Nexus One

Linus Torvalds: I broke down and bought a Nexus One last week

For Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, the Nexus One is apparently the first mobile phone that he doesn’t hate. He bought the phone a few days ago after hearing the news that Google were pushing out an update to enable pinch & zoom on the device. He’s owned a number of phones, including the G1, but according to a post on his personal blog the Nexus One is the first that he’s enthusiastic about:

I love the concept of having a phone that runs Linux, and I’ve had a number of them over the years (in addition to the G1, I had one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones) etc. But my hatred of phones ends up resulting in me not really ever using them…

But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner. I wasn’t enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge. I’ve wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that google navigation might finally make a phone useful.

And it does. What a difference! I no longer feel like I’m dragging a phone with me “just in case” I would need to get in touch with somebody - now I’m having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead. The fact that you can use it as a phone too is kind of secondary.

Tips for iPhone users thinking about switching to a Nexus One

Scott Knaster, an employee at Google has spent the last 3 months living with the Nexus One and talks about switching from an iPhone. A good exploration of some of the differences between the two phones from the insights that he gained from the experience.

This is not your practice blog

Nexus One: designed to sync to the cloud, not your desktop

Wired seem impressed with the Nexus One and give it a fairly balanced review. Their only big complaint was lack of support for syncing with your computer. But then there’s a reason for that - Google is all about the cloud.

Super syncing with Google products. The Nexus One makes use of your Google account the way a peasant farmer utilizes a pig carcass — it uses almost every part. (Except Google Docs, which you can view from the browser, but without editing.)

All you have to do is sign in to enable your e-mail, calendar, contacts, Picasa galleries (with a neat new interface for accessing photos) and Google Voice, the free application that organizes your phone activities and transcribes your voicemail. Google Voice doesn’t work with the iPhone, and I had trouble making outgoing calls with it on the Droid. But it works like a charm with the Nexus.

But when it comes to syncing with your computer, the Nexus isn’t so great. This reflects Google’s philosophy that if something ain’t in the cloud, it probably ain’t worth bothering about. Yes, you can plug a Nexus into your laptop via USB, but you have to trigger a command to mount it before the icon shows up, and then you have to drag the files over. Clearly Google would prefer that you use your Nexus One to hear music from Pandora or Last.FM and watch videos from TV.Com or YouTube, as opposed to the antiquated practice of copying and playing actual files.

That’s also probably why Google sniffs at the idea of building in gigabytes of onboard memory on the Nexus. The phone comes with a miserable 512 MB of built-in flash memory. Google’s message for those who want to store MP3 files, photos or movies? Let them buy SD cards!

Smartphones Compared: total cost of ownership

With a new smartphone player now in the game BillShrink has put together a handy 24 month total cost of ownership chart comparing the Nexus One, iPhone, Droid and Palm Pre handsets. It’s US-centric but interesting viewing for non-US readers as well. The verdict? With an unlimited plan the Nexus One would cost $2,580 over 24 months whilst the iPhone weighs in at an impressive $3780, almost 50% more. Read on to see all the figures.

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How the Nexus One stacks-up against the iPhone - specification comparison

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Nexus One Hands On - Dynamic Background

You’ve no doubt heard about the animated video backgrounds, but they’re actually more than just animations: you can interact with them.

The default background is the square/8-bit like one shown above, where lines of coloured squares come in from different sides of the screen. What’s neat (even if it is superfluous and battery draining) is that you can tap anywhere on the desktop in a blank space and trigger dots to spread out from your tap. Basically, press anywhere to cause blocks to fly outwards. The same thing happens in the “water” background, except instead of blocks, you cause ripples in the water.

What’s also neat are the two virtual sound meters, which act as a visualizer for whatever music you’re currently playing on your phone. There’s one analog one that looks like one of the old ones with a red needle, and a “digital” one that looks similar to ones you see elsewhere. Sorta neat in itself, but it shows that the interactive backgrounds can actually interact with apps, as long as one knows the other’s APIs.

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Nexus One Hands On - Speed

Google just gave Motorola (and Verizon) a swift shot to the TSTS, because the Nexus One is astonishingly faster than the Droid. The speed dominance was most evident when we compared the loading of webpages, but even when you’re just scrolling around, launching apps and moving about the OS, you could tell that there’s a beefier brain inside the N1. I don’t know the specs for sure, but there’s talk of a 1GHz processor being inside, which would push it quite a ways above the 550MHz Arm A8 in Motorola’s newest toy.

When comparing the three phones in loading a webpage over Wi-Fi, the Nexus One loaded first, the iPhone 3GS came in a few seconds later, and the Droid came in a little while after that. This was constant throughout many webpage loads, so it’s indicative of something going on inside with the hardware.

I ran all three through a Javascript benchmark engine for some quantifiable numbers, and while the results were similar between the Nexus One and the iPhone 3GS, the Droid still came up at about 60% of the other two. Surprisingly enough, Mobile Safari on the iPhone scored better on the Javscript benches than the Nexus did, even though the Nexus was able to pull down and render actual web pages faster. Note that I didn’t list actual numbers here, for privacy reasons.

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Nexus One Hands On - The Screen

Even though the screen is the same size and same resolution as the Droid, it’s noticeably better. The colours are much more vibrant and the blacks are blacker, as evidenced by putting both side by side and hitting up various websites and loading various games. The pinks on Perez Hilton and the blues on Gizmodo just popped a lot more on the N1, and made the Droid (which was actually considered to have a great screen) seem washed out. The same feeling carries over when you compare the Nexus with the iPhone 3GS. And it’s pretty damn bright, compared to the other two phones. This is probably the best screen we’ve seen on a smartphone so far. Probably.

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Nexus One Hands On - How it feels

The Nexus One is slightly thinner than the iPhone 3GS, and slightly lighter. No hard specs were thrown around, unfortunately, since Google didn’t even let people who they gave the phone to know that. The back is definitely not cheap and plasticky, like the iPhone’s backing, and feels like some sort of rubbery material. So, not smooth like the iPhone, but not as rubbery as the Droid. It’s halfway in-between.

You can call the design the antithesis of the Droid: smooth, curved, and light, instead of hard, square and pointy. It feels long and silky and natural in your hand—even more so than the iPhone 3GS. There are also three gold contacts on the bottom designed for future docking (possibly charging?) use, but there aren’t any accessories available for the phone now. It plugs in via microUSB at the moment.

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