Two weeks with Nexus One!

My hunt for a smart phone ends with a Google Nexus One. I was looking for a phone with WiFi,3G,GPS,Touch interface, and ease of application development. Being a fan of Google, I always wanted to try out all the Google’s products and ended up buying Nexus One. With this smart gadget, I feel like I am getting into a new world. It has been two weeks since I got the phone on hand and it is just awesome. I have been playing around with it all the time and tried out almost all the features available. I will try my best to write down an unbiased review.   What are the good things about it?

• Look & feel. The phone looks sexy with slim body and curved edges. The 480 x 800 resolution makes it look stunning. Many have talked about the difficulties in using the phone’s AMOLED display in sunlight. But, I don’t seem to be facing this problem. I have just turned on the “Auto brightness” feature which is taking care of this for me. The light sensor used for deciding the display brightness is accurate and very fast. The fancy unlock screen definitely draws attention. Live wallpapers are just amazing.
• Sound quality. The voice quality is pretty descent. The second mic provided at the backside for noise filtering is very effective and it works like magic. I tested this from a moving train and it filtered out all the background noise. Really impressed with this. The voice quality seems to be little bit dull when put on speaker mode.
• Multimedia. I am using the default application for listening to audio / video songs and for viewing pictures. They seem to be solving the purpose with all the required functionalities. Believe me or not, the audio quality of Nexus One is better than my iPod Shuffle. I don’t know whether its the headset which makes the difference or the app or the internal hardware. But, as an end user, this is what I feel about this. I have limited knowledge on this area and I can not come up with proper reasoning also.
• Touch sensitivity. Nexus One has a capacitive touch screen and it working well with the 480 x 800 display. Multi touch was not available as part of the Android 2.1 OS but was later released as an OTA (Over The Air) update. General responsiveness of the OS is very good as well. And, you know what, this has impressed many of those who tried out my phone.
• Camera. Nexus One has 5 MP camera with auto-focusing capabilities. The picture quality is pretty good. The camera has lots of options to be configured. Even though the phone has a flash, the night photos look little pixelated.
• Sync with Google Account. Nexus One has apps for almost all of the frequently used Google products. I am really amazed with the syncing capabilities especially the syncing of contacts. Contacts are seamlessly synced and this is really helping me out. You can sync your contacts, mails, photos, and even docs.

Things which are more than expected?

• Pro-active suggestions. Nexus One gives you with pro-active suggestions to improve your experience with the gadget. For example, if you are in a place with weak signal strength, you will be suggested to switch to Airplane mode to save your battery. If you have turned on WiFi with no wireless networks available near you, it will search for some time and will suggest you to turn it off.
• Resources usage tracking. Nexus One shows you cool stats pages where in you can figure out the resources consumed by different applications. Battery Usage and Running applications page are damn useful to figure out if any of your applications are draining your battery. Its provides really useful information on applications. Of course, there are other sophisticated apps available on the market.
• Applications association. Based on the content you are trying to access, Android will decide the application to use. The contents are associated with the application. For example, if you are trying to open a hyperlink (say a Twitter profile URL) from GMail app, Android knows which application to use for opening the link. I was surprised to see the Twitter client I had installed appeared on the list along with the internal browser. Same is the case with any location information. It will try to open in Google maps or on the browser.

Is there anything which needs improvement?

• Battery backup. Fully charged battery seems to last only for about 6-7 hours with continuous WiFi / 3G usage. The fact of the matter is the other smart phones also have almost similar battery backup. But, still it would be great if it lasts at least for a day.
• Heating up. This is one of the main problems I see in Nexus One. The phone gets heated up badly while charging. That is fine. Many devices get heated up while charging. But, Nexus One gets heated up when the phone searches for WiFi / 3G signals continuously. (In an area with weak signal strength). Though it is not anything serious, it should have been taken care.
• Multi-lingual support. Nexus One has very limited language support. One can install the true type font on to the Android system using some work-arounds but it requires rooting of devices. Rooting of devices means getting access to the system as a root user. I was tempted to root my phone but the fact that the warranty will void if rooted had stopped me at least for now.

The apps I am using

To conclude, Nexus one is an elegant smart phone from Google which is worth the money you paid for it. It is just awesome. I am loving it. :-)

P.S: This blog post will explain my idleness on this blog for the past two weeks. ;)

Update: Have tweaked the settings and I am getting battery backup of more than 24 hours. :-) On a related note, Google has blamed the third party application developers for poor battery life. Link here.

-- Varun