I need a new phone. I mean, I desperately need a new phone. My current phone, a Samsung SPH-A500, is many years past its prime and is flakey and unreliable at best. Lately, it seems to enjoy entering “safe-hold” mode and is unable to boot. My replacement phone will have certain characteristics, including but not limited to
- running the Android operating system,
- doubling as a portable media player to replace my aging iPod 5G,
- be Linux-friendly,
- be pocketable, sexy, and all-around desirable (”geek-cred”), and
- be a performance monster.
When rumours began circulating of Google’s Nexus One smartphone, I thought to myself this is it! Today Google hosted a press conference to detail the phone and announce its immediate release. The phone is everything I never wanted.
Performance
Engadget has a review up of the Nexus One. To say the least, they are unimpressed with the performance delivered by the hyped-up 1 GHz Snapdragon powering it. It certainly doesn’t look faster than the iPhone 3GS, and if you can’t shut the fanbois up, then what is the point?
Sexiness
The Nexus One is a handsome phone. I suggest you check out Engadget’s hands-on gallery for an idea of what the phone actually looks like, especially in comparison to the iPhone. This is almost exactly what the phone looked like when I first saw blurry-cam shots of it a few months ago. Here are the things that I told myself they would absolutely have to change prior to releasing the phone; note that all of these features remain in the retail version.
- Get rid of the trackball, it is utterly useless when dealing with a fully touch-screen interface.
- If you absolutely, positively must keep the trackball, don’t increase the phone’s chin to support it! Collapse the trackball and buttons into a single row to save space.
- Change the colour scheme; this drab brown-grey is tiresome to the eyes.
- Expand the screen to the edge of the device; large bezels are ugly!
I will grant the Nexus One a few points for thinness (11.5 mm), aspect ratio (more phone-like than the iPhone), and general pocketability.
Other Disappointments
There are some other things that displease me with the current state of release of the Nexus One. First, pinch-to-zoom and other multi-touch gestures are disabled for all pre-installed applications and the core operating system. Although these are available to downloaded apps, it would be nice to have these now-common gestures available in the core of the OS. Second, you cannot put apps onto the uSD card; they are limited to the built-in 512 MiB of flash ROM, which they share with the OS itself. Third, the pricing is still fairly stiff despite being available as an unlocked GSM phone, and does not really seem to directly compete with the iPhone on a dollar for dollar basis.
Lastly and most importantly, the Nexus One is not available in Canada — lolwut? Even if you purchased the phone by proxy, it would only work on our local GSM networks in EDGE mode. Le sigh.
