Hardware Performance
The Nexus One is gorgeous. It's a 4.7 by 2.35 by 0.45 inch (HWD) slab weighing 4.6 ounces and feeling unusually slim and solid in the hand. Most of the slab is a big 3.7-inch AMOLED touch screen, with four touch buttons at the bottom, but there's also room for a rather loose-feeling trackball, hard volume buttons on the side, and a power button on top. There's a microSD card slot under the back cover that you must remove the battery to access. The phone comes with a 4GB card and is expandable to 32GB.
The Nexus One is gorgeous. It's a 4.7 by 2.35 by 0.45 inch (HWD) slab weighing 4.6 ounces and feeling unusually slim and solid in the hand. Most of the slab is a big 3.7-inch AMOLED touch screen, with four touch buttons at the bottom, but there's also room for a rather loose-feeling trackball, hard volume buttons on the side, and a power button on top. There's a microSD card slot under the back cover that you must remove the battery to access. The phone comes with a 4GB card and is expandable to 32GB.
The Nexus One's 1-GHz Snapdragon processor burned through our benchmarks. On four publicly available Android benchmark programs (Softweg, Linpack, CaffeineMark and BenchmarkPi), the Nexus One performed much faster than other Android phones, including the Motorola Droid. The pure CPU benchmarks were the most amazing, with the Nexus One scoring 700 on Softweg's CPU scale to the Droid's 420 and the Motorola CLI's 134.
Graphics performance is also kicked up a notch, with the Nexus One scoring 26.7 fps on Qualcomm's Neocore OpenGL ES 1.1 benchmark as compared to the Droid's 20.8 fps. This phone is the best Android hardware yet.
That excellent graphics performance is paired with a 3.7-inch, 800-by-480-pixel AMOLED screen. Blacks are much blacker on this screen than on standard LCDs, and colors are crazily hyped up. The result is a very punchy image. But the screen can still be reflective and hard to view from certain angles. (For more on the Nexus One's screen, read our associated story.)
You get about 180MB free on the phone to add your own apps and media; you can also put media, but not apps, on a memory card up to 32GB. When you connect the phone to your PC, it shows up as a Flash drive so you can transfer data.
Interface
Even though the Nexus One has the fastest processor of any phone in the U.S., the phone's touch buttons are occasionally sluggish, especially when trying to skip within or back out of playing a video. The lack of multitouch hurt on the phone's otherwise decent software keyboard, where I kept trying to hold down the "shift" key and failing.
Even though the Nexus One has the fastest processor of any phone in the U.S., the phone's touch buttons are occasionally sluggish, especially when trying to skip within or back out of playing a video. The lack of multitouch hurt on the phone's otherwise decent software keyboard, where I kept trying to hold down the "shift" key and failing.
Google has touched up Android's interface a bit with the new version 2.1, which is also coming to the HTC Hero, Samsung Moment, and Motorola Droid and CLIQ soon. Android 2.1 features "live" animated wallpapers and an animated, better-looking photo gallery. You can swivel between five home screens, and the main menu of icons has a pleasing 3D effect.
But pure, stock Android isn't that great of an experience. It's spare, a bit cold, and confusing at times. It's not entirely obvious which buttons do what, and the interface is more devoted to self-configuration than to immediately presenting useful information out of the box. In other words, it's best for geeks.
Google is a great platform provider, not a consumer interface designer. HTC's Sense UI and Motorola's Motoblur both do better jobs of balancing Android's flexibility with consumer-friendly usability than Google does alone.
Phone Performance
The Nexus One is a quad-band EDGE and dual-band 3G phone that works on all U.S. and foreign 2G GSM networks, and T-Mobile's and foreign 3G systems. On AT&T, it's stuck on 2G. The Nexus One reportedly has 3G reception problems. I didn't see them; in fact, in my tests, the Nexus One was pretty much on par with the T-Mobile G1 and Motorola CLIQ. But Google has acknowledged there are issues they're working on, and that's something you must take into account.
The Nexus One is a quad-band EDGE and dual-band 3G phone that works on all U.S. and foreign 2G GSM networks, and T-Mobile's and foreign 3G systems. On AT&T, it's stuck on 2G. The Nexus One reportedly has 3G reception problems. I didn't see them; in fact, in my tests, the Nexus One was pretty much on par with the T-Mobile G1 and Motorola CLIQ. But Google has acknowledged there are issues they're working on, and that's something you must take into account.
Voice quality is acceptable, with one shining facet: the new fancy-pants noise cancellation by Audience works brilliantly. Both a roaring truck and the noise of construction equipment failed to make it to the other end of a call. But both the sound in the phone's earpiece and call transmissions on the other end sounded a bit trebly and harsh, even in non-noisy areas. The speakerphone, which is of average volume, sounded clear.
The Nexus One pairs automatically with any Bluetooth headset supporting Bluetooth 2.0, and I found it paired easily with both the Novero TFO and Plantronics Voyager Pro mono headsets. There was about a second of call lost before the call transferred to the headset, though. Music and video sounded fine on a Plantronics Pulsar 590 stereo headset, though video lost lip sync over Bluetooth.
But the supposedly voice-enabled Nexus One can't use its voice dialing, voice commands, or dictation with a Bluetooth headset. The Nexus One has an unusual speech-to-text feature where you can input into any field by speaking. But it's a gimmick, because it's hard to use; first, you have to press a very tricky little touch screen button, and then you have to hold the phone up to your head while you're talking. Voice dialing also wasn't that accurate.
There is at least one potential con you should know about before you buy the Google Nexus One: it is slightly chubby compared to most other phones.There are also a bunch of Google Nexus One pros revealed in this computer-generated Google Nexus One review of the pros and cons:Google Nexus One Pros:
- Faster processor: The speed of its Qualcomm QSD 8250 microprocessor (CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 1 GHz) is among the fastest among recent phones.
- Included Accessories: The Google Nexus One includes these accessories: Nexus One phone case, USB cable. It might be convenient.
- Large screen: The display is rather big, with its 3.7-inch diagonal size and a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels.
- High-definition Camera: It includes an advanced built-in camera: 5 megapixel
- Nice battery life: The manufacturer-rated talk time of 420 minutes is above the average. Though battery-life ratings could be exagerated by manufacturers, this is still an indication that the Google Nexus One could last longer than other phones.
- Popular operating system: The Google Nexus One is equipped with the Android 2.1 operating system, one of the two most popular mobile operating systems, already featuring a myriad of applications. This could turn out to be a great plus in comparison other smartphones since app developpers tend to be more interested to develop apps for the most widespread operating systems.
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