Google launches its one of a kind smartphone that has brought excitement to all of us.
The Google phone aka Nexus One is finally here!
The device is an HTC-built Android handset that has a very sleek and stylish design that can easily go toe-to-toe with the iPhone 3GSs, Pres, and Droids of the world, powered by the latest version of Android (2.1 “Flan,” if you’re counting), and hand-retooled by Google. But can it really live up to the hype attributed to it? No one really knows, until we get our own hands on it.
Here’s a little preview:
HTC has managed to get the thickness of the phone down to just 11.5mm, and it measures just 59.8mm and 119mm across and up and down — kind of a feat when you consider the guts of this thing. In the hand it’s a bit lighter than you expect — though it’s not straight-up light — and the curved edges and slightly tapered top and bottom make for a truly comfortable phone to hold. Its physical attractiveness is at the top of the line and is undeniably irresistible. On the glass-covered front of the device there are four “hardware” buttons (just touch-sensitive spots on the display) laid out exactly as the Droid’s four hard keys: back, menu, home, and search. Clearly this is going to be something of a trend with Google-approved devices.
The Nexus One has a trackball, unlike the Droid, though there’s literally nothing in the OS that requires it. Along the left side you’ve got a volume rocker, up top there’s a sleep / wake / power button on one end, and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the other, and along the bottom there’s a micro-USB port, a mic hole, and three gold dots that look destined for some kind of dock. At the back, you’ll find a 5mp camera accompanied with a LED flash, however, it didn’t have a physical camera key. Despite the minor downside, HTC and Google have put together one heck of a phone!
The Nexus One runs atop the much-hyped, rarely seen 1GHz Snapdragon CPU from Qualcomm (the same processor powering the HD2) — really the highlight of this phone. The display is an AMOLED, 480 x 800 capacitive touchscreen, and the handset also contains a light sensor, proximity sensor, and accelerometer, along with an HSPA-capable GSM radio (AWS and euro 2100MHz bands only for 3G — sorry AT&T users), WiFi, the prerequisite AGPS chip, and a microSD slot (which comes loaded with a 4GB card, but is expandable to 32GB). By late-2009 / early-2010 standards, there’s really nothing notable about the guts of this phone beyond the presence of a Snapdragon processor, and even that left something to be desired.
One place where Google has really made some smart decisions is within the Gallery application. Instead of the drab, flat iterations of Android past, the new version is extremely attractive and user friendly, giving you far more options than before (like a nice pan and scan slideshow) and making browsing photos a much more enjoyable experience.
On the other hand, as we mentioned in our previous post, there’s no multitouch on the Nexus One. Now, we can live with a browser or Google Maps with no pinch-to-zoom, but not having a hardware keyboard hamstrings this device in other ways.
All we can say is, Nexus One is not a phone without faults (all phones have one), but they’re pretty few and far between and it’s that balance which makes the phone such an intriguing piece of hardware.
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