Google Nexus One review

One of the most eagerly awaited smartphones ever, the Google Nexus One has a lot to live up to. That it doesn’t quite meet expectations is perhaps not surprising, given that at heart it’s ‘just’ an HTC tablet and that Google themselves are still new to the game.

However, quite a lot of what’s wrong can be fixed in software and Android updates will be pushed out to this device first and foremost in 2010, so don’t take the score here as fixed for all time. There’s enough RAM and processor power to see you through a couple of years of over-the-air updates, making the Nexus One a super test bed for geeks everywhere.

It’s the same width as the iPhone, slightly taller and a millimetre or so thinner, but feels smaller than it actually is, thanks to every corner and edge being beautifully rounded. In fact, it’s so curvy that it’s easy to drop, it just oozes out of the hand. The screen is large at 3.7″, capacitive and OLED, giving the Nexus One a stunning display and touch experience indoors. Outside, as with other OLED phones, the screen is unable to cope with direct sunlight.

Made with both metal and plastic,  the Nexus One is solid and has a 3.5mm audio out jack, power/sleep and volume buttons, plus microUSB for charging and data. Internally, there’s the usual tri-band 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS, all of which work well.

The front ‘buttons’ are actually just an extension of the capacitive touchscreen and not particularly well aligned – you have to hit on the high side of each icon for any effect, a nuisance at first. There’s also a multi-LED trackball, useful for notifications and for nudging the cursor in text fields.

On the back is a tinny speaker,  unfortunately positioned so that you lose your sound every time your finger happens to block the small slot – annoying when you’re trying to watch a video. Also on the back is an extra microphone, used to sample ambient noise in real time and then subtract this from your voice calls, a system that works well.

Inside the Nexus One is a 1400mAh battery that just about copes in the face of being online all the time. You’ll definitely need to charge it each night though.

Start up the Nexus One and you’re in a Google-dominated world of pleasure. From live, animated wallpapers to complete integration of your Facebook contacts into your Google contacts, to the best mobile Gmail client to Google Maps, Google Talk and Google’s YouTube client. If you’ve got a free Google account and use it heavily, choosing Android as your mobile OS and the Nexus One as your device of choice is an easy decision.

Demonstrating that Android is still young, perhaps, there are no Office/PDF file viewers out of the box (yet). Thankfully, the built-in Android Market fills in most gaps, adding in, for example, free DataViz Office file viewers (and, optionally, editors) and numerous PDF viewers.

Also missing out-of-the-box are a file manager and a podcatcher – again, both quick and easy free downloads in the Android Market. Searching this is easy, with thousands of apps to choose from. Downloading and installing takes only seconds and you’re notified of updates to anything you’ve previously grabbed.

Commercial apps are best paid for using Google Checkout. Disappointingly, there’s limited space for applications, less than 200MB, which will ultimately dent the growing market for serious Android games.

Text entry is via a virtual QWERTY keyboard in both portrait and landscape mode, with writing aids to auto-correct miskeys. However, despite multi-touch on the capacitive screen (so you don’t have to lift each thumb before touching the screen for the next letter), the results aren’t a patch on text entry with the iPhone – expect Google to improve this in time.

Voice recognition is an alternative, of course, though general recognition is only about 75%; this needs to get to 99% before it’s usable in real life for texts and emails.

Web browsing on the Nexus One is generally excellent with the 1GHz processor driving all before it, though multi-touch zooming has yet to be added and there’s no Flash support in the browser.

Video playback is stunning, though disappointingly there’s no support for DivX or WMV. Music is taken care of with a functional player (though no EQ settings or frills) and by a built-in Music store, run by Amazon, with DRM-free track prices from as low as 30p. The 5 megapixel camera is one of HTC’s best ever, though let down by both the awful sound quality in videos and by the way you can’t shoot anything when it’s sunny because you can’t see the screen.

Rounding off the Nexus One experience are a maximum of five homescreens and a cornucopia of widgets (weather, music, search, facebook) and shortcuts to apps or shortcuts, meaning that you’ll be able to set up the Nexus One to show exactly the items that are important to your life.

Price: £440 (approx, SIM-free)
Web: www.google.com/phone

Essential Verdict
Performance: 9/10
Design: 10/10
Features: 8/10
Value for Money: 7/10
Overall score: 9/10

Written by Steve Litchfield.

Popularity: 1% [?]