I’ve had the new Nexus One produced by HTC for almost 2 weeks now. I think I’ve finally broken it in. Being a Blackberry user for the past 5 years, it wasn’t real easy. There are some features that I still miss from my blackberry. The N1′s technical specifications can be found here.
Out of the box the N1 blows you away with its vibrant screen and sleek soft keys and touch screen ease. The screen reacts very smoothly. I really like the haptic feedback (vibrations) on the soft keys when pressed. I like that confirmation that you have pressed it.
As for the keyboard for me it’s one of the weak sides of the N1. I’ve never owns a touch screen phone before so I knew there would be a learning curve. There was, especially when typing on the phone when it’s in portrait. In landscape the typing is easier. I’ve found it easiest when I have sound on so I have confirmation that I typed a letter and it seems to help me type in a rhythm. The keyboard typing sounds do not have a volume control so that’s kind of annoying. You can turn down the keyboard typing. The volume is controlled by the media volume which is found in the phones settings or can be adjust while you are viewing or listening to media. Still somewhat annoying, but at least it can be adjusted.
My other knock on the N1 is that the home screen does not rotate. Every time I’m in landscape using another app I have to flip the phone back to portrait when I navigate back to the home page. The screen does allow for a lot of app short cuts and tool bars, i.e. Google search, weather and news to name a few out of the box. I would’ve thought they would’ve figured out this for such a smart phone, b/c I think it’s a pretty big drawback.
Maybe I haven’t figured this out yet but cutting and pasting is not available on previous threads on emails. It’s easy to copy text from applications that allow it such as my favorite twitter app for the N1 “Swift”. But if the app doesn’t have a plug in that allows for copying text you can’t. And that’s a bummer.
The track ball is something I rarely ever use except when moving back in a text entry field to edit my spelling or when I’m reading tweets and scrolling through a long list of them. I guess I’m not knocking it seems to have some use, and probably puts some blackberry Curve users at ease.
Battery life is another thing that has been disappointing. Running the all functions turned on, Wi-Fi, GPS, brightness, sync all really diminish the battery life significantly. I always had the Wi-Fi on my blackberry. The sync used for syncing apps like Facebook, and Gmail has been turned off to reserve battery life. I usually unplug my phone about 7am on a work day and by 2pm the battery is down to about 20%. After turning all of the services off all day the phone will last a full day. This is a flaw that wasn’t with all my previous blackberry’s. Turns out the battery life is more than adaquate. I had installed Touchdown Pro to manage my outlook mail and address book and it killed my battery. With Touchdown Pro no longer running I get more than a full days battery life without charging.
The 5 megapixel camera is great, and the LED flash seems to as good as or better than my last Blackberry Curve. I like that it allows adjusting the quality of megapixels from 5M Pixels to 3, 2, or 1. There are also video taking quality options available. High quality or a lower quality used when you want to send the video as an MMS video. The camera also has an option to store the location of where the photo is taken based on your GPS location. If your GPS is turned on, otherwise it used the triangulation method. This could come in handy using a 3rd party app to log a trip of sightseeing or just to log your days out and about town. If I find a cool widget for this I’ll post it on my site.
I’m really looking forward to when the flash video player is released for the android 2.1 platform that will be a really nice feature. It’s expected for release in early 2010.
Twitter
Facebook
Court & Dixie's Website
Youtube