By Dave Pellegrin
I recently wrote a review on Apple’s new, software inclined, iPhone 4. I briefly touched on my short-lived switch from iOS to Android then back to iOS again. I’ve decided to write a full review on the subject for potential Nexus One buyers. It’s a tale of amazing software, dropped calls, and hardware issues. Keep reading to see what’s good and bad about Google’s, HTC built, Nexus One.
The Cost of Freedom
Have you ever woken up one day, turn to your significant other and said, “Honey, I’m going to spend $566 of my hard earned money on a hunk of metal, plastic, and other magical things”? Well don’t, you might as well say, “Honey, I’m taking the unicorn to work today mind taking the reindeer”.
At the time I purchased the Nexus One it could be purchased one of two ways: through T-Mobile for $179.99 with a new 2-year contract or completely unsubsidized, and unlocked, for $529. Believe it or not, the unsubsidized price isn’t as terrible as some smart phones. I believe the iPhone is around $600 unsubsidized. Since I’m an AT&T customer I get lucky door #2, unsubsidized pricing. I won’t lie it kinda sucked dropping that much cash for a device I’ve never touched. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to purchase the Nexus One directly from Google’s online store leaving USA buyers without many options to buy this device.
Hardware, Look & Feel
It’s been a while since I’ve anticipated a new “toy” like I did with the Nexus One. It felt like Christmas in June. On first handling, the Nexus One’s shape reminded me of the original iPhone. The edges are rounded and the body is thin yet sturdy design. The materials that made up the Nexus are mostly plastics but it didn’t feel cheap or flimsy. I didn’t mind the feel one bit. Since this was my first Android device I couldn’t stop staring at all the extra buttons. On the front of the device you’ll find the obvious speaker and screen in addition to the less obvious Back, Settings, Home, and Search “haptic” buttons. Haptic means the phone vibrates when these buttons are touched giving the user feedback. In addition to these alien objects you’ll find a trackball from 1996. Yes, a trackball I’m not kidding. The underside of the device has a mic for voice calls, 3 other holes plugged up with something (magic beans?) and a micro USB port. On the back of the device there’s another speaker for speakerphone and another mic for noise canceling. If this secondary, noise-canceling mic gets covered forget about holding a voice call conversation. The person on the other line will think you’ve jumped into a lake or a vat of marshmallow fluffernutter. The rest of the device has what you’d expect: volume rocker, headphone jack, and power button. I’d rate the build quality: Good.
Pros: “Haptic” buttons add more function than a software button on screen.
Cons: If the noise-canceling mic gets covered the person on the other line will fear the worst and call the fluffernutter factory in a panic.
AMOLED Screen
HTC used an AMOLED screen for Google’s Nexus One. From what I understand about these screens the device doesn’t have to “light up” the black pixels. This allows the picture to have a much better contrast ratio (better blacks) when compared to traditional LCD screens. These screens also save on power for that reason so you should get better battery life out of your mobile device. The down side to an AMOLED screen is that it’s much harder to see outside in the daylight. I can attest to this fact, it’s REALLY hard to see in the daylight. Those two facts aside, the Nexus One’s screen is very attractive and rendered colors beautifully. The closest thing I can compare the picture to is that of a Plasma TV’s. On a side note, touching the screen sometimes activated a false touch on the Haptic buttons towards the bottom of the screen. This would cause the search or home screen to pop up. Annoying but avoidable once you get used to the phone.
Pros: Beautiful display with rich blacks and vibrant colors
Cons: Very hard to use outdoors even not in direct sunlight. Haptic buttons sometimes activate when touching too close to the bottom of the screen.
Android OS (2.2, Froyo), UI & Features Galore
The thing I was most anticipating about the Nexus One was the operating system (OS). At this point I only knew what I read from reviews on various sites like AndroidAndMe and Droid Dog and what I saw on YouTube. Other than that this was a brand new experience for my geeky brain to take in. Let me just say the Android OS is oozing with geeky goodness. Yes, that’s how scientific the rest of this review is going to be.
Lock Screen
On first boot up, you’ll be brought to a familiar lock screen with the date and time. I really liked how Google made the lock screen multi-functional. What I mean by that is you can slide from left to right to unlock the screen OR you can slide right to left to put the device in silent mode.
Home Screen & Wallpaper
Once unlocked, you’re brought to the home screen and on the stock setup you’ll see one of the Nexus One’s live wallpapers. Think of live wallpaper as a screensaver that can be interacted with. They’re really neat at first but eat the battery up so I generally turn them off. Speaking of wallpaper, I really like how the Android OS handles them. Instead of a static portrait image Android uses a landscape image, which pans as you scroll from home screen to home screen. It’s a nice touch and makes the OS stand out against Apple’s OSs.
