Much has already been written about whether the Nexus One is an iPhone-killer, with its beautiful AMOLED screen, lightning-fast Snapdragon processor and lamentable music player. After using it for a week, what I am writing here are my observations on how well the Nexus serves to increase my personal productivity and mobility.
My points of comparison are not the iPhone which I have never owned, but various HP, Dopod, Palm and Nokia smartphones and PDAs that I have been using over more than 10 years. So this is as much about the phone as it is about how Android compares with Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm OS.
Data Connectivity
My first impression of the Nexus One was when I popped in my Virgin Mobile pre-paid card and it connected seamlessly to the Virgin 3G network, without so much as a prompt about configuration. To me this was not a trivial matter considering it had taken me 2 days of phone and e-mail support to get my previous HP IPaq 612 online. And also considering that the Nexus One is not meant to be sold in Australia, this gives me confidence that it can connect seamlessly anywhere in the world.
Google Contacts
No review ever talks about Google Contacts (GC), but I think this is one of the best parts of a Google phone. GC first pulled all my contacts from GMail onto the phone. That's probably a no-brainer. It then merged these with all the matching profiles of friends that it found on Facebook. I was then able to upload in CSV format, all my remaining contacts from Outlook as well as my Nokia phone. I keep two lists because everyone I ever met is in my Outlook, but I wouldn't want that on my Nokia phone which has been my primary device for making calls. In GC, I am able to specify a My Contacts group that resides on the phone, while everyone else is kept safely out of the way in the GC cloud.
The real beauty of this is that for the first time, I have got all the phone, e-mail and even Facebook info of all my acquaintances in one place. And then I can run the Find Duplicates function to weed out multiple entries.
Notifications
I think it's just great how my phone now notifies me when I have new e-mail, Facebook messages, auctions ending and I'm sure the list can go on forever. It definitely saves me from actively logging in to check. My previous HP phone wouldn't last a day if I left it permanently connected, but the Nexus does a pretty decent job even with me playing games and going through my photos. These are things I would never have done on my old phone because all the Apps sucked.
Android Marketplace
The Android Marketplace is great, and really easy to find and install new apps. iPhone users will probably find this passe, but coming from Windows Mobile it is app heaven.
File Synchronisation
One thing I don't like about Android is that it doesn't provide a facility to synchronise a folder with the computer. There are a number of apps you can download to do this via the cloud, but I really rather sync some things directly such as all my Keepass passwords.
Broadband Tethering
The other thing I expect of a 3G phone is the ability to connect my laptop to the internet when I don't have wi-fi. This is a native function in Windows Mobile but not so in Android, and I have yet to find a decent App that does it well.
Well, these are my initial impressions, but I will certainly build and update this list as I explore the phone and the multitude of apps further.
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