Google Phone – Nexus One – Review

Google is announcing the Nexus One phone today and I was fortunate enough to receive one as a gift from Google a few weeks back. As Google says “It’s svelte (only 130g), fast (a 1 GHz processor), and gorgeous (a 3.7″, high resolution display)”.

Things To Love

• The Nexus has a very nice screen and is a touch screen phone about the same size as the iPhone to which it will be compared… a lot.
• The Nexus has built in GPS
• The Nexus has built in turn by turn directions
• The Nexus also has a hands off car dash mode where you can say things like “directions to 76, 9th avenue, new york”
• The phone has a 5M pixel camera with a flash that takes pretty good pictures for a cell phone, certainly better than my camera which is the original iPhone.
• There are a growing number of applications for the Nexus because it is not the first Android phone. Even some of the better iPhone apps like Shazam and Pandora are available for the Nexus.

Things that puzzle me

• The phone has a track ball which does not bother me but seems odd when you already have the touch screen.
• You can’t pinch to zoom into photos or into the map which I want to do.

Things that need work

• The thing I miss most on the Nexus is iTunes. I use my iPhone as my iPod and my podcast player. The Nexus has integration with Amazon MP3 but all my music is in iTunes. The Nexus also has a Listener podcast player but the Amateur Traveler, for instance, is not listed despite being a relatively well known podcast that has been around for 4.5 years.
• If you want an alternative to the iPhone to get off of AT&T this is not the phone for you. It is a GSM phone that supports, in the US, T-Mobile and AT&T Edge. It does, of course, also support wi-fi.
• At least once the GPS lost its signal for a few minutes while I drove on and missed my turn. If the phone gave me some audible warning tone that it lost its signal, I missed it.
• It has a growing number of applications but may find find, as I did, that there are one or two applications that you rely on that are not on the Nexus yet. For me that is my todo list application “Things”.

Sample picture

Conclusion

The bottom line is that I think it is a very interesting product and I think they will sell a number of Nexus phones.