Nexus One is here to stay

I have one. I am excited. It is powerful. I want to use it all the time. I am happy to have waited. Surprisingly I do not miss my Blackberry keyboard. The powerful apps, personalization and connectivity make it feel soo much like a micro laptop that I have lost my appetite somewhat for a UMTS netbook too.

I believe Android has the potential to beat out BlackberryOS and AppleOS. For the technically inclined I expect this to happen in the next year or so and for the pure business and entertainment users it could take three years for the interface to mature and differentiating software features to find their way into the stable base platform that companies can fully support within their IT policies. This is supported by Gartner who have their own predictions as well as describing the current market share.

With some 80 apps dowloaded in the first few days, my phone has already seen some new quirks and bugs intermittently that come with all the new functionality I have turned on and off again in some cases. You can make your phone perform poorly with just one bad application. I have un-installed about 20 applications while making comparisons between various VNC, SSH, SCP, RDP, RemoteTorrent, GoogleReader, VPN, FileManager and Application Management clients of the free variety. I am doing MUCH more with my Nexus One than I ever envisioned. It is dreamy for a technology geek like myself. As far as I can tell, the 10K-strong applications Market is delivering way more productivity and functionality to me than I seem to be able to pull down with the 120K-strong applications iTunes Store. My conclusion is the Apple Store is full of games.

In the wake of the iPad, the Nexus One has really not gotten much publicity since the release of its new version March 16th, 2010. This new version allows the Nexus One to operate on the large Canadian carriers (Rogers, Bell, etc.) and AT&T in the US. It would appear that there are now 11 combinations of frequencies used for 3G, and this latest Nexus One is about the best combination you can have in a phone for worldwide compatibility, especially if you live in Canada.

What is with this NEW Nexus One?

When I first started my research on what device would replace my aged Blackberry OS, I found a number of iPhone and Nexus One comparisons. As someone that has promoted the iPhone (my wife loves hers, and I recently migrated my mother to the iPhone) I was surprised at some missing details or seemingly Apple_biased online comparisons. Given there are millions of iPhone users out there, you have to assume there are a few people who want to justify their investment. I am not one of those, and I will state for the record that the Nexus One…:

Is faster; Not just on UMTS. Wifi browsing is much quicker side by side an iPhone when you are accessing a local proxy, like squid that sits behind my home network. I suspect most online comparisons have been able to find some sort of lag scenario, either due to CSS, or concurrent access that lets them demonstrate a faster iPhone. I can do that too .. but one of these phones is actually much faster. Could this be an improved Andriod OS browser since some of these comparisions? _ sure _. The current iPhone OS 3.1.2 to Android OS 2.1update1 (2.6.29-01117) is the comparison I am making.

Most people that pick up my Nexus One try to surf the web first (since the search widget makes it soo easy) and many first reactions are “Wow that is fast”.
It has multi-touch; I am not sure what was going on for this Engadget review, but pinch zoom works everywhere on my Nexus One. This confirms for me that they must have made some changes as I find it hard to believe Engadget could mis-report a feature like this.
It has more features; Yes. Most of the comparisons like this nice chart at Mashable leave out things like its digital compass (that can turn it into a *metal detector* of sorts) and the unique voice processor that make the speech-to-text pretty amazing, or the fact that it has two microphones that assist in noise reduction to deliver far superior call quality (as noted in most comparisons to the iPhone). No other phone has all three of these subtle features.
04/26/10 - Ahead of my next Nexus Post (Might as well call it the Nexus Two with Cyanogen, it ROX!) - The Nexus One has some soon-to-be-enabled features including an FM radio and 802.11-N capability…it just keeps impressing me.

My hardware differentiators

For me, it boils down to the following

High resolution 480×800 OLED screen: The screen delivers tremendous colour contrast, and I suspect the increased resolution is where the impressive typing accuracy (compared to using my wife’s iPhone) comes from. I can not believe how great it has been since I figured I would really miss my Blackberry. Needless to say it is much better than the iPhone thanks to double the horizontal resolution. The predictive text also lets you type faster.. keys are instant, and dynamic one touch words appear quickly with the 1Ghz processor. None of which can be delivered this fast on any other phone I have seen. I am soo happy about this.
Hint: The screen is still by far the big power suck on this device. Android OS’s handy tool that tells you what hardware/software is chewing your battery puts my screen in the high seventies when I am actively using it like a computer for hours on end. In the first few days, I was able to kill the battery each day after about 4 hours non-stop of pushing data, installing applications, streaming media, etc. Even though it has the largest battery, and boasts the longest talk time of all the other phones, you begin to realise that the super high resolution screen is power hungry and that moving from 1-minute to 10-minute timeouts on the display can have a significant impact on battery life if you like it on full brightness all the time. (5/9/2010 - Ahead of next post: After burn in, I now get 1.5 days of heavy use .. I still have to charge every day; If I miss a charge, I have to back off to phone-only if I expect to make it through the day.)
Amazing Voice Recognition: Until I used this phone I did not appreciate voice recognition. It works because of a special voice processor. I just talk anywhere I can use a keyboard, and it throws words down with amazing accuracy. When searching the web casually, this is a great feature, and I am sure once I realize I can always use it with reasonable accuracy, I will start to more. It is a major leap ahead of RIM’s “Call Bob Smith”. It also has some interesting intelligence around swearing.
Hint: I suspect selecting the right language (Queen’s English instead of the US_default for myself) and the correct playback accent (US instead of British_default_for_Queen’s_English for myself) help indicate to the phone what type of use I am, because it works amazing well. When I first chose British english, the phone chose a British speaking voice, which I was able to override to a US sounding one (which is more Canadian believe it or not). I suspect this default mismatch may lead other Canadians to have less than perfect voice settings. A selection by region might better serve the phone when selecting defaults.
Processing Horsepower: The phone is so processing capable, that you often do not realize that you have loaded 15-30 applications. This requires some new user *mangement* techniques, as generally the first thing I check when I see a wee delay somewhere is the task list _ usually to find 15 or so apps that I have left running in the background. I have learned several tricks through various applications that quickly allow me to one-touch to a *clean* state, but it is very easy to let things stay running which can lead to battery consumption and UI delays as application load begins to challenge the CPU. I believe multiple running apps appear to have hooks and/or delay touching some of the four hardware buttons below the screen, as seen in this CNET comparison. Keeping this multitasking environment from overloading itself is one of the Nexus One user challenges. I just like to note that it has a 1Ghz CPU with 512MB RAM to the iPhone 3GS 600Mhz with 256MB and more than double the desktop real estate (display resolution). A neat hardware comparison chart is here.
Hint: I have found this tool Advanced Task Killer (ATK)
to be invaluable in managing running apps. Unfortunately killing apps without some expertise can have unexpected results, and it is non-trivial to figure out what killing applications can do. I have noticed from time to time my SD mount point is unavailable to other apps, etc. after killing certain applications. Getting command line access will help me better understand these types of things.

