Google Nexus One: Hands On

I’m not going to use the word “iPhone killer” to describe the Nexus One, such phrasing is trite at best. Not to mention that the only thing that’s going to kill the iPhone will be Apple, and then, only when iPhone 4 or whatever comes out.

That said, of the current crop of pretenders the Nexus One seems to be something special. Follow us after the jump for our first impressions after 48 hours.

I’m forced by my employer to use TMobile, and I have long looked at iPhones with the sort of envy that only a devout Mac-cultist deprived of the sacred ‘Jesus Phone’ could. I had tried the pretenders, the other supposed ‘iPhone Killers’, and finally just settled into a comfortable groove with my Android G1. Sure it was no iPhone, but it worked reasonably well, and I was used to its quirks.

Enter the Super Phone.

Right off, I’ll tell ya, I just love this dog-gone phone. I didn’t expect to, I expected to be impressed by some of it’s sexy features, but to become frustrated as my big sausage-like red-neck fingers tried to type on the on-screen only keyboard.

I was wrong. The screen is so large, the onscreen keyboard is plenty big enough for me to accurately type. What’s more every text field on the phone is voice enabled, so I can dictate rather than type. This feature works reasonably well though sometimes how the phone interprets my “Texan” into written English yields some comical results.

USER EXPERIENCE

The hand feel of the phone is fantastic. It’s solid enough that you know you’re holding a precision instrument, but not heavy. The shape of it fits my paws pretty well. It’s longer but thinner than the iPhone, the screen is massive, and beautiful.  Actually, you know, talking on the thing is a dream thanks to the twin microphones and noise canceling. It’s clear as a bell.

What is very telling is the UI. It’s clear that Eric Schmidt was taking notes while sitting on Apple’s board. There is a level of refinement in the interface not present in other Android phones that is darn near –dare it say it- Apple like.

When I place a call, big bright buttons show up, enabling me to trigger the keypad, Bluetooth headsets, or the speakerphone. Gone are the G1’s layers of menus to get to needed on call features. When I pull the phone away from my face the screen turns itself back on to give me instant access to needed features (like uh… hanging up).

This is what Android needed to be all along, and really reaffirms Apple’s strategy of perfecting products. Apple would have never released the G1 in it’s current state, but the Nexus One with its year+ of refinement, is a product a cultist can be proud to carry.

Performance is crisp, and even silly features like animated desktop wallpaper don’t seem to tax the mighty 1GHz ARM processor. We’ll need to wait on developers, however, to see how high-end games play on the phone.

APPLICATION INTEGRATION

One of the coolest things I’ve discovered in the past 48 hours with this phone has been how tightly Google has integrated different application platforms together on this phone.  Of course the phone works with Gmail, and like every smartphone there is a Facebook application. What I didn’t expect was for them to be integrated. My Facebook contacts are incorporated into my Google contacts. Moreover if one of my contacts doesn’t have a picture associated, it will download their headshot from their Facebook profile.

That’s a trivial feature, to be sure, but it demonstrates the kind of attention to small details that we’d heretofore only gotten from Apple.

And the whole phone is full of them, I’m still discovering small touches that make me go, WOW!

The phone is of course integrated with Google Voice, which was an add-on for the G1. Conspicuously, the only major Google platform not supported is Wave.

SIDE BY SIDE

*Light usage = checking email, appointments, and such, with no heavy browsing, a few short phone calls, Heavy Usage = This is your only computer & phone.
** not spec’d separately, Actual web surfing on the G1 is so painfully slow you’d never do it long enough to actually drain the battery.
*** not had the Nexus One long enough to provide reliable data for pure surfing.

CONCLUSION

The Nexus One is fast, with a high rez bright screen that sips batter power. Of course, it has a set of wiz-bang features that will probably be old news by the end of next week, as phones continue to leapfrog each other. But more than its specs, it has the refinement and attention to detail that an Apple aficionado can appreciate.

While not necessarily an iPhone killer, the Nexus One is no poseur either. This phone stands on it’s own, living up to it’s own hype. It’s not the second coming of the Jesus phone… But it is something different…  perhaps a true Super Phone.

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