Two Days With the Nexus One
ardichoke
Icrontian
I've finally got my hands on a Nexus One this week. I spent the past couple days getting the feel of it and wanted to share my thoughts on it, mostly at the behest of Lynx 
The Good:
* Speed - Moving from the G1 to the Nexus One is a night and day difference. Switching apps is quick and fluid. Changing screens is stutter free. This thing absolutely flies. I'm not easy on my phone, I expect it to do many things at once and the N1 lives up to my expectations and then some.
* The screen - It's absolutely stunning. Colors are rich and lifelike. It makes my LCDs and my HDTV look washed out by comparison. It's high enough resolution that it makes the on-screen keyboard easy to use. The touch responsiveness is wonderful.
* Battery life - Head and shoulders better than the G1 so far. On my first day, even with all the installing and configuring going on, it still only dropped to about 25% without charging it during the day at all. Today, with my normal usage pattern (ie - lots of texting, tweeting, a bit of browsing and one or two phone calls) I've only dropped to about 60% after around 13 hours. Not bad considering I used to have to charge my G1 during the day to keep it from dying.
* Android 2.1 - While I fully enjoyed the earlier versions of Android on the G1, this one finally feels finished. It has both substance and polish and has both in abundance.
* Build Quality - Despite this phone being light, it feels solid and well-built in the hand. The battery door feels well attached... none of the problems with it falling off like the Droid here. It has a standard headphone jack as well, good to see that HTC learned their lesson about adapters after the Dream and the Magic.
* The glowing trackball - I love this thing. It's seriously mesmerizing to watch the trackball light pulse when you have messages, tweets, emails, etc. I don't know why, but I love it.
The Bad:
* No dedicated camera button. Yes, you can use both the on-screen button or the trackball but there's something nice about having a hardware button in a spot that is consistent with your average point and shoot camera when you're trying to take pictures.
* Enterprise WPA support. It's there, but it doesn't work well, in my experience so far anyway. I can get it to connect to our wireless network at work but as soon as the phone goes to sleep and is woken back up it won't reconnect to the network unless WiFi is turned off then back on.
* VPN support. They still don't have support for Cisco VPN without rooting the phone. This is a huge oversight from my point of view since my work only runs a Cisco VPN. Users of OpenVPN will be happy to know that you can connect to OpenVPN networks using the standard, non-rooted ROM.
You'll note I didn't list the lack of hardware keyboard under either heading. Some people have to have the hardware keyboard, some people don't care either way, some people don't want it. I'm personally indifferent to hardware keyboards. I like how slim the N1 is, thus the lack of hardware keyboard doesn't bother me. As I mentioned above, the 800x480 resolution screen makes the on-screen keyboard VERY usable for me at least.
Considering that I, like many people, have never bought a phone unless I was recontracting, thus have never paid full price I was worried that paying full price for this phone would end up ruining my enjoyment of this phone. I can honestly say that it didn't. Going from the G1 to the N1 was well worth the money spent. If your contract is up, you're looking for a smart phone and you don't mind not having a physical keyboard I highly recommend considering the Nexus One. Especially since it should be available for all major US carriers soon. If you happen to have $500 or so dollars laying around and are looking for a smart phone upgrade, this is a great choice. If you'll excuse me now, I'm off to go curl up with my Nexus One and plumb the depths of the Information Superhighway.
The Good:
* Speed - Moving from the G1 to the Nexus One is a night and day difference. Switching apps is quick and fluid. Changing screens is stutter free. This thing absolutely flies. I'm not easy on my phone, I expect it to do many things at once and the N1 lives up to my expectations and then some.
* The screen - It's absolutely stunning. Colors are rich and lifelike. It makes my LCDs and my HDTV look washed out by comparison. It's high enough resolution that it makes the on-screen keyboard easy to use. The touch responsiveness is wonderful.
* Battery life - Head and shoulders better than the G1 so far. On my first day, even with all the installing and configuring going on, it still only dropped to about 25% without charging it during the day at all. Today, with my normal usage pattern (ie - lots of texting, tweeting, a bit of browsing and one or two phone calls) I've only dropped to about 60% after around 13 hours. Not bad considering I used to have to charge my G1 during the day to keep it from dying.
* Android 2.1 - While I fully enjoyed the earlier versions of Android on the G1, this one finally feels finished. It has both substance and polish and has both in abundance.
* Build Quality - Despite this phone being light, it feels solid and well-built in the hand. The battery door feels well attached... none of the problems with it falling off like the Droid here. It has a standard headphone jack as well, good to see that HTC learned their lesson about adapters after the Dream and the Magic.
* The glowing trackball - I love this thing. It's seriously mesmerizing to watch the trackball light pulse when you have messages, tweets, emails, etc. I don't know why, but I love it.
The Bad:
* No dedicated camera button. Yes, you can use both the on-screen button or the trackball but there's something nice about having a hardware button in a spot that is consistent with your average point and shoot camera when you're trying to take pictures.
* Enterprise WPA support. It's there, but it doesn't work well, in my experience so far anyway. I can get it to connect to our wireless network at work but as soon as the phone goes to sleep and is woken back up it won't reconnect to the network unless WiFi is turned off then back on.
* VPN support. They still don't have support for Cisco VPN without rooting the phone. This is a huge oversight from my point of view since my work only runs a Cisco VPN. Users of OpenVPN will be happy to know that you can connect to OpenVPN networks using the standard, non-rooted ROM.
You'll note I didn't list the lack of hardware keyboard under either heading. Some people have to have the hardware keyboard, some people don't care either way, some people don't want it. I'm personally indifferent to hardware keyboards. I like how slim the N1 is, thus the lack of hardware keyboard doesn't bother me. As I mentioned above, the 800x480 resolution screen makes the on-screen keyboard VERY usable for me at least.
Considering that I, like many people, have never bought a phone unless I was recontracting, thus have never paid full price I was worried that paying full price for this phone would end up ruining my enjoyment of this phone. I can honestly say that it didn't. Going from the G1 to the N1 was well worth the money spent. If your contract is up, you're looking for a smart phone and you don't mind not having a physical keyboard I highly recommend considering the Nexus One. Especially since it should be available for all major US carriers soon. If you happen to have $500 or so dollars laying around and are looking for a smart phone upgrade, this is a great choice. If you'll excuse me now, I'm off to go curl up with my Nexus One and plumb the depths of the Information Superhighway.
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