My personal review of the Google Nexus One
Post date: Aug 27, 2012 4:46:07 AM
Originally posted February 5, 2010
I finally pulled the trigger and ordered my first ever non-company owned Cell phone, a Google Nexus One!
I’ve got some videos linked below on it, but figured I’d type up my own personal review, since I haven’t seen many sites list all of it’s goodness on a single page.
First off, some specs (and comparisons to the latest Apple iPhone, 3rd gen, aka. 3Gs):
1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor (iPhone 3Gs has a 666 I think)
512MB Flash, 512MB RAM, and a 4GB Micro SD Card included, which I can swap with a 32GB card if I want (iPhone doesn’t have a removable storage option)
Removable 1400 mAH Battery (iPhone doesn’t allow you to replace the battery, locking in more future sales for them I guess)
5MP Camera with LED Flash, 720×480 video at 20 frames per second (iPhone has no flash)
3.5mm stereo headphone jack (iPhone doesn’t have this)
Second microphone on the other side of the phone for active noise cancellation (iPhone doesn’t have this)
A beautiful, huge, AMOLED screen!
Android Operating System, made by Google, and from my initial experience (and past using a crappy Microsoft PocketPC back in the day, rebooting it every 30 minutes) it’s stable, fast, feature rich, and knowing Google’s way, hopefully based on solid, secure, Linux style programming fundamentals.
For more details on the tech specs, check out this page on Google’s site
Now on to what I can do with the operating system (with an Unlimited T-mobile plan):
Browse the web using Google’s WebKit based browser (no Flash yet, but the Adobe site says it’ll be on Android by mid-2010):
Android 2.1 running on Google’s Nexus One allows you to click a microphone icon anywhere text can be entered (vs. the Motorola Droid which has Android 2.01, and only allows voice search with the Google Search page from what I know, as of the date of this post that is). Since the keyboard buttons are virtual (on-screen), being able to say what you want to type, instead of having to type is one of the main goals of the Android O/S it seems. When I want to search Google for tebo3, I can simply hit a mic button, say “tebo3″, it records the audio, sends it to cloud computers on the Internet , converts the speech to text, then promptly shows me the results on Google’s search page. Also, they just updated the O/S over the air to 2.1Update-1 (all I had to do was reboot to apply the update!), which now gives me the only iPhone thing I envied that wasn’t on my phone, now it has Multi-Touch! This allows you to use 2 fingers on the screen, pinching them together or moving them out, which zooms maps/graphics/web pages in and out. Right-on Google for implementing this! Originally I had thought there may have been some legal issues for why they hadn’t done multi-touch, especially when the screen itself supports it, but it seems they just wanted to wait and implement it right. Either that or they weren’t planning on implementing it and from user feedback, decided to change their mind (which was a great idea in my opinion).
Send SMS (aka Text) messages:
I haven’t texted much in the past, but the Nexus one keeps texts to/from the same people in threads, making it like a chat window vs. what I saw on my old school work flip-phone, where the Inbox was the only area there was to see incoming texts, and the Outbox was the only are to remember what you just sent them.
Check E-mail:
It supports all types (POP3, IMAP, M$ Exchange), but I recently embraced Google and setup a free Gmail account. Setting a Google account up on the phone was the first thing it wanted me to do, and was as easy as entering a user name/password. After setting this as the account for the phone, the Calendar, Photo Albums, Documents, and everything else “Google” worked out of the box. It also synchronizes all contacts on the phone to the Google account contacts, meaning I can update an address, number, e-mail, etc. via the web and within a few seconds it’s synced on my phone’s contact list, also works the other way around. This to me is great since I can use a keyboard and mouse to clean up a huge amount of contacts, and this same address book is used in everything Google offers on-line, via a web-browser or E-mail client, i.e. Mozilla Thunderbird with Gmail IMAP, or Lightening with Google Calendar (for a centralized calendar on both the computer and phone, audio alerts and all) and is transparently synchronized to the phone, allowing me to quickly look up by name phone #’s when calling, e-mail addresses when e-mailing, Google Talk chat addresses when chatting, text messages when texting (to be sure I don’t try and text a home phone
), and from the awesome gallery application Google has, Picasa, all from both the phone and a computer.
Take Pictures:
As you might have seen from previous posts, I recently setup Google’s free (well, free up to 1GB) on-line picture album called Picasa Web Albums on my Gmail account, and was amazed that when I went into the gallery/picture viewer program on the phone just a little while after setting up my Google account on it, all of my on-line Google Picasa picture albums were showing up, able to be clicked, slid through, slide-showed, and sent to others via E-mail, MMS (Picture text message), Facebook, and later when I set it up, Twitter. This to me is a huge example of convergence, I simply logged in a Google account on it just by entering a Gmail user name and password, and Gmail, Calendar, Voice, Documents, Images (Picasa), and YouTube (Video) are all ready for me to use or store media on.
