Review: Google Nexus One Smartphone
The Nexus One is the best Android smartphone out there, and makes a good device for business users; we will keep the Google OS in the MWC spotlight, but voice quality issues in the US have been a problem
More trivially, we tried the Google Goggles experimental visual search application, which attempts to find search results concerning an object in a photo taken by the Nexus One. This worked as well on the Nexus One as it did on a Droid I reviewed earlier.The Nexus One has a Facebook app, which I tested and found competent. To use Twitter, I went to the Android Market and quickly downloaded both Seesmic and Swift. They both worked well, but we think iPhone fans would laugh at any comparison with the bunch of fine Twitter apps they have. For a comparison of the Nexus One and the iPhone, read MG Siegler’s balanced report on TechCrunch.
We should mention that the auto-suggest capabilities on Android devices are excellent. The Twitter message, “Tweeting from the Nexus One!” was sent without having to complete a single word, as Google efficiently offered choices of words.
Auto-suggest also works well in other languages, which produced a problem for our French colleague. He likes to send English language emails, but uses a French azerty keyboard. We have found no way to combine English auto-suggest with a French keyboard, so he types with no auto-suggest.
We are excited by Nexus One’s voice input, an experimental feature which lets users fill text fields for Gmail, Facebook and other apps by speaking into the phone, and using Google’s networked speech recognition.
There were some fits and starts but we could call up e-mail contacts by speaking into the phone and sending short messages. The function also worked with English and French accents.
Searching for the Sherlock Holmes movie worked fine, but there are rough edges: we found that a name was returned spelled correctly from a phonetic standpoint, but missing a letter. Also “clintboulton” came back as “clintdalton.”
A Facebook status update, “Testing voice input on the Nexus One.” came out pretty well, but inexplicably substituted “card” for the word “one”. I realise that experimental releases, betas and dogfooding are part of the Google Way, but the voice recognition app is a disappointment.
While Google executives have stressed that a Nexus Two won’t follow the Nexus One in two months the way the Nexus One followed the Droid, I can’t help but get excited about how some of Google’s more iterative apps, such as voice search, input, Google Maps Navigation and Google Goggles, will look and feel on subsequent Nexus devices.
Conclusion
Overall Google’s Android 2.1-based Nexus One smartphone is a darn good device. It offers lots of eye candy and fine features. Phone calls and text messages are fine, but in the US the phone’s data is spoiled by vacillation between T-Mobile’s EDGE and 3G networks. The voice-to-text input feature is a disappointing ill-advised gimmick, but as the service problems and experimental software get improved, the Nexus One line could be excellent.
