[Nexus One General] halorin:
I've had the Nexus One for AT&T for close to a month, and I live in the DC area. Take my unscientific, layman's review for what it is.

The phone is very nice. It's easily the best phone I've ever had, but I cannot say that it's a superphone without adding certain things to consider. I've been on this forum for a long time, since I bought an 8525 and was blown away to find through Google searches that people were customizing their phones to speed them up.

I really thought my days of modding the phone to death and waiting for the latest dev release to speed my phone up would be over with a 1Ghz phone with 512 MB of RAM running Android. Sadly enough, that's just not true. I figured the phone would fly out of the box. In a lot of ways it does, but I found the stock ROM to not be aesthetically smooth. The scrolling on the default launcher is borderline painful considering the hardware. Third party launchers like LauncherPro are essential (to me) for a smooth user experience.

I'm also disappointed by the browsing experience. Many sites feature choppy scrolling, another thing I thought would be behind me with a phone so powerful. Considering how the iPhone 3G my girlfriend has regularly puts up a smoother scrolling experience than the Nexus One particularly hits home.

But, after some tweaking (Cyanogen Mod, a 1.1 Ghz Kernel, and some third party apps from the Market), I am really, really enjoying the phone. The camera is very high quality, better than I expected, and the flash works much better than I anticipated. I find myself rarely using my desktop or laptop because everything I'd do on there I can accomplish on my phone. It's become rather integral to my day to day activity.

I'm probably a heavier user than most people, so my battery life is rather flimsy. I can drain the battery easily in half a day, but I keep push on, keep the brightest relatively high, and am always tinkering around with it. I bought this pack of 2 batteries and an external charger for about 20 bucks off of eBay, so I'm never without a fresh battery so it's not a big deal for me, but it would have been nice to have better battery life.

One of the biggest glaring faults is the touch screen sensor used in this phone. When I see the term superphone, I don't expect to find out that previous generation, inexpensive components are used. As it stands now, the sensor gets confused when two touches are put on within 15mm along the same axis. What this means is that for games where say a virtual stick and buttons are along the same axis you will have input issues because it'll read as one straight line rather than you moving the stick up while pressing fire.

It's something you can look up on the internet or youtube. It's been talked about quite extensively. It's definitely the biggest detractor for me. It's fine for browsing and pinching, but if you game keep that in mind. You'll also occasionally find some weird inputs in general at random, especially if there are a lot of finger prints on the screen, or if you're holding the phone with one hand and you try to reach across the screen with your thumb. All in all it's poor form to use such a lame sensor, especially considering that phones generations before this one have better hardware.

But, I love the phone. It being a Google phone almost guarantees that it will be first in line for Android updates (Froyo?).

The pro's outweigh the con's, in my opinion, and it's a very nice phone. Froyo will make it an even better phone. As far as 3G, I don't have any problems. I've gotten at as high as ~2900kbps, which is a lot faster than I ever got on my iPhone or Tilt 2.

The only phone I'd take over this is the Evo 4G, because of the screen and the 4G. But from what I read the camera's actually better on the Nexus One.