Introducing the Google phone – The Nexus One

December may have been a slow month for phones, but the New Year is kicking of in style as the much anticipated Nexus One Google phone has been officially confirmed and is available to buy right now! The Nexus One is the phone that has dominated net chatter related to mobile phone concerns over the past few months, but in truth, the Google Phone has been top of the rumour mill for well over a year. Now that we have confirmed spec and release on this device, we can take a closer look and see what all the fuss has been about.

The temptation with the Nexus One is to instantly compare it with the Apple iPhone, and already the device is being labelled as the ‘iPhone killer’, as if there isn’t room for both devices on the market. This is a poor attitude to take; we firmly believe that both devices will maintain their own ‘fanboi’ army, whilst giving the not so blinkered consumer a real choice on which platform to spend their hard earned cash on. Seeing that our top three phones from 2009 were two Android devices, plus the iPhone 3G S, we have a foot in each camp, and can see the pluses and minuses of both products. And whilst there is a lot of crossover in terms of functionality and usability, there are distinct differences between the products; the advantage Android has is in the multitude of devices being released running this OS, which will be attractive to application developers, plus the speed with which new devices are being released that are ever improving in terms of hardware.

But the iPhone still has an important place within the general smartphone/superphone market, so we shall try to resist making any comparison here between the Nexus One and iPhone. The Google Phone will stand or fall by its own merits.

Design wise the Nexus One is very smart to look at, and has that instant appeal that will attract users. This is not a clunky, box shape phone, it is smoothly designed with eye pleasing rounded edges, and the two tone colour is also pleasing to the eye. Google seem to realise that for a phone to be successful it has to match power features with top design, and HTC, in manufacturing this handset, have done a good job in producing this with the Nexus One. The screen on the device is a real beaut, measuring in at an impressive 3.7 inches, with a display resolution of 480 x 800 pixels.

The Nexus One uses AMOLED technology, which will help with battery standby times, as an AMOLED screen doesn’t need a backlight, and generally consumes less power. Underneath the screen is a trackball, which will light up with various colours for different alerts, but otherwise is pretty much defunct. Where it will come in useful is for assisting web browsing by making selection of links on poorly optimised websites easier. There are four navigation keys at the bottom of the display, which are touch sensitive, and these are used for general navigation option, a back option, search button, and so on. The display also utilises an accelerometer for auto display rotation, plus there is a proximity sensor which disables the screen when you are making a call.

Size wise the Nexus One measures up at 119 x 60 x 11.5mm, and weighs in at a fairly hefty 130g. As well as looking good design wise, the Nexus One also looks good in terms of menu, with a lot of mainly useless but pleasing to look at menu animations. One of the most talked about of this is the ‘live wallpaper’ offered, which is basically animated wallpaper, which moves as you browse through the phone. There is no point to this other than it looks nice, but a plain, boring menu system is just dull, and I’m a fan of menu animations when this has no effect on overall phone performance.

Accessing the menu is slightly different on the Nexus One than on previous Android devices – Google have done away with the pop up drawer, instead the menu icons appear overlaid whatever you currently have on screen, and yes, this appears in another animated manner. When scrolling through the menu, the top and bottom of the screen have a kind of 3D curved action, which kind of reminded me of the old fashioned blackboards we had at school, free standing ones that could be scrolled over to reveal a new board. The Nexus One now offers 5 standby screens instead of the traditional three found on Android devices to date, and there are dots at the bottom of the screen to help you orientate yourself as you move from one screen to the next. A long press on these brings up a little card style animation, so you can instantly move from the first screen to the last, just by pressing the screen you want. Again, it looks good, adds a nice touch to the menu navigation, and helps enhance the overall look of the device.

The Nexus One, though, is not all about fancy menu animations and good looks. Beneath the Teflon coated exterior is a powerful smartphone, packed with the best in mobile technology. The handset has a powerful 5.0 Megapixel camera, with autofocus and LED flash. Smile detection and geotagging support is included, and first examples of captured images look pretty good. The camera is also enabled for video recording, and is able to capture clips at D1 resolution (720 x 480) at a minimum of 20 fps. The media capabilities are on a par with the majority of modern smartphones, with support for MP3, AAC and MP4 files, although disappointingly there is still no native support for DivX files. The gallery on the phone has been given a bit of a facelift, and offers a few different ways of scrolling through your photo album, although sadly the music player still looks the way we see it on current devices. Usable, functional, but not really inspiring. There is also a stereo FM radio with RDS support, plus a 3.5mm audio output jack.

The handset is a capable browsing device, offering EDGE, GPRS, 3G and HSPA, 7.2Mbps for downloads and upload speeds of 2Mbps. The Nexus One also offers WiFi, and the spec suggests it will be the first device to offer WiFi 802.11n. Bluetooth 2.1 is on board, and the device uses MicroUSB connectivity a move away from Mini USB seen on previous Android phones. Memory on the handset is 512MB internal, with support for 32GB MicroSD cards. Applications are still limited to being installed on the internal memory, although Google say there will be a system update available soon which will allow apps to be installed to the memory card, which is welcome news indeed, allowing developers to bring larger, and more feature rich apps to the Android platform.

As expected, the Nexus One will offer all the usual Google services on the device, such as Mail, Calendar and Maps, plus the new Android 2.1 will bring Google Earth app to the Android platform, too. One of the cool things the Nexus One brings is Voice entry, allowing you to use voice control on many parts of the phone, from entering text in a message to searching the web. You can also use voice search on Google Earth; just say the name of a place, and the app zooms in. All of the power running through the Nexus One is handled by an onboard Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor, which should allow for speedy, smooth navigation throughout the phone.

One of the unique aspects of the Nexus One is the way it is being sold; Google are entering into mobile retail, selling the device SIM free, direct. Available in the US and UK amongst others, there is currently a contract subsidy deal available to T-Mobile customers in the US. In Europe Vodafone will be the first network to offer the Nexus One, and should be available sometime in the Spring. The mobile market continues to evolve at pace, and the Nexus One is just the first of many Google devices. It will be interesting to see this time next year just how much of an impact this device, and the Android OS in general has on the industry.

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