Nexus One Review

The Nexus One is a smartphone from Google that uses the Android open source mobile operating system. The device is manufactured by Taiwan's HTC Corporation, and became available on January 5, 2010.Features of the phone include the ability to transcribe voice to text, noise canceling dual microphones, and voice directions while driving.

The phone comes unlocked and is not restricted to any particular mobile network provider. Google currently offers it for use on the T-Mobile network in the United States; a version for use on the Verizon (US) and Vodafone (European) networks is expected in the second calendar quarter of 2010.

When you first lay eyes on the Nexus One, you can almost hear someone at Google say something like, "Make us something as sexy as the iPhone, but let's not forget what got us here" -- "what got us here" being the G1, which Google worked tightly with HTC to create. Whether you love or hate the iPhone, it's hard to deny its obvious physical attractiveness, and it's clear that Google and HTC made strides to bring an Android handset into the same realm of base desirability that Apple's halo device occupies. For the most part, they've succeeded. The phone shape finds itself somewhere between the iPhone and Palm Pre -- taking the Pre's curved, stone-like shape and stretching it into something resembling a more standard touchscreen device (a la the Hero or Instinct). The body of the handset is comprised of what appears to the eye as two interlocking pieces, a main, dark gray housing (coated in a soft-touch treatment) which is intersected and wrapped by a lighter gray, smooth, almost metallic band. The overall effect is fluid, though we're not crazy about the choice of coloring -- we would have liked to see something a little more consistent as opposed to the two-tone, particularly when the choice of hues is this drab and familiar. Still, the shape and size of the phone is absolutely fantastic; even though the surface of the device houses a 3.7-inch display, the handset generally feels trimmer and more svelte than an iPhone, Hero, and certainly the Droid.

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. 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.


Unlike the Droid, the Nexus One has a trackball just below those buttons that should feel very familiar to Hero users -- the placement feels a bit awkward here, and 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 (which would jibe with what we've seen and heard). Around back you'll find the strangely pronounced 5 megapixel camera and accompanying LED flash, along with Google's Android mascot holding up a QR code -- a decidedly geeky Google touch that we expect won't make it to the final retail version. The layout of the phone is solid, though we would have liked a physical camera key (no biggie), and we actually had some real trouble with those four dedicated buttons. Hopefully it was just our review unit, but the target areas seemed to be too high on the row, and we found ourselves consistently accidentally tapping them while composing an email or text message, or missing them when we tapped a little too low. It wasn't a deal breaker, but it was definitely maddening -- especially considering that we don't have similar issues on the Droid.

Despite the minor niggles, HTC and Google have put together pretty damn good looking and feeling phone; it's not without faults, but they're pretty few and far between.