Google’s Nexus One, heralded as a contender to Apple’s all-mighty iPhone, was unleashed at an invitation only event earlier in the month at Google’s Mountain View Headquarters in California.
There can be no doubt that this new smartphone is a force to be reckoned with. Manufactured by Taiwanese based HTC, the phone is available exclusively from Google via their website (google.com/phone) meaning that unlike other smartphones including the iPhone, you have the immediate option to buy it “unlocked” although at a considerable price ($529 unlocked or $179 with two-year contract to T-Mobile). The ability to make phone calls is a mere aside as unsurprisingly the device is a stated “multi-purpose computing device” and is thus laden with all the bells and whistles you’d expect and a little more.
Aesthetically it’s a beauty to behold. Without getting into pounds and inches, the Nexus is both lighter and slimmer than the iPhone and comes with a slightly larger touch screen. The device is also more powerful and comes with more RAM but has only 4GB storage (although this is expandable to 32GB with a removable SD card – a feature the iPhone lacks). A negative is that apps can only be stored on the phones internal memory which at 512Mb means space will be severely limited. Google have already insisted however that this ‘feature’ will be dropped in the near future.
As for battery life, the specs say a single charge will give you 250hrs standby, 7hrs talk and video playback or 20 hrs audio playback. Not bad considering the battery is keeping a 1 GHz beast of a processor ticking over.
Looking at features, the inclusion of Google’s Voice recognition technology certainly stands out and if it’s as good as they say it is, typing text messages and facebook updates are a thing of the past as every text field can be controlled via voice commands. First touch, now voice – we’ve come a long way in past 12 months.The Nexus also comes with a 5 megapixel camera complete with built-in LCD flash easily beating iPhone’s flash-devoid 3 megapixel version.
The Android 2.1 operating system (OS) still doesn’t have the goods on the iPhone’s OS with many users reporting the user-interface to be “rough around the edges” and lacking the polish of its competitors. It does come with access to a well stocked (18,000+) app store. This pales in comparison to Apple’s stock of over 100,000 but is set to flourish with the wider availability of Android running smartphones on the market.
Vodafone have already secured the initial rights to sell the Nexus in the UK this spring. However unlike the iPhone, Google doesn’t want to be tied to one operator preferring to get the phone “into as many hands as possible” meaning that we can expect to see tie-ins with multiple mobile operators. Its debut in other European countries is set for later in 2010 with no information as yet on an Irish rel
ease date.
