This is embarrassing. Last week I was putting a new Nexus One supplied by Google through its paces at the CES show in Las Vegas (more about that below) when… I dropped it.
Nothing new about that, I drop things all the time – I’ve dropped a MyTouch Android phone so many times the cover’s beaten and scratched.
The Nexus One didn’t come out of it so well, though. Below the glass, hairline cracks appeared. The image started to darken and wrinkle in places. A day later, it was unusable. That’s five days to destroy a $590 device. How am I going to explain that to Google?
Should a handset break this easily? Was it just bad luck? Do other people not drop things?
OK, I realise I shouldn’t blame HTC and Google for my clumsiness. But it’s very easy to drop the Nexus One. Its smooth, curved form is hard to get a grip on, and it’s a little too large to fit comfortably in one hand. Also, unlike the rugged little MyTouch, the casing seems to give little protection to the screen.
To be honest, I’m happy to be back on the MyTouch. The general reception to the Nexus One has been gushing, but you can count me among the less-than-convinced. In striving a little too hard to go head-to-head with the iPhone, it falls short.
The power of Android so far lies in its tight integration with Google Web apps like Calendar and Gmail. You can get that even on the most basic models. Nexus One includes these features but is trying to be more of a media device, like the iPhone.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon processor is certainly fast, and a definite improvement. The brightness and clarity of the screen also make it a pleasure to use.
But these things eat into battery life. I found I was getting only four-five hours use out of it in Vegas, even though I was doing most of my email and browsing on a laptop (admittedly, I had the brightness turned up high).
Also, the screen is far less responsive than the MyTouch. At first I thought this was just me, but after several days of jabbing and poking away at it I was left feeling frustrated. And then there’s the feel of it in the hand: it just doesn’t sit comfortably in the palm, at least not mine.
As for features: the main new feature in the Nexus One, the voice-to-text capability that is meant to let you do things like dictate emails, just didn’t work, at least for me. Every time I tried it I waited a few seconds before receiving a message to the effect that the “server was not responding” – yet all the other email and browsing functions continued to work fine. The on-screen keyboard has also been adapted to make room for a key to launch the voice command: this appears where the comma used to be and means you have to click through to a second keyboard every time you need a comma, which is irritating.
No doubt there will be many apps that will take full advantage of the latest Android 2.1 platform and turn Nexus One into a highly useful device. Sitting next to a Google employee on the plane back from Vegas, for instance, I was regaled with how it integrates the latest updates from your Facebook friends with the handset’s contact list.
Alas, with my Nexus One now laid to rest, I may never get to find out.
Update. One other point to note: my Nexus One told me it was connected to an Edge network, which is slower than the 3G it was meant to use. I assumed this was a roaming issue in Vegas, but this note from T-Mobile makes it look like there are wider problems.
