Google Nexus One Review (touch input, battery life, conclusion)

Filed under: Features

Finger v. Stylus

I know people love to complain about stylus input on PDAs and smartphones. They're small, easy to lose, and who can really get the hang of handwriting recognition software? And on-screen or hardware keyboards are generally easy to tap on with two thumbs than a stylus.

But there are a few things that stylus input is far better at than finger input. Aside from handwriting recognition software which is a mixed bag at best, there's the simple act of jotting down a note in your own handwriting -- without asking the software to bother converting it to text. And art and drawing applications are far easier to use with a stylus than a big fat fingertip.

I have lousy handwriting and I'm not an artist, so those things don't bother me much. Here's what does: It's generally harder to tap a precise point on a touchscreen with a fingertip than with a stylus. I find myself tapping the wrong link on a web page all the time on the Nexus One. This is partly a result of the fact that the web browser does show full desktop views of web pages. In a world where more and more web pages are designed for small screens, maybe we'll come up with a better way to create finger-friendly hyperlinks. But we're not there yet.

And when entering text, it's much harder than it needs to be to go back and fix a tpyo. See how I misspelled "typo" in that previous sentence. If I noticed that while typing on the Android at this moment, I'd have to tap at the screen with my finger and hope that the cursor moves to the right spot between the "t" and "p." With a stylus, this would be incredibly easy. With a finger, I'll be lucky if the cursor is near the word "tpyo" instead of the world "fix."

Look, I get it. The iPod has demonstrated that people would prefer to use on-screen keyboards and large, finger-friendly touchscreen buttons rather than fumbling with a stylus and Start Menu. But I really wish that every now and again I could tap on the screen with the back of my fingernail instead of the tip of my finger. Unfortunately, the Nexus One and most finger-friendly touchscreen smartphones simply won't recognize this kind of input.

I'd love to see someone come out with a phone with a touchscreen display that can handle either type of input. Unfortunately, I suspect there's really not much demand for this feature.

Update: As has been pointing out in the comments, the situation isn't as dire as I made it out to be on the Nexus One. There's a trackball beneath the touchscreen that you can use to move the cursor around while entering text. I'd used the trackball a bit while surfing the web to scroll through pages or scroll from link to link. Somehow it didn't occur to me to try it while entering text. Thanks Jon!

Battery

I didn't want to focus too heavily on hardware in this review, but battery life is important when talking about a mobile device like the Nexus One. I didn't perform any scientific tests, but let's put it this way: If you operate the Nexus One with Wifi and 3G enabled all day, you'll probably have to charge it every night.

If you plan to spend a few hours watching video or playing games, don't expect the phone to last through a full workday. It simply won't. But you can get reasonably good battery life when performing tasks that don't require the backlit display to be turned on. The screen is one of the biggest battery hogs, so you can probably spend much of the day listening to MP3s without killing the battery -- especially if you turn off WiFi and/or put the phone in Airplane Mode, which cuts off all wireless communication.

You can find plenty of phones that will provide longer run time than the Nexus One, but not many of them will have 1GHz processors.

Conclusion

There are a lot of things I like about the Nexus One and Google Android. And a lot of things I don't. It's fast, has a great web browser, excellent email application (especially for Gmail users), and blurs the line between web and local content in a way that my old Windows Mobile PDA doesn't even dream of doing.

But I'm disappointed in the selection of video players. And I'm still not convinced that the on-screen keyboard and finger-friendly controls are worth dropping stylus input altogether -- even though I know I'm probably in the minority on that point. I also miss physical buttons for controlling media playback. They also come in handy when playing video games where you don't want to actually have to put your fingers over the screen you should be looking at in order to control actions.

Despite my complaints, I'm thinking about picking up a Nexus One for myself though. And here's why: The Nexus One and Google Android in general have revived my interest in mobile apps. Most of the applications running on my Dell Axim were developed 4 or 5 years ago. That's partly because the PDA runs Windows Mobile 2003SE and can't handle most applications developed for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 in the last few years. But it's also because developers have largely moved to platforms such as the iPhone and Google Android that do a better job of integrating cloud and local elements.

Some of the coolest applications I've tested on the Nexus One so far include Google Listen, an on-device podcast manager that lets you download and listen to podcasts on the device, an NPR News app that lets you find podcasts and live streams of NPR radio programs and local stations, the WordPress blogging app, and the Seesmic Twitter client for Android. I also love the Aldiko eBook reader which lets you find and download thousands of free eBooks and read them directly on the phone.

Even more exciting, I found all of these applications by browsing the Android Market on my device. I didn't have to look them up online, download them to my desktop and then copy them to the phone. Again, I realize that Android isn't the only platform with an app store. In fact, pretty soon every major mobile operating system will have one. But after spending years complaining that I didn't need my PDA to be a phone, the Nexus One has convinced me that maybe that's exactly what I do want. And with Google Android shipping on 60,000 handsets a day, I have confidence that the platform will only continue to grow, which makes the Nexus One a pretty good choice for someone looking for a first smartphone.

Previous Page

page 1 page 2 page 3

Google Nexus One Review (touch input, battery life, conclusion) originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments