Nexus One Review: Not Your Grandma’s Cell Phone

July 4th, 2010 | View Comments

And even if Grandma wants a Nexus One, don’t buy it for her. Get her an iPhone. For serious.

Having said that, I will never buy another iPhone. Now that I’ve gone Android, I’ll never go back.

iPhone battery issues got me thinking of upgrading to a new phone in the first place. At the end of its life, my iPhone 3G needed 3 charges a day. That boggles the mind. But alas, that’s pretty much the standard for a 2-year old smartphone battery these days. But what gets my goat is the fact that I’m not able to simply buy a new battery. Apple’s obsession with “perfect” design unfortunately means it’s not terribly functional — no replaceable battery is a deal killer for me at this point.

So onto my thoughts on the Nexus One.

Battery

  • I bought a second battery right away (at a very reasonable $25)
  • I can usually go from 8am till about midnight on one battery
  • Swapping batteries is a bit of a hassle since I have to power the phone off then back on, but of course this would be true of any phone

Multitasking

  • I’m generally running about 7 apps at any given time (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Music, Latitude, Locale, Talk [i.e., the Gmail Chat app])
  • Battery life and performance are both great with this setup

Custom Wallpapers

  • I was installing coloured LEDs, spray painting, and Dremeling windows into my PCs back in the day — so yes, I like to customize. And Android let’s me do that.
  • Change your backgrounds
  • Live backgrounds (I’m found of the Aquarium — I have a school of fish constantly swimming behind my apps, it’s very cool!)

Custom Ringtones

  • The iPhone is iPod meets phone, so you would think it would be easy to use your music as ringtones. Not true. Apple wants you to buy ringtones from them. That’s what happens when your phone manufacturer is also a music store.
  • Android lets you use any music file for any purpose — different songs as ringtones for different people, or even custom sounds for each text message notification. Such simple things — other phones have been doing this for years — but coming from the iPhone, this is a breath of fresh air.

Notifications

  • You don’t realize what a big deal this is until you’ve had an Android in your pocket for a day or two! There’s a notification menu that slides open with as simple top down thumb swipe that has become the center of my existence.
  • Twitter replies, Facebook messages, my friends’ Foursquare checkins, new emails, voicemail, text messages, Google chats — all these things magically populate the notification menu in realtime. No need to check for updates in a dozen different places, it’s all under one roof on Android.
  • Does that sound like too much going on? Don’t worry, you control which apps push updates to the menu
  • The (otherwise useless) Nexus One trackball glows different a colour when I have different notifications waiting for me — Twitter and Facebook glow blue, email is white, SMSs are red, etc. So there’s no need to unlock the phone and check all these services to see if anyone wants to say hi, I can just glance at my phone and see if the ball is glowing or not. Easy.

Unlocked

  • I’m heading to Europe in a few weeks for a little vacay and I’ll be able to pop in a Euro sim card and have it just *work*. No hacking, no jailbreaking, no hassle. (This applies to trips to the US too. No more $1000 phone bills after a few days in America, what a novelty.)
  • And when my Fido contract is up, my phone is compatibile with every cell provider in my local market — Public Mobile, Bell, Telus, Rogers, Fido, and the Videotron network which is due to launch in a couple of months. In other words, I can switch providers every month in search of the best deal. (I’m never taking another cell contract thank you very much.)

No More Syncing With iTunes

  • Adding 1 song to my iPhone actually took about 30 minutes. Why? Because iTunes insisted on backing up my entire phone every time. Total lunacy.
  • There’s no syncing at all with my Nexus One. My app data is backed up over the air.
  • Plugging in my phone via USB has it show up as an SD card mounted on my Macbook. Simple. Drag and drop files onto it as needed. That’s it. No iTunes management with complicated menus and epic syncing sessions.

Music

  • I can’t buy music over the air with the Nexus One because it uses Amazon’s MP3 store which (like freedom and the pursuit of happiness) is not available in Canada.
  • The Music app sucks. It works — you click artist, you click album, you click song. Simple. But the iPhone is slick. This isn’t slick at all.

Widgets

  • My homescreen has 2 widgets — weather and my calendar. At a glance, without launching an app, I can see if it’s going to rain and what my next meeting is. This isn’t rocket science, but it is seriously useful.
  • My Twitter and Foursquare widgets are constantly piping in updates that I can see at a glance.
  • My CBC Radio widget lets me flip on Radio One with a single press.

Locale (Geo Fences)

  • This is a paid app but it’s so awesome I wanted to mention it!
  • My ringer/vibrate settings actually change depending on where I am.
  • At work my phone sits on my desk, so I keep the ringer and vibrate off, but I’ll see my screen jump on when I’m getting a call
  • At home the ringer and vibrate are both on full blast
  • At school the ringer is off and since my phone is in my pocket, I keep the vibrate on
  • I don’t have to change settings — my phone just knows where I am (thank you GPS) and changes settings depending on my geographic location.
  • You can also change settings based on other criteria — battery life (ex: battery is low, maybe turn off the wifi), time of day (ex: no calls after midnight please!), or even who is calling (ex: my phone is on silent for everyone except my mom!)

I have no doubt Locale’s features will either get copied or they will get acquired by Google or Apple. This stuff is killer and truly makes the phone “smart”.

Keyboard

  • Straight up, the iPhone keyboard is better. I can fly on an iPhone, but after 2 weeks with my Nexus One I’m still not as fast.
  • Unlike the iPhone you can actually replace the keyboard with third party solutions. (I like Swype a lot.)

Flash

  • Flash works surprisingly well. But I tried loading Frontierville and it crashed. So super huge involved Flash games? Not going to work. But basic website functionality works like a charm. You can actually surf the entire Internet now, that’s actually a first for a smartphone.
  • Famously, Steve Jobs will not let Flash on the iPhone.

Torrents

  • I haven’t played with this yet, but there are Torrent apps that can actually queue up and start torrent downloads on your home computer. I’m pretty sure Jobs isn’t going to let that on the iPhone anytime soon :)

Speed

  • Moving from an iPhone 3G to the Nexus One was a huge jump — I essentially skipped a generation of smartphone, so the speed increase has been startling. Web pages, apps, everything is super snappy and launches in no time at all.
  • Web surfing on this device is awesome — fast fast fast.

Hotspot

  • Setting up my Nexus One as a mobile wifi hotspot is super easy. My Macbook connects to it no problem, and surfing speeds are shockingly fast. I used USB tethering with my iPhone 3G and found that very slow. The hotspot is a revelation and can see myself using it a lot.

Google Calendar and Account Syncing

  • Are you a Google Calendar user who uses an iPhone? Do you want the ability to add a new calendar item on your phone, and have it show up in Google Calendar on the web? Out of the box, this simple functionality doesn’t work. Now, there is a way to make it work, but we’re talking some serious settings kung fu that 99/100 people aren’t going to do.
  • As you might expect with the Google Phone (aka, the Nexus One), or any Android phone, syncing with your Google account is brain dead easy. Enter your username and password. And you’re done.

Updates

  • Ever update an iPhone to the latest firmware? Pain in the ass. But I got the Android 2.2 update over the air last week and it couldn’t be simpler. I was prompted to upgrade, I clicked yes, and a few minutes later it was done. No cables, no syncing, no backup, it just worked.

I’ve left a bunch of stuff out of this review — here’s a quick list and my reasons for not going into more depth:

  • Marketplace (this is the Android App Store) — it sort of sucks, but I never use it.
  • Apps — yes, the iPhone has a bajillion more apps than the Android. But the Android is catching up quickly. More importantly for me, I don’t use a bajillion apps, even when I was on the iPhone. I use like 15, tops. And I have them all on my Nexus. So whatever! :)
  • Camera — apparently the iPhone 4 has a gorgeous camera. The Nexus One camera is pretty good, but frankly I never use. I never used the iPhone camera before it.
  • Facetime — iPhone 4′s killer app isn’t that interesting for me. And there’s no front facing camera on the Nexus One. I don’t really see myself doing a lot of Facetime-like calls, but that’s just me. I don’t really talk on the phone a lot in the first place. Now, if Apple had bought Skype and integrated Facetime with Skype and made it work on 3G and not just wifi, well, then, that would truly be killer. But you can only talk with other iPhone 4 users if you’re both on wifi? Umm, so that’s like 7 people?
  • Phone — the phone is great, the voice dialing is great. Not much else to say about that.

Concluding Remarks

If you’ve made it this far, you can tell I’m thrilled about my new phone. Other than the keyboard, I have no real complaints. However, always consider the source. I’m a geek. When I first popped in my Fido SIM card, my phone couldn’t use the 3G network. I had to go switch it on deep inside some menu. I’m happy to do that because I’m the type of guy who is going to investigate every setting and every menu anyway. But grandma? She just wants it to work! And while some things, like updates, are super simple, other things, like setting up Locale, the hotspot, and customizing notifications, actually require you to play around in the menus for a bit. Most people won’t bother, so as a result, this is not a phone for most people.

I met an iPhone fanboy last fall who wasn’t very technologically skilled. He didn’t know how to change his ringer. He didn’t know how to turn on vibrate. Basic, basic stuff. But he loved his phone, he thought it was best thing ever. My guess is that most people are like this, or (I hope!) slightly more advanced. But the Nexus One menu system and customization settings are likely too complicated for your average Joe. Hopefully the next upgrade (Gingerbread) which is coming in the fall will address many of these issues.