On the stock Nexus you have a weird dotted square in the bottom center of the screen. This is called the App Drawer and it’s pretty much every App installed on the device. I seldom use the App Drawer since I put things into folders. Speaking of which, folders work pretty much how you’d expect them to work. You create a folder; name it what you want then drag Apps into it. Brilliant! The key advantage of Android’s folders vs. Apple’s folders is you can have as many Apps as you want in them. As I’ve explained in my recent iPhone 4 review, Apple’s iOS 4 only allow for 12 Apps in any given folder. The Internet is still pondering this one and Steve Jobs could careless.
Widgets
One of my favorite features of Android awesome OS is the ability to put widgets on the home screen. To do this you just tap and hold anywhere on the home screen and a contextual menu will pop-up asking you what you want to do next. Widgets can be as simple as a contact list or as robust as a twitter or RSS feed. These widgets run in real time and auto refresh based on settings. My two favorite widgets are Fancy Widget, which is a simple clock and weather widget that replicates the HTC Sense UI theme and the stock Power Controls widget, which allows you to turn on/off things like Wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS. You can download more widgets from the Android Market and there are endless possibilities for widgets. It may be my favorite feature of Android’s OS.
Notifications & Alerts
Another huge feature of the Android OS is it’s unobtrusive notification system. When you receive an email, text, voicemail or any other alert you’ll see an icon in the top left hand corner of your status bar (the bar at the top). To view these alerts drag down from the status bar to reveal a hidden drawer with all your notifications. This is not only unobtrusive but it’s also a logical for Android to collect all of your alerts in one easy to reach place. Let say you get 2 texts, a voicemail, and 3 email alerts. Unlike Apple’s obstructive notification system, you can pull down the notification drawer and see them all and decide to click on them now or later. Apple’s notification system requires you do SOMETHING to get rid of the annoying pop up. Simply put, Android’s notification system is awesome.
Google Navigation & GPS
Since Android 2.0, Google has bundled with their OS free turn-by-turn GPS with text to speech using their already robust Google Maps system. I’ve used it a handful of time on both long and short trips. Compared to my Girl Friend’s stand alone GPS and say it’s did admirably in both accuracy and presentation. The interface is definitely harder to use when compared to a stand alone GPS but once you get the hang of it its works quite well. My only complaint with Android’s GPS is the voice is a little robotic at times especially with abbreviated street names like Mt. Laurel Ave. It comes out more like “Mit Laurel Ave” instead of “Mount Laurel Ave”. The fact that the App is free and has features like 3D mapping, text-to-speech, and point of interest search I really can’t say anything else bad about it.
Email & Gmail
Google did a pretty decent job with email on the Android OS but there are a few downfalls I felt kept it from being great. Android has two email Apps: One for GMail and another for any other mail like Yahoo, Hotmail, and your ISP email. This in itself is one of my major complaints about how Android handles email. I would have preferred they had one singular email App that piped all my email through it. Having two Apps just breaks up the experience and becomes annoying really fast. One of my Co-Workers explained that this could be circumvented by forward email through GMail, which would allow you to only have to use the GMail App. That’s not a solution but more of a clumsy work around in my opinion. Another issue I had with their email Apps was navigating through different folders and sections. Like most Android Apps, you have to use the haptic “settings” button to pull up a contextual menu with options to navigate through the App. This by itself I don’t have an issue with but for some reason in the mail Apps it just felt cumbersome. This is one area Apple has done it right in comparison.
Music Player & Sound Quality
Another “so-so” area of Android is the Music Player. Android’s music player App replicates what others (Apple) have done over the years. You get a tab based menu system with options like “artist” or “album” and you can drill through these sections to get to what song or album you want. All this worked fine and I think this part of the review I’m a little biased since I feel Apple’s music interface is much cleaner and easier to navigate. So I will say the presentation is a matter of opinion. My biggest problem with the Nexus One’s music player, and over all sound, is sound level is way too low even at the max setting. Unlike the iPhone, the Android music player doesn’t have lock screen controls. You can download a 3rd party App to do this but I didn’t find one that came close to the ease of use of the iPhone’s simple controls.
Visual Voicemail
Another weak area for the Nexus One and other Android phones on AT&T is the lack of visual voicemail. Those of you who are familiar with Apple’s voicemail know effective and user friendly it is. This was a feature I really missed from my previous iPhones. Luckily, there are options to help with this. The option I opted for was a Google Voice account. Google voice (GV) intercepts the voicemail and directs the caller to your GV voicemail instead of the stock service provider voicemail. This is another case where I feel it’s a band-aid solution to something that should be relatively easy to remedy. In Google’s defense, I’m pretty sure this is AT&T’s shortcoming and not Androids. AT&T most likely has to support the Android in their Visual Voicemail engine before this type of thing can be integrated into the platform.
