Nexus One

After being present in the mobile phone industry as just a software manufacturer, Google has finally decided to take the plunge and make its first very own mobile phone to compete with the likes of Nokia, Samsung, Apple and BlackBerry. Its weapon of choice? The Nexus One. Manufactured by HTC for Google, the Nexus One has, by far, one of the most impressive specifications list you can find in a smartphone. Or should I call it Superphone, as Google does. The Nexus One comes armed with Qualcomm's finest 1GHz Snapdragon processor, a 3.7-inch, 800 x 480 pixel AMOLED display, a 5 megapixel camera, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and runs on the latest and greatest Android 2.1 operating system.

Although the Nexus One is so far only sold in U.S., we managed to get our hands on one sample in India, which was bought from U.S. We spent some time with the Nexus One and this is what we have to say about it.

Hardware
The Nexus One is one amazing piece of equipment. I must say I am a big fan of the whole industrial design theme that HTC has going on here. The Nexus One design is from the same school of thought but has its own personality compared to other HTC handsets. The design has the charm of a smoothened stone found on river banks. It looks beautiful, yet in an understated, classy way.

The build quality of the handset is terrific too. The Nexus One makes use of Teflon coated metal and rubberized plastic to good use. The metal surrounds the display and goes around the back, while it has plastic at the base and on the back and battery cover. The Nexus One is also a fairly slim and light handset; more than the iPhone 3GS. The curved design also feels great in your hand and the rubberized surface gives decent grip.

On the front, we have the 3.7-inch display occupying most of the space. Above the display is the thin earpiece, which also contains the proximity sensor and the display light sensor. Below the display are a row of touch sensitive controls and a trackball. I found these controls to be a bit temperamental. Sometimes, they would work even with an accidental touch of your finger and trigger their respective functions, while at times, they wouldn't function even when we wanted them to; like the back button. The trackball is fairly useless for most part and only come into play when you have to scroll the cursor between text. It also glows in different colors to indicate different activities; such as when you receive a message or have a missed call.

On the left side, you'll find the slim volume control button. At the bottom is the microUSB port with three metal connectors, for the desktop dock and on the top is the power button on the left and the 3.5mm headphone jack on the right.

On the back is the 5 megapixel camera lens that juts out slight from the body. This is to prevent muffling the loudspeaker, which is placed on its right. The camera also has a single LED flash. You'll also notice a small hole on the left, which is for the microphone. The Nexus One has a noise cancellation feature, which makes use of this mic so that the person on the other side of your call hears your voice clearly.
Under the hood the Nexus One runs on a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 processor. It has 512 MB of RAM and 512 MB of ROM. The built-in memory is practically useless to the user as on the Android OS, the user can only save files on the memory card while the phone memory is used by the system. If a memory card is not present, you cannot use any memory related feature, such as taking pictures with the camera or the installing applications onto the phone. The Nexus One comes with 4GB card and can support up to 32GB of microSDHC cards. In comparison, the iPhone 3GS comes with 16 or 32GB built-in.
You can check out the making of the handset through a series of very interesting videos made by HTC. Watch them here.
Display

The Nexus One comes with a beautiful 3.7-inch, 480 x 800 pixel AMOLED, capacitive touchscreen display. The display quality is top notch. Colours look vivid and pop out. Black levels are excellent and so are the viewing angles; advantages of  OLED technology. In comparison, the iPhone display looks pale and washed out. However, OLED too has its fair share of disadvantages and the Nexus One suffers from all of them. For starters, the display visibility under sunlight is disappointing. The display also has a problem of slightly over-saturating certain colours, such as red, which makes skin tones look unnatural at times. In comparison, the iPhone display looks more natural and is several times more readable in the sun.
The capacitive touchscreen on the Nexus One has an excellent touch response. The display reacts instantly and accurately to your touch responses. The touch response is on par with the iPhone display. The display has support for multi-touch technology but Google had disabled it initially. However, in the recently announced firmware update, the Nexus One now supports multi-touch in apps like the photo viewer, web browser and the Maps application, where you can pinch to zoom instead of using the on-screen zoom buttons.

Software
The Nexus One runs on the latest Android 2.1 operating system, also knows as "Eclair" (what's with all the pastry names, Google?). It is currently the only phone to run this OS but soon enough, we will see more phones coming out with it. To be honest, there isn't much difference between 2.1 and the 1.6 that we saw on the Hero (since we haven't used the Droid, we will refrain from mentioning it). First of all, the home screen has seen most of the changes. On the Nexus One, you get five home screens, two more than the older version of Android. You can see which home screen you are on by the dots at the bottom corners of the display. If there are two dots on either side, you are in the middle screen. If there is none on the right and four on the left then you are on the rightmost screen.

