Friday, March 19, 2010

Nexus One - First Impressions

I've been an iPhone user for about 2 years now, but I ordered a Nexus One the same day they became availible in Canada.

Here are my first impressions.

- The packaging is as slick as an iPhone.
- The phone is a millimetere or two thinner than the iPhone, but overall its almost exactly the same size and it is going to fix in most of my iPhone holsters etc.
- It comes with a 4 gig microSD card already in the phone.
- Starts up with an animation as an indicator.
- The screen is much brighter than my iPhone. and faster.
- The onscreen keyboard is very similar to the iPhone, so I'm not having much trouble with it. It doesn't come withteh keyboardsound feedback enabled however which I'm missing right away. I may be able to turn it on once i get things going. (update: indeed you can turn on the click sounds).
- Battery status shows you what applications/features are taking up the most battery power... very handy.

I'll have to explore more, but I'll post anything else I find that is particularly cool or different.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Will the phone work if my SIM card is for a Prepaid account?

Brill Pappin said...

I don't know if it will work with a pre-paid SIM.
Presumably the SIM itself is not what keeps track of your balance so it might work.

Can you get data on a pre-paid card? If not you could still use the wifi for data.

If your in the east end (beaches) of Toronto, you can try it on mine.

braindef said...

I have a question that's iPhone vs. N1 related.

The way that the iPhone interfaces with my wife's voicemail is seamless; it has an interface that appears to stream the sound from the voicemail box as if it were a media player. It's very impressive.

Is this kind of thing iPhone exclusive, or can we achieve similar results in Android? I'm about to go dig around, but I thought I'd throw it out there. I just got data on my N1 today and I'm very happy with what the phone can do.

Now, to download some fart apps!

: P

braindef said...

Eh... damn, I'm ig'nant. "Visual Voicemail" is the term I'm looking for. I should've known that.

And I now know the answer: Yes and No.

Brill Pappin said...

Yah the visual voicemail is very slick.
the n1 has to dial the voicemail number.

tge vmail are files stores somewere so my guess is that the iphone is just streaming them, there us likely a way for any phone to do it if you know how, just like you add the 3g settings.

id you dind out, ill write somesoftware to do it.

braindef said...

Okay... I might give fido a call to discuss it.

Unless there's a way to dig the code out of an iPhone; I have a software engineer friend who owns a jailbroken Fido iPhone... maybe he'll have some ideas.

Either way, I'll keep my eyes peeled.

braindef said...

Looks like we'll have to wait for an official application... yeah, right.

Brill Pappin said...

Very musch a pain. and I'm *really* not happy that tethering isn't included for some stupid reason.

After using the phone for several months now, I still like it, its a good phone, but I have several issues that I would want adressed to make it better than an iPhone.

I keep meaning to write a post about it, but have been too busy :)