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!