My software differentiators

These all seem to follow an “input intelligence” theme, which might be expected.

Google Goggles: Only for android, this tool does for pictures what Shazaam did for audio. Snap my Heineken beer, and voila I am at http://www.heineken.com/. Just like what those Google guy’s promised.
Locale:

Apparently this app has some history. This application is what delivers personalization to the Nexus One. Here is what it does for me:

Prevents my phone from locking when I am at home (when it detects my home Wifi network)
Sends a Wake-On-Lan (WOL) to my office computer when I pull into the parking lot (when it detects my office Wifi network)
Sends an SMS to my wife when my phone battery is getting really low (detects my low battery power)
Turns my flashing trackball and audible notifications off for some services (email) at night ONLY when I am at home
The list goes on and on, but you can detect any *situation* and launch apps, execute actions and change settings. It can track the hours you are *AT* the office in log through timer apps that use Locale data. You can launch apps when you are in_dock, turn on GPS when you leave your home, etc.

From here, its just pure application power, something the iPhone has too, but it would seem that Nexus One benefits from being Andriod/Linux-based in that some pretty common tools and libraries related to networking and documents/media show up and you know they are just mobile versions of things you might find on an Ubuntu desktop. If you compare the distribution-based package repositories for Debian or Ubuntu to the Apple package repositories for OSX you might begin to understand where Andriod Application Market is headed with less requirement for third party development (Adobe, MS, etc) and more benefits from the existing open source software community. I am really curious to go under the hood and see if there is a package management system akin to dpkg/apt supporting the Market.

A highlight worth mentioning (that may not be unique to the Andriod) is Cam Card. It could be the 5MP camera again, but this thing works *amazingly* .. finds and separates title and departments, converts extensions into proper dialing syntax and gets the name and address information right. The first card I scanned was perfect; no changes; all phone numbers and fields populated. I just picked the category and contact database.

Accessories … Now that I know?

One of the obvious accessories for me is the Car Dock. In addition to the fact that this is now required by law in Ontario to use the navigation features, there is an instant ease of use benefit provided by the fact that the phone can charge and has awareness of its presence in the car dock.

The general awareness the phone has to its current situation, enabled in part by the software Locale, makes accessories much more appealing. The fact that I can have navigation pop-up, change the input and output device parameters, or have the phone automatically enable gps apps and/or operate as a speakerphone while in my car charging is pretty awesome. The same things apply with the dock which can be plugged into the home stereo. Plug it in, and automatically launch your media player of choice.

The obvious and not-so-great

After years of generic white or black earbuds that do not let you identify R vs L in the dark, the Andriod put a textured Andriod on the right ear. Thank-you. Apple pay close attention.

The things that bothered me were:

SIM card removal requires removal of the battery. This makes popping my SIM into something like a Rogers Rocket Stick, or a UTMS enabled netbook less than trivial. I think they could have put a sensor on the back panel if all they wanted to do was prevent removal of the SIM while powered on.
This was most annoying when I was creating a good battery profile during initial day or two by fully charging and discharging a few times… the result was switching back to my old phone to avoid taking a near_dead Andriod with me during this burn-in phase.
The speaker is nothing special. It is loud enough, but not superb for in-car calls and broadcasting your favorite tune to a room full of people. I think the iPhone and Blackberry may both have better speakers (perhaps related to its thickness too), however the speaker output as a speakerphone seemed to be less than the quality of my Blackberry on high volume.
The default storage location for applications does not take advantage of the SD card. And the card is only a Class 2. This is actually just like Blackberry in not using SD storage for apps, however I was able to quickly fill my local phone storage, and will need to manually move some things or mount points around in my filesystem. I popped in my Class 6 storage chip too, greatly improving the media performance. Why they ship a class 2 card is beyond me. I guess having the media space is more important than the speedy data access from a new_user perspective.

Although the battery life in terms of talk-time is stated to be the best, the reality is that I find I get only one day of regular Android use out of each charge. There is just soo much you can do on this thing, that the screen is sort of always on. Using locale to turn of GPS and periodically clean up running apps when at home and office, and scaling down CPU when the screen is off all help, but I am tempted to buy an higher capacity aftermarket battery 1600mAh or 3200mAh(larger form factor) from Seidio. We will see if I can optimize this power use some more in the coming weeks.

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