Camera
The Nexus One is bundled with a 5 mega-pixel (MP) camera and LCD Flash. The stock software does a great job on features like sharing your pictures and videos with YouTube and Facebook. The interface also offers digital zoom and a few color effects, which I personally didn’t play with too much. One thing missing from the software is a tap-to-focus feature found on many other smart phones today. Tap-to-focus can usually turn a not so great shot into a pretty good one. Naturally lit scenes come out very good on the Nexus One’s camera. Like most smart phones, dark and night shots still look terrible even with the assistance of a flash. Nine times out of ten, the LCD flash usually made for a noisy picture.
I was less impressed with the video functionality of the Nexus One. Where most smart phones these days can shoot 720p movies at 30 frames per second (fps) the Nexus One’s video capturing isn’t true 720p and only runs at 20 fps. Much like the Camera, video Capturing does come out fairly well in well-lit areas.
Customization
The Android OS was built with the user in mind. By that I mean you can customize and tweak most of the UI to fit your needs. The entire home screen engine and be replaced with one of the many 3rd party replacements available in the Market. My drug of choice was called LauncherPro (beta). It was a very basic yet FAST home screen replacement that added easing to the home screen scrolling. In other words, it ran just as smooth or smoother than the iPhone’s springboard (Apple’s version of the home screen).
Battery
Prior to me purchasing the Nexus One I read about it’s battery life on one of the many pro android sites. Basically, you can turn everything on, have a ton of updating widgets, or have the screen brightness all the way up and you’ll get maybe 10-12 hrs on the device on standby. Or you can set everything a little more moderately and get more like 16-18 hrs. In addition to the available user customizable power usage, the Android OS has a very smart power management system built into itself. Let say you have three Apps open called App A, App B, and App C. If App B is the only application using the CPU than Apps A & C won’t require power, saving you battery life.
Pros: OS is far superior than any other mobile OS I’ve used. To name a few things it does well: Multitasking, interactive wallpaper, unobtrusive & cohesive notification system, home screen widgets, customizable UI, great memory management and free turn-by-turn GPS.
Cons: Email App(s) are slightly confusing and clumsy requiring two Apps to get the job done. No visual voicemail. The music player is just OK and could use a lock screen widget similar to the iPhone’s.
Epic Fails Happen in Threes: Call Quality & Wifi
These days call quality seems to take a back seat to other features like how many pixels per square inch phone developers can fit on the screen. Luckily, the Nexus One did a very good job with call quality. Conversations were clear and crisp with minimal modulation or metallic sounds in the background. People on the other end of the call had the same results. Unfortunately, the Nexus One would drop most of my calls both when sending and receiving. There were times I couldn’t make a call even with full signal. Calls in my area just wouldn’t work on this device. Another issue, I mentioned earlier, was with the noise-canceling mic muffling my end of the conversation. On several occasions I needed an extra hand free so I’d hold the phone between my shoulder and cheek. As soon as I did this the person on the other end would swear I was trying to hold a conversation under water. I Googled this problem and it’s a known issue with the Nexus One. Most people’s work around was “don’t hold the phone that way”. Sound familiar?
After having the Nexus One for a week or so I started noticing my Wifi would refuse to reconnect when waking the phone up from a locked stat. I figured it was just taking its sweet’ol time with re-initiating the connection. After 5 minutes of waiting for it to reconnect to my router I decided to see check the Wifi settings on the phone. In the settings panel there was a message under my saved connection that said, “Connection unsuccessful, touch to try again”. So I did what I was told, I touched to try again. Doing this turns the Wifi off and on again, which restores the connection. I figured “great it works again”. Unfortunately, from that point on the wifi would lose connection after being in a locked stat for more than a few minutes which means I had to go through the annoying process explained above every time I wanted wifi to work. A quick Google search shows how big of a problem this really is on this device and Google doesn’t seem to care much about fixing it.
These two major flaws left me with no option but to return the phone for a replacement device. What HTC doesn’t tell you is they’re sending you a refurbished phone not a new one. Apparently, this is the norm in the mobile market and is insane. After spending $529+ on a device I certainly didn’t expect to receive a refurb as a replacement. Don’t worry; I let HTC know how I felt about that policy of theirs. Unfortunately, the next two Nexus Ones all had individual problems either with dropping calls, dropping Wifi or serious quality control issues with the inner motor that makes the phone vibrate. EPIC FAIL.
Final Thoughts
Overall, the Nexus One is a very good smart phone when it works. You get features like widgets, true multi tasking, free turn-by-turn GPS with text-to-speech, haptic buttons, UI Customization, unobtrusive notifications, and so much more I didn’t get to cover in this review. There are some downsides to the OS though that you should be aware of before switching from your iPhone or BlackBerry. Most notable are: the lack of visual voicemail, clumsy email App, the Market is still mostly junk Apps, and the Camera could use a tap-to-focus feature. Unfortunately, in the end, because of build quality issues I had three lemons and couldn’t justify dealing with the problems at a premium of $566 (after tax). Which is a darn shame because the Android OS, in my opinion, is the best mobile OS out there today and it’s amazing. Without the hardware to support the awesome OS what good is it though?
