Keyvan Nayyeri

Since I arrived here in the United States, I’ve been arguing with myself to choose a mobile phone to use. To now I was using a very poor Nokia phone that I got with my prepaid plan on my arrival.

Doing some research here and there, I finally realized that my best options are Apple iPhone and Google Nexus One. As I’ll describe later in this post, I chose to go for the Google phone and received it earlier today. Many of my friends have asked me to share my experiences with them as they’re in doubt to switch to Nexus One; therefore, here I write a review based on my first impressions on the first Google mobile phone called Nexus One.

Before, jumping into the details, it’s worth mentioning that I have a good background to judge on the qualities of this phone and compare it with Apple iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry devices. In Iran I used to have Windows Mobile devices for 5-6 years, and I’ve used my friends iPhones for a very long time as I feel I’ve had one. I also tested Blackberry devices by friends a few times so I think that I can compare the features of these phones. Also unlike, many people in the world specifically many of the ordinary Americans who die for Apple products with no apparent reason, I’m not a biased person for any of these companies and my regular readers should have known me during the time. Therefore, if I write anything in this review, it’s solely based on my technical perspective and nothing more.

Order

As I arrived here with two bags of clothes only, I ought to order many things to start my life. In the past three months I never had a great experience as I had with Google Nexus One order yesterday.

As I’ll describe later, I decided to buy an unlocked phone directly from the Google website. I put my order online and asked them to engrave my name and blog URL on my phone.

The default processing time for engraved phones is 72 hours and I went to take a short nap, but receiving a call in less than 3 hours from FexEx automated notification service, I woke up and noticed that they already have engraved my custom text on my phone and have shipped it via FedEx. This was very surprising indeed.

My phone was sent via Standard Overnight service by FedEx and arrived here at my address in less than 24 hours. I received it and unpacked my phone quickly!

In my honest opinion the online ordering experience with Google was amazing!

Unpacking

The packaging was excellent but I don’t think that it can compete with Apple product packaging. Initial setup was easy and fast but obviously, the phone relies heavily on a good internet connection on the phone to have almost all the functionality.

One initial problem that I noticed was the account signing-in process for my Google account. While I had my fast Wi-Fi connection at home and T-Mobile 3G network was also available without any problem, Nexus One took half an hour and several attempts to initially sign in and synchronize with my Google account.

Plan

My story with my monthly plan is something long that shouldn’t concern you but for some reasons I couldn’t sign up a contract with Apple, and it turned out to be a good thing later. I signed up for a 2 year contract with T-Mobile and waited for almost a month to evaluate my options.

Doing some research on different forums, I realized that the best trick to get a Nexus One is to get an unlocked phone and use it with your existing plan even with T-Mobile that offers a service with Google. Honestly, the deal between Google and T-Mobile isn’t good at all and many people have been complaining about it.

In my experience, the best way to get a Nexus One and use this phone is to get your plan from T-Mobile and use an unlocked phone. The good point is that T-Mobile has a deal that gives you all the features you need on a monthly basis without mandating you to sign a long-term contract.

Of course, everybody knows that AT&T is not a good operator at all. I’ve had some interactions with their customer service and they were all frustrating. On the other hand, T-Mobile has one of the best customer service qualities. Yesterday, I asked them to add the data plan to my service and they did that quickly and easily.

One point worth mentioning is that I didn’t get any text message service for my plan as I’m not a big fan of text messaging (being a Ph.D. student and wasting your time?) and I don’t need to send many text messages in a month to pay $10 per month. Luckily, Nexus One comes with the best integration with Google Voice and I can send unlimited number of text messages for free. I thought that this may be considered as an advantage of an unlocked phone because it doesn’t enforce you to get the whole plan from T-Mobile. I just hope that they don’t stop this feature in the future revision of the Android even though it seems far from the reality with the policies that Google has exhibited before.

Hardware

Nexus One comes with one of the best hardware available on any mobile phone in the market even I think that I’m safe to say that it has the best set of hardware.