Gone is the pull up tray of applications of older Android versions. You now get a Home icon at the bottom and pressing it makes the icons appear on the home screen, in an animation that resembles the way the icons on the iPhone appear every time you press the home button. The applications list is no longer a straightforward 2D list but has somewhat of a 3D look, where the icons slide up and down on the screen, as if placed on a scroll. You can see the icons that went off the screen on top and the ones to come below (if you are scrolling down). It looks cool and also worked smoothly, thanks to the powerful processor, so we have no qualms about it.

Another addition to the home screen is the new live wallpapers. Live wallpapers are basically those which don't just display static image or a fixed animation but rather take into account user interactions or other factors such as time, etc. to look livelier. For example, the default Nexus One theme has one animation running in the background but also reacts to your touch when you press on the display. Same goes for another animation of water surface where you could see movements on the surface at points where you touch the display. There is one which changes the color of the sky according to the current time and another which has a decibel meter which moves in sync with the music you are playing. Others are simpler and simply animate as you move through the five home screens. These too look cool but will ultimately drain your battery faster so if you don't want that to happen, you might want to switch to old fashioned static wallpapers.

We also noticed other changes such a redesigned image gallery, calculator, etc., which have gone through a major change. Some other applications such as contact and messages haven't gone through as much of a change and look similar to their versions in older Android OSes. The notification tray is also the same as before, which is just fine as the Android notification system is the most elegant of them all unlike the iPhone notification system where the notifications just pop right up in the middle of the screen, stealing focus from whatever you were trying to do.
Multi-tasking on the Android is still the same as before. Press and hold the home key and you are presented with the last six opened applications so you can quickly switch between them. Although it is infinitely better than the zero multi-tasking ability on the iPhone platform, it still isn't as brilliant as Symbian's (or even Windows Mobile's) way of presenting all the open applications running in the background and closing them from the task manager without opening them. Also, on the Android, you cannot really 'close' any application after you are done with them and they continue to stay open even after you exit them.
Google has also added a new feature to the Nexus One called voice to text conversion. Now basically instead of typing out your thoughts you just speak them to the phone. The Nexus One then magically converts your words to actual text. And this works in any text input field, whether it is your message editor or your Twitter client. You have to speak very clearly though and enunciate each and every punctuation. Your accent also plays a role in how the final text comes out and if you have a heavy accent the text might not entirely resemble what you just said. Also the service requires an Internet connection on the phone as conversion process takes online at Google s servers.
Compared to the older Android phones, the overall smoothness of the UI has improved dramatically in the Nexus One. Most of the credit goes to the 1GHz Snapdragon processor which makes light work of everything. The OS itself went through very little changes to become faster but on the other hand, included even more graphical effects (most of them quite superfluous, to be honest) which places further strain on the hardware. So, although the experience has improved a lot, at times, it still stutters momentarily, something we did not expect to happen. Still, when compared with all the smartphone interfaces out there, the Android OS comes closest to the iPhone OS in matching the ease of use and the overall look and finish of the UI and is getting closer with every successive version.

A smartphone is as good as the applications available for it and in this aspect, Android is still inferior to the iPhone, Symbian or Windows Mobile phones. Although the Android Market is slowly picking up steam, it just isn't happening at a pace as it should. Unlike the Apple App Store which suddenly exploded with thousands of apps coming in thick and fast for the platform, developers are taking their own sweet time in coming up with applications for the Android OS. The current range of apps available is decent but nothing to be proud of. Also, unlike the iPhone, which you can buy almost entirely based on the quality of applications available for it, the Nexus One (or any Android phone for that matter) is still some way from reaching that status. We do hope developers get their act together and come up with some really brilliant applications like they did for the iPhone because phones like the Nexus One surely deserve them as much as the iPhone does.

 

Connectivity

The Nexus One is a GSM Quad-band handset. It supports 3G and HSDPA, along with GPRS and EDGE. You also get Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g, Bluetooth v2.1 + EDR, A-GPS and USB 2.0.
The call quality and network reception is all acceptable. The Nexus One even has an extra microphone at the back to filter the noise so your voice sounds clearer to the person on the other end. The loudspeaker is a bit timid. The volume levels weren't all that great.
Messaging is an enjoyable experience on the Nexus One, thanks to the multitude of options available. You can send an SMS, MMS as well as an email. For email, you can use the standard email application or the GMail app. The Nexus One also comes with the GTalk application built-in and it works great. These applications do require a constant Internet connection though, which will drain your battery faster. The on-screen keypad is the closest to the one on the iPhone in terms of usability. Even in the portrait mode, you can type at a fairly brisk pace and most of the time you'll hit the correct key and even if you don't the auto correct presents you with the correct option eight out of ten times. The landscape keyboard isn't necessarily better as you have to stretch your thumbs a bit to hit the keys since the Nexus One is a bit tall (or wide in this case).
The web browser on the Nexus One is just superb. As far as page loading speed and accuracy of the content on the page goes, it is on par with the iPhone browser. But when it comes to actually scrolling on a web page, especially the one loaded with images and other complex content, then the Nexus One is much better and faster. Unlike the iPhone where the moment you start scrolling, you'll see the checkered pattern on screen as the phone is scrambling to process all the content on the page in order to display it, the Nexus One does it immediately so you never have to wait, even for a split second. This is one of those areas where you get to experience the raw processing power of the Snapdragon processor over other processors. It also has multi-tab browsing and although it isn't as elegant as the one on the Opera Mobile 10, it still is on par with the iPhone. Also, the Nexus One works much better with multiple windows open in the background than the iPhone.

