[Nexus One General] stealthchicken75:
I've been using my Nexus One for a solid 3 days now and I can't tell you how much I love it. I've been browsing all over the internet and forums looking for reviews and stuff on it just to see what other people have been thinking. I'm absolutely shocked at how much negativity there is towards the phone. Even Gizmodo's review, which wasn't completely bad, was largely against the phone in general... calling it "good, not great."

It is not an iPhone "killer," but it certainly is iPhone competition. I've never owned one myself, it just never impressed me enough to actually go out and buy one. I would've had to switch to AT&T (yeah... right!) and Apple has always kept tight reins in on it's products not allowing you to customize things all that much. THIS is where the Nexus One and Android win.

My Review:

I can customize the hell out of my Nexus One even without rooting it (no real reason to right yet IMO, waiting for developers to create things specifically for 2.1 and that can really use the N1's Snapdragon). I'm sure you've read that the screen is absolutely gorgeous, everything is snappy, no real lag to speak of. Even this "problem" where the icons in the menu don't scroll smoothly isn't a consistent thing. People seem to expect that due to the Snapdragon Processor that you should NEVER EVER see the phone skip. This is computing people, that simply will never happen. You'll always run into a scenario where things will hang, and when they do on the N1, it's for a millisecond. Any review nitpicking the N1 for this type of thing is simply looking for something to be wrong with the phone.

T-Mobile:

Most people use T-Mo as a reason not to get the phone because they aren't as big as Verizon or AT&T. But their coverage isn't horrible either. If you live in a decent sized city that isn't out in the boonies, you're not likely to have any issues at all. For instance, I live in Dallas and I have absolutely zero issues with getting 3G coverage. I constantly have Pandora playing with high-quality turned on with virtually zero lag. SOMETIMES I might wait 3 seconds inbetween a song, that's it. And as a company they, so far, seem FAR more customer friendly than any other wireless company I've ever dealt with. Heck, they even have an app you can install that will warn you when you get near your Text/Minute limits (if you're not on an unlimited plan).

What other company does that? I sure as hell know Sprint didn't during the 6 years I used them, it was like they were always just waiting for me to go over to smack me with overage fees. T-Mo warns me so I don't? That's refreshing. I can also use the app to pay my bill or view my current plan, it's convenient, that's huge for me.

Multi-Touch:

Lots of reviews say that phone lacked multi-touch. While waiting for FedEx to deliver mine, I could feel buyer's remorse sinking in because multi-touch is the one feature that I really love about the iPhone. As many of you already might've read though, the screen *does* support it. Google's native apps don't however. Which is still somewhat disappointing but that means they can add it later should they choose. In the meantime I just loaded up the Dolphin Browser where multi-touch works perfectly! And that's really the only place that I NEED the feature (other than SNESoid).

Voice:

I don't use the feature much at all, but I know some people out there would/do. I tested it out quite a bit yesterday and it works quite well (comparable to my Ford Sync which I really love). Names of course are where it's flaws really show but that's more the fault of the names themselves rather than the software. The voice command feature is integrated in virtually every area of the phone which will make it convenient for anyone who chooses to use this feature over the touch-keyboard.

Navigation:

One of the most compelling features of the phone is the Car Home app which is basically an application with huge buttons that are shortcuts for things in Google Maps. I decided to test out the turn-by-turn on a section of I-30 that has been COMPLETELY f***ed by modification/construction the past couple years to see just how well it could handle things. I was impressed, while some of the directions seemed a little wonky at times I got to my destination with no trouble at all. I will say that it made me take a totally unnecessary u-turn at one point to enter back onto the freeway but honestly, something like that was to be expected considering the HELL I was putting the device through. Anyone who's driven there recently will know what I mean.

What I liked most about the navigation was that it warned me ahead of time about what I needed to do. Not just turn-by-turn but "Exit on right and then turn left." A couple of other GPSs I've used would've just said the Exit on right and not warned me about the left until it was too late. They didn't seem to think ahead like a human being would you know? Or when I got to the destination "Turn left at the light and your destination will be on the left." Other navs would've just made me turn left and let me figure out which side of the street my destination was.

Gripes:

My biggest gripe is that there really isn't anything out right now that is really designed to use this device. Which isn't really the fault of the phone itself, it's the curse of being an early-adopter. You think the iPhone had good apps the day it came out? Also, some apps can be a tad bit buggy, I'm not sure whether it's the apps themselves or because they are running on Android 2.1. I personally assume the latter. For example Pandora bugged out on me yesterday and kept trying to skip songs even though I wasn't in the app. I had to restart the phone for it to work properly again. I've had to force quit one or two other apps as well but they worked just fine when I opened them back up.

I have confidence that these few quirks will be resolved by the end of the month and that by Feb there will be plenty of apps that will take advantage of the powerful hardware in the N1. But what if not? I don't really care. The phone AS IS is just fine.

Overall:

This is hands down the best phone I've ever seen/used. It's quick, powerful, and works damn near perfectly overall. People will make comparisons and say "Well, it's no iPhone." They'd be right, it's not, it BETTER. You can say that in a contest between the two it really comes down to preference, but you'd really be selling the N1 short. Yes, in regards to the OS- Android vs iPhone it is pretty much all preference at this point. But the phone as a piece of hardware is leaps and bounds above the 3GS. I cannot say enough good things about this phone and encourage anyone looking to replace their current one to give it

serious

consideration.

One last thing to add, I got the phone for 180$ by becoming a subscriber to T-Mobile. Now that I have the phone in my hands and have played with it extensively I can tell you 100% that I would've paid the full 530$ if I had to. People balk at that price but forget that you WILL pay full price one way or the other. The full cost is just hidden over two years when you sign that contract. If you're willing to fork the 530$ over in one go, you'll actually save money overall.