Hardware specification is an area where it proves to be much better than iPhone, many of the Windows Mobile devices, and Blackberries. It has a very fast Qualcomm 1 Ghz process, 512 MB of Flash memory, and 512 MB of RAM memory. It has a big 3.7 inch display and 5 megapixels camera. Android platform 2.1 is installed and it supports all the common GSM/EDGE standards as well as Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Besides, it has AGPS receiver, Cell tower and Wi-Fi positioning, Digital compass and Accelerometer.

Putting all the hardware specifications together, Nexus One is definitely a powerful phone, and I’m seeing it in action myself.

Platform

This is an area that Nexus One is a leader for sure. Android is much more powerful than iPhone OS (OS X iPhone). One big weakness of iPhone is lack of multi-tasking support which is bolder when I turned on my Nexus One to stream a radio station while was receiving latest tweets and emails in the background, and was checking the Google Maps simultaneously! I don’t think that I need to compare it with Windows Mobile and Blackberry!

Besides, the development process for iPhone platform is something complicated. I’ve started a new post series and am writing about it on a regular basis. In one of the recent posts I wrote enough details about the pain of development and deployment of an iPhone application!

Furthermore, Android is an open platform that lets many people work around it easily without worrying about limitations. So the applications built for the framework are mostly free or cheaper than equivalent iPhone applications.

User Experience

In my opinion iPhone is slightly better in this area. Nexus One is very powerful and in many situations it has the same level of user experience as iPhone does, but there is only one area where it shows some weaknesses: navigation buttons! I found the physical navigation buttons/shortcuts a little hard to use and sometimes they don’t respond very well. I don’t think that they’re necessary at all but most likely Google had the intention to show that they haven’t imitated something from Apple.

For all the other scenarios Nexus One is as great as iPhone even in some areas it’s better because it seems to have a better Operating System and hardware.

Connectivity

I tested my phone and called some friends and received a few calls. The quality of the voice is great on both sides. I also tested my phone with my home Wi-Fi connection as well as T-Mobile’s EDGE and 3G networks and it worked very well. Obviously, I got much better results with my 3G connection on T-Mobile in comparison with AT&T! I can’t blame Apple for the connection problems with AT&T but with iPhone and AT&T you wouldn’t get the high level of quality that you can get with Nexus One and T-Mobile.

Graphic

In this area Nexus One is slightly better than iPhone. In my experience the level of graphic and video on Nexus One is noticeably better than what you can experience on iPhone. Of course, better hardware can be the main reason for this.

Applications

Although iPhone has more applications than Android available, Android applications are mostly free or cheaper than their equivalent iPhone applications. Also Android is younger and its current number of applications seems to be equivalent to the number of applications for iPhone at this age.

Nexus One comes with a great set of pre-installed applications and has a fantastic integration with various Google services which means that you won’t feel the power of Nexus One unless you have a good internet connection on your phone.

I installed some applications on my device and found very rich and powerful applications available for my purposes.

Camera

I took a few photos and videos with my new phone and really loved the quality. Nexus One should have the best camera among all the well-known mobile phones available in the markets today.

Maps

Google has proven to be the best in this area and has ported this power to Nexus One as well. Nexus One is much better than all the other phones when it comes to maps and directions. I really loved the speed and quality of Google Maps on my Nexus One.

Voice Recognition

I tested the voice recognition feature on my new phone and it worked fine. I had heard that this is another area that Nexus One rocks but so far I haven’t seen any noticeable difference with other phones.

Engraved Text

One cool option for unlocked Nexus One phones is to engrave two lines of text on your phone, and I used my name and blog URL on my phone. I found this a very nice idea that is not offered by the vendors for iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry.

Conclusion

So far I’ve enjoyed my experience with my new Google Nexus One mobile phone even though it’s not a very long time that I’ve used that. It’s hard to judge on mobile phones these days as the competition is very close, but in my honest opinion Nexus One takes the lead at present with some better features and qualities that it provides.

I try to work more with my new toy and if I found something big to share, I’ll post it here or on my Twitter account. If you have special questions about the device, feel free to leave a comment and I try to answer you.