Google Nexus One Review (settings, keyboard, file management)

Filed under: Features

User Interface - Settings

The Android Settings menu is one of the most thorough, yet complicated things I've ever seen on a mobile device. On the one hand, you have control over a huge number of features and settings. On the other hand, it can take a pretty long time to find what you're looking for if you're not sure where to look -- and it can take a while to get used to where things are hidden. Even once you do get used to the Settings screen, it takes a lot of scrolling and clicking to do some simple tasks such as fine-tuning the screen brightness or checking the exact state of the battery. Fortunately there are quicker shortcuts that you can use for both of these tasks.

In order to bring up the Settings menu, you click the Settings button from the home screen and then tap on Settings (as opposed to the icons for adjusting your notification settings, desktop wallpaper, or other features).

You're greeted with a screen broken down into 15 different section. Yes. I said 15. I won't bother listing them all here, but basically you can adjust the Wireless and network settings, Call Settings, Sound & display, Accounts, Language & keyboard, and Date & Time.

If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you'll find the "About phone" menu, where you can check your phone's status to see your battery level. As I mentioned above, there is a faster way to check your battery level.

The meter in the status bar at the top of most windows gives you a rough battery gauge. And if you run the Clock application, you'll see the time, temperature, and battery status. Throw a shortcut on the home screen to the Clock, and you can get your battery status much faster than you would be opening the Settings menu. But seriously, does is strike anyone as odd that you have to scroll past 14 menus and click "About phone" and then "Status," to check the battery level in settings menu?

Likewise, adjusting the screen brightness is kind of a chore. You have to open the settings dialog, click Sound & Display, and then scroll down near the bottom of a fairly long list of menu options before you get to "Brightness." This really seems like something that should be near the top of the settings menu.

The workaround here is to add the "Power Control" widget to the Android home screen. Just tap and hold an empty space on the home screen and click "Widgets." The Power Widget lets you turn the WiFi and Bluetooth on and off with a single click, toggle synchronization with Google services, and adjust the screen brightness -- to an extent. Basically there are three settings: dark, somewhat bright, and very bright. You can't adjust the display brightness with a slider using the Power Widget. You can just tap three times to flip through the three brightness settings.

While the settings dialog is a bit long in the tooth, making simple tasks such as these more difficult than they need to be, you do have a lot of control over your system.

For instance, you can get a list of running services, even seeing how long each has been running for and how much memory each service is using. You can check a box that will allow you to install applications from "unknown sources" rather than only sticking to the 99.99% safe material found in the Android Market. You can adjust your security and privacy settings, and even toggle between US and European date formats and 12 or 24 hour clocks.

Given the choice, I suppose I'd have to say I'd rather have more control and a less intuitive interface than vice-versa. But I'm also a big ole geek. This might not be true for everyone. And in case you couldn't tell, I do get annoyed when it takes 4 clicks to do something that should just take 2.

On-Screen Keyboard

Like the iPhone, Google Android is a no-handwriting-recognition zone. While some Android devices are stylus-friendly thanks to resistive touchscreens and others are finger-friendly due to capacitive touchscreen displays, you're pretty much always going to find an on-screen keyboard instead of handwriting recognition.

The Nexus One is a bit thin for two-thumb typing in portrait mode. I found I fairly regularly hit the wrong key. But if you turn the phone on its side and type in landscape mode, the keyboard is actually quite comfortable to use.

My typing speed drops from about 100wpm on a full sized keyboard to around 15-20wpm on the Android keyboard, so it's not exactly my preferred method of text input. But it suffices for entering short search queries, email messages, and URLs.

In portrait mode, I found the on-screen keyboard wasn't all that bad if I resorted to one-finger typing, which is even slower. But sometimes you're just too lazy to tilt the phone on its side, you know?

Typing accuracy is assisted by some pretty good predictive text software. If you type a commonly used word with a letter or two wrong, Android will probably make an automatic correction for you. Or if you start tapping out a long word and see that the phone is predicting the correct word, you can just tap it and save yourself some typing.

Program and file management

While Google Android supports true multitasking, allowing you to run as many applications as you want, once you have a dozen or so more programs running simultaneously, the system might begin to slow down. Android does a reasonably good job of closing unused apps when it needs more memory, and for most users that's probably good enough.

If you actually want to take a little more control, you can visit the "Running services" menu I mentioned above. It's available in the settings menu under "Application settings." You can can tap on any service to bring up a dialog asking if you want to stop it. You can also uninstall applications from this area using the 'Manage applications" dialog.

There are also third party applications that make it easier to kill running programs. But there's a reason Google doesn't make it easy to do this: Most of the time it's just not that necessary.

On the other hand, I wouldn't mind a built in file manager. If you want to find and delete eBooks, music, videos, or other files you're going to either need to connect your Nexus One to a computer and use its file browser or install a third party application.

Connecting the Nexus One to a PC is a fairly simple process. You just plug in the USB cable and drag down the notification icon from the task bar and click the "USB connected" item. Anrdoid will ask if you want to "mount" your SD card, and if you say yes then your SD card will show up on your Windows, Mac, or Linux machine as if it were a USB flash drive. This makes it easy to drag and drop files to and from your phone. There's no synchronization software like iTunes for keeping your music and programs synchronized though. You can decide whether that's a bad thing or good.

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Google Nexus One Review (settings, keyboard, file management) originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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