a task manager app that lets you kill battery hogging processes on your phone that may be running in the background. There are a variety of task killer apps out there, this one had good ratings so I ended up checking it out.

Audalyzer and Wildspecta Mobile Lite, these are both free spectral analyzers which use the mic as the input source. While they’re probably not very accurate, they are fun to play with and might help you get some info you need in a tough spot.

Phonalyzr lets you see way more statistics than you ever wanted to about your texting and phoning habits, breaking your phone usage down by day and type of use, incoming and outgoing use, time, etc.

Games!

Trap! by Matt Wachowski is a fun and somewhat addictive game. You isolate a number of balls which bounce around the screen by drawing lines between them. By getting different multipliers and power-ups you increase your score. I’ve managed to score over 600k points on one level before, but I hear you can get into millions of points. It’s a good time waster for when you’re on a plane or what not.

Space Physics by Camel Games is another good game. You use your finger to draw lines and gears and wheels to move a ball from one location to the target, or multiple targets. It’s a good puzzle game that can absorb you.

Misc Apps

Barcode Scanner by ZXing team is free and uses the camera on the phone to scan bar codes and then run them through Google to find matches. It works pretty good with UPC numbers and other standard barcode formats to bring up results, competitive pricing, etc. This is more of a toy though, I don’t need a barcode scanner and search engine to tell me that if I walk into a Best Buy and see something, it’ll be cheaper online.

Summary

Overall I feel this will be a great phone for my personal use for several years to come. I don’t always need to have the latest and greatest toys on a constant basis, but when I do upgrade my devices and equipment I go for what I feel is the best option out there for myself and will last me at least several years. There are a ton of useful applications for time management and productivity as well as games, networking, social networking and other things out there to suit most peoples needs. One app I would like to see for Android / the Nexus One is one that uses the mic to determine the RPM of a running 2-cycle engine or frequency of a repetitive sound in numerical format.