Multimedia
The Nexus One has a 5 megapixel camera with auto-focus and single LED flash. It can also record videos in 720 x 480 resolution at 20 FPS. The camera software includes all the functions on the left side (when the phone is held horizontally) in a slide out tray. At times, this tray can be frustratingly difficult to open as it just refuses to slide out when you tap on it. It is best to use the options key on the bottom of the display (besides the home key) to access the menu. The Nexus One has no shutter button and has to rely on the trackball or the on-screen button to take the picture. The Nexus One also lacks the touch to focus feature of the iPhone 3GS.
The image quality is pretty decent. Images in day light came out well, but those taken in low-light conditions had a fair amount of noise in them. The flash is quite powerful but has a tendency to focus its brightness in the centre and the corners of the image are often dark. The videos boast of a slightly higher than usual 720 x 480 pixel resolution but capped at 20 FPS, they lack the smoothness that you'd want from them. You can also record at VGA resolution at 30 FPS. The iPhone 3GS video quality is still top notch in comparison, even though the resolution isn't as high.
The music player on the Nexus One is still the same old player that we saw on the previous versions of Android with hardly any differences. It is rather basic and offers the bare minimum in terms of features. You can categorize your music into different sections such as Album, Artist, etc. You can see a small thumbnail of the album art on the side in Album view. When you click on an album, you'll see the album art in the background full screen as you go through the tracks in that album. When opened, a track opens in the same old interface, with the no-so-large album art view on the left, some playback mode keys on the right and the playback control keys on the bottom.
The audio quality of the phone is pretty good through the headphones. The loudspeaker is disappointing though. While playing the same track iPhone 3G loudspeaker turned out to be louder than the Nexus One. For those who don't know, the iPhone was criticized for having one of the quietest loudspeakers around.
The photo gallery is completely different from what we saw in the older versions of Android. Your albums are represented as a grid of stacks. Clicking on one stack opens it in a grid of thumbnails of the images contained within. One little feature Google as added here is that if you turn the phone around as you go through the gallery, the thumbnails seem to rotate on a plane. It's hard to explain and need to be seen to understand. It's not really useful and one of those things that Google has added in the UI just because they can.
I did observe some amount of stuttering as I navigated through the gallery. It's not very smooth and makes you wonder why Google went through the trouble of making it so fancy if the phone was not going to handle it. And we are talking about the freaking Snapdragon here!
The video player on the Nexus One is rather basic. And by basic, I mean it does not support formats like DivX and XviD. Although you do get applications on the Market for playing these files, it would have been of nice of Google to include support for these formats by default, seeing as how the Nexus One has absolutely perfect display for watching videos on. Also, it won't have problem playing high resolution files as the Snapdragon can handle those with ease.

 

Battery Life

The Nexus One has a 1400 mAh Li-Ion battery. When used heavily with the Wi-Fi on most of the day, the Nexus One gave one day of usage. This included calling, messaging, web browsing, using applications and the camera. With the Wi-Fi off, one could easily eke out one and half to two days of battery life from the phone.

Pricing and Availability
The Google Nexus One is not officially sold in India, although it could be purchased through the gray market for around Rs. 35,000. A better alternative would be to ask someone flying down from the U.S. to get you one. The Nexus One is sold there for $530 SIM free, and when converted to Indian Rupees with taxes added should cost you about Rs. 28,000, which isn't a bad price to pay for the phone.
Verdict
So should you get one? Well the phone definitely is pretty good and it would make a good buy if purchased from the U.S. Even with the Indian gray market price, it is cheaper than the iPhone 3GS and hence, a better value. It does have its share of niggles but to be honest none of them are deal breakers. There is a lot more to the phone than those niggles and in the final tally the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. For that price, you get a phone with a lovely design, superb display, a well-designed interface - which also has a lot of potential than what it currently shows - and a good set of connectivity and multimedia features to boot.
Although the iPhone's interface and App Store still betters Google's offering, as an overall product, the Nexus One is better than the iPhone 3G (or the 3GS sold through the gray market) that is available in India.

The Nexus One is not only the best Android phone so far but quite possibly the best smartphone available today. In other words, if you have the money, then this is the smartphone to buy right now.