Google Nexus One Review

Okay. Nexus one is still not available in India. A friend of mine got it for me from USA. I am not really happy with Google there. Anyways, let me get back to the review part of it. When ever I get a new gadget, the kid in me wakes up. I use it all the time. So this review is not a standard review. It's just what I felt about Nexus One after using it for 96 hours.

Package and start it comes with a simple package. Nothing special in it. I had struggle to find out the battery package. Once I did it, everything was piece of a cake. I just added my Google Apps account, it pulled out all my mails, contacts, calendar events, talk and tasks etc. Once I added the FB details, my FB friends were also synced up into my contact list. I just love contacts application and the way it has been integrated into various online services. It connected to my home/office wifi easily. Nobody at airtel had any clue how to send the edge details to my phone. I had to do it manually. Once done it worked with out any problem.

Camera I have taken pictures only in well lighted environment. It takes decent pictures. I am happy to use it as a camera.
I love the photo editor application and you can enable GPS location tagging for pictures. I did few live video transmissions too. The video capture is not bad. But I can't zoom when I am capturing. Which probably will be fixed in next software upgrade I guess.

Battery Lets be clear. We use smart phone through out the day. As of now I have to charge it everyday. The biggest power consumption is by (Settings -> About Phone -> Battery status) screen (43%) and voice calls (30%) for four-day average. I have seen battery losing juice when GPS is on. So I tried to turn off the screen as soon as I am done with playing and keep the brightness to lowest level when I am inside a building/car. Turn off GPS/wifi when not required. With all these changes I could increase the batter life 30 mins. When I am listening to music, using navigation in sunlight with few apps in background. It dies with in 6hrs. It just tells how bad the battery life is when it's used as smart phone. Also I have noticed it generates lot of heat in such situations. Google and HTC has to work on it. In the mean time I am searching for an extra battery,

Memory It comes with 512mb ram, 512mb flash and 4gb micro sd card. The external memory can be expanded upto 32GB. I am still searching for 32GB. Let me know if you know any store where I can buy one. No problems faced with memory until now.

Screen Its 3.7 inch (diagonal, 800 x 480 pixels resolution) widescreen WVGA AMOLED touchscreen. It's an amazing screen to watch videos and browse. I haven't faced any problem with the screen, I am happy with screen.

User Interface and Operating System UI is simple, clean and usable. As soon as I connected it to the internet, the OS got upgraded and that needs a reboot. But then after that everything went pretty well. I guess that update installed multi-touch. Multi touch works as expected :) Like most of the users, I like pull down notification screen and dot puzzle to log into the phone.
Every text box is enabled with STT (speech to text). It doesn't work that well with Indian accent :( Probably they will have one, once they officially start selling in India. OS is pretty stable and hasn't crashed yet. It's truly multi-processing.

Applications I have installed quite a few free apps. Installing an app is quite a breeze. Launch the market place application, choose the app and click on the install button. Upgrade too works in similar fashion. When ever there is an upgrade to the installed app, it shows up in the notification area, from there its pretty simple. Sadly I couldn't find the call recorder which is supposed to be pre-installed. Do you know any good call recording app?

Phone works as expected. The contact application is just awesome. It integrates my phone, google contacts, gtalk, facebook. Is there any way to integrate calendar and twitter into the contact app?

Update
Music: Oh, how could I forget. Nexus comes with pretty decent music player. All you need to do is copy paste your music into the micro SD card. The app scans the music and catalogs them using mp3 tags. The app has all the standard features. I haven't tried other music formats. But I guess there are apps for playing ogg. It also comes with a pair of 3.5 mm earphones. For me its going to be a major audio book reader.

Overall I am happy. But HTC and Google needs to fix two things. 1. Battery life 2. Start selling in India.

Let me know if you want to know anything in specific.