View Google Maps real-time, using the built-in GPS:
This baby kills any need for a stand alone GPS. I can click a button, say a place (i.e. “pizza restaurant”), and using the cloud computing web based voice recognition, in concert with the high end GPS, in about 10 seconds, I see a listing of nearby places, displayed over-top of Google Maps, just like a browser would show if you searched Google Maps for businesses within a Zip code. Clicking one of the places instantly gets me the phone #, which is able to be dialled with one click. Oh yeah
, it can also get me the directions, by clicking just below the phone #, which brings up (in a separate native Android App, Google Navigation an option to click “Navigate”, which allows me to hear step-by-step, turn-by-turn, spoken directions as well as see my location overlaid on Google maps, with the option to use satellite view, terrain, live traffic, or street view, all real-time from the Internet. It even switches to street view (if it’s available in that area, that is, rare to me lately) when I am within a 100′ or so of the location, automatically facing the location, just to be sure you know what the building/house/landmark looks like, at least the last time the Google picture trucks went by ;0.
Google Goggles (Pictures sent to and analysed by the cloud):
Killer App of the Century! Can’t be described better than this video, but in a nut-shell, I can take a picture of something (i.e. a Book, DVD, UPC Bar Code, Landmark), and Google Googles analyzes it (again using 2g/3g/WiFi Internet and their cloud computer resources), and shows me Google search results. For things I tested, I saw about 90% accuracy! It may sound ho-hum, but really to me it’s amazing searching something on-line without typing or talking what it is. In the future, this program will likely be able to identify plants by taking a picture of the leaf, or bugs by snapping a photo of it.
Google Goggles Part 2 (Video and GPS location info streamed to and analysed by the cloud, a.k.a. “Augmented Reality“):
Now this is really where things get interesting! Imagine that you have something like swimmer goggles on your eyes, but instead of glass, their little LCD screens, echoing back video from cameras on the other side, meaning you can see, but it’s through a video camera and display (perhaps the military would be interested in the same thing, but with night-vision, thermal, overlaid waypoints/threats/friendlies, and huge optical zooming
WOW!). Now, add GPS based info coming from the swimmer goggles, instantly streaming coordinates and live video from the cameras on-line to Google’s massive cloud computing resources, and having it sent back to your swimmer goggles LCD display (all in about half of a second) overlaying text on the LCD screens over the live video you see through the goggles, which shows buildings and landmarks. Oh yeah, add click-able links to the names overlaid on the LCD screen which bring up Google search on the name, along with the option to know more about it, get voice based turn-by-turn directions to it, or call them with one click, and now you have Google Goggles. I have a video below as well for more info.
Google Voice:
With Google Nexus One phone buyers, I think Google is allowing them to have a Google Voice account. This is something they still have on the Internet as invite only while trials are going on, and before I had the phone, I tried getting one but they never e-mailed me. Google voice allows me to have a separate phone # from Google, which I then link to forward any calls to one or more other phone #’s. This means that when someone calls it, it will ring my home phone and cell phone at the same time. Whichever I pick-up first is where Google transfers the call to, meaning if I’m at home and someone tried calling my cell phone (when instead I would have wished they called my home phone, i.e. to save minutes on my cell phone plan) I can instead pick-up my home phone line and it bypasses the cell call, using 0 minutes. You can even setup time of day call #’s. I set mine to ring my cell and work phone during business hours on weekdays, then after business hours and on weekends, it’ll ring my cell phone and home phone #. I feel this is Google’s way of not just being in the Cell phone market with an O/S (i.e. how Windows Mobile and iPhones do it) but also with an alternative way to save money with Cell phone carriers, directly competing with them but at the same time directly complementing them (is that even possible?). Seems like they want to be in the path of everything Internet/Communication related in life, and honestly, I think this will be done in one way or another, they’ve probably spent enough building it, and I feel it will really benefit everyone if they do it right. I just saw a Frontline Special last Tuesday and I’m pretty sure I saw a few schools utilizing Goolge’s resources at least a few times, saving our school systems huge amounts of money I bet. What do they ask of it? Some analysing of the data (by computers, not humans) so that they can learn from it and make things better.
http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?answer=115073&cbid=83keeq3od4d&src=cb&lev=topic
Stream live Internet audio while driving:
Who needs HD or Satellite radio! Using Last.FM I have been listening to music streaming over the 3G to/from my lengthy commute to work (Pandora is also available but I haven’t tried it). Last.fm is a free on-line radio streaming service which allows you to enter artist names, hear them and related artists, skip to a new song, blacklist songs you don’t like and “heart” the ones you do, view bio’s, etc. I got into it from an update my Xbox 360 had a few months back and have been hooked since. Using it over T-Mobile’s network has worked without any issues so far on 3 separate trips. It streams constantly without any need to re-buffer, it hasn’t lost connection during the entire drive even once, and to me is way better than any Satellite radio I’ve seen as I can still hear the stream fine when driving under an overpass (Satellite radio usually cuts out completely for the 1-5 seconds your under an overpass due to not being able to pick-up the signal).
Things I still want to try on this bad boy, which I’ll try to post about later on when I figure them out or their available
Google Latitude:
I think I can set this up to see where other friends are at. Also I think it would help me find my phone if I accidentally left it somewhere.
http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html
VoIP a.k.a. SIP:
Google recently bought a big VoIP provider named Gizmo5. When this is available via Google, I think I’ll be able to link my Google voice phone # to a VoIP connected client on my Google Nexus One, eliminating the need to worry about using up cell phone minutes on my plan, will especially be helpful since I’ll probably be getting work calls on it too!
Here’s the videos I was talking about.
First, a video of how it would be out of the box:
Now a video with it powered on:
Good tech spec video:
For more on Google Goggles, see this link, or watch the video below: