Hands on First Thoughts with the Nexus One

• Presentation and boxing of the device is fine, looks the part, the un-boxing drew oohs and ahhs from non geeks
• Easy to find and set up the home wireless network
• Moves you straight to a google account set up
• o2 iphone sim doesn’t seem to support any data connectivity 
• The SD card didn’t quite sit in the mount correctly which created several errors on the phone, until I reseated the SD card the phone created several error messages in applications and it also crashed the phone a couple of times.  now the SD card is in the correct position I have not had to reboot.

• The iphone feels slightly heavier and the screen is noticabley smaller
• Lack of multitouch not a major problem with N1 for me, zoom in and out works fine
• N1 touch screen seems a little more sensitive which makes the scrolling easier and a more comfortable experience
• With the iphone I can press the home button twice and the screen is enabled (easy) on the N1 I have to press the power button located at the top of the phone (bad) this small thing turns a constant activity from a one finger double tap into a Full hand maneuver (to be fair to the N1 voice search has quickly told me how to spell maneuver)
• The four soft touch buttons take some time to get used to and they are central to the operation of the phone
• I don’t think the ball is central to the operation of the phone and should be removed, it seems an un-necessary nobble
• I haven’t had a great time to spend with the virtual keyboard yet but first impression is that the iphone keyboard feels easier to use. This may very well be an unfair comparison to make at this stage as I have spent many hours learning to use and adopt the iphone keyboard.

Good Points:

• Easy access to Android app market
• Voice enabled apps get an early thumbs up
• Open android marketplace seems to encourage innovation (beebplayer app is fantastic)
• Camera is great
• Google maps is much better on N1.

• Can’t edit google docs from N1, this should be enabled from the get go
• I want apps specified, optimised for N1, the flip side of an open Android apps market and multiple devices/android OS versions meants that you have to scroll through lots of apps that don’t seem relevant to for droid etc
• Quite a few software hang ups already, quite a few forced app shutdown and one total reboot (related to SD card that was not installed, no such problems after the SD card was 
• Still waiting for flash…coming soon in H1 2010 we are told 
• Fragmentation of android infects the app market, creates confusion and possibly dilutes the experience
• 4Gb memory card is a poor effort compared to the iphone gs 16Gb.

Lack of itunes:

• I use itunes every day for managing my music and podcast downloads.  The N1 has no comparable application, a couple of applications (Google Live and Doubleswitch) attempt to fill the void but they aren’t really fit for purpose yet.  Google Live shows promise but is a Google Labs project and it looks that way at the moment.  This is a big hole for me and will prevent me from switching to N1 for the time being.
• No google voice for the uk yet…come on Google (I do have a Ribbit account so will check that out over the next couple of days).

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