I've had my N1 for a few days now, and I've been following Android for about a year, so I thought I'd give my impressions of the device coming from a crappy old Moto Razr. I have used the iphone and Droid a bit, and I actually had a Sprint Hero for about 10 days before I took it back and got this instead.
This is for all you guys out there sitting on the fence. Hope it helps you make a decision.
The Good:
The screen. UN-believable. Feels much larger than the Droid screen, even though it's not. Colors are incredibly saturated (even a bit too much) and this thing is tack sharp. Plus, you can view it from just about any angle without getting the normal distortion.
This thing is fast fast fast. Web pages load over wi-fi same speed as on my desktop. That's pretty amazing. Launching and switching between apps is a breeze - I feel 100% more productive on this thing than the Hero. For example, Advanced Task Killer would take up to 5 seconds to load on the Hero and I had to hit the "kill tasks" button a million times before it would work. The N1 loads it up in about 1 second at the most.
Trackball is really nice to have. I wish people would quit criticizing it. Try to browse a forum on the web and hit the "next page" button with your finger. Just try it.
Live wallpapers are really cool. Consumer oriented smartphones to me should be about having fun, and these little touches really help. Even if the clock wallpaper doesn't work.
Gallery is awesome. It's so smooth an easy to navigate through a ton of pictures and I actually prefer the zoom buttons on this app vs the multi touch on the Hero. Before you all go crazy, let me explain why. This screen is big enough for you to see just about any picture really well when it fills the screen. Hitting the + button once does just that. I don't really need to pinch and zoom in to get a good look at my image on a 3.7 inch screen.
The new app menu animation and button are much better than the old app tray. Call me lazy, but I prefer to tap a button to swiping up, and the old grey bar was just ugly. The new UI fits a next-gen device such as this.
The clock feature is great. Goodbye old alarm clock! Now if they would only sell me that dock...
Speech to text is amazing. I spent about an hour talking to my girlfriend through Google Talk, trying to stump it. Those who say it doesn't work seriously need to learn to speak English. Or not - this thing knows Spanish as well! You don't even have to switch a setting, just start talking. I found it works about 95% of the time if you speak using real sentences because it seems to base a lot of its decisions on context. For instance, I said the following and it got it right: "I have 2 pizzas. You need pizza two." And it knew when to use "damn" and not "dam."
The Bad:
The touch buttons at the bottom suck. Just give me normal buttons. Seriously.
Every other complaint is Android related. HTC did an amazing job with this phone. I wish they had done the UI. Bravo anybody??
Despite the Snapdragon processor, it still stutters. This seems all down to the coding in the transitions. The menus and apps still load lightning fast, but the animations drop frames like crazy. Swiping between home screens causes stutters every time (it's much smoother using the little dot buttons at the bottom for some reason) and closing an app causes stuttering in the animations. Google, please fix this. Home screen transitions were smoother on the Hero. I know the N1 is pushing 2.6 times the pixels but come on.
Contacts app is just decent. Taping on a contact's picture to interact with them is really cool, but the Sense UI way of organizing all the emails, text, stats updates, and photos of each contact is genius. There were no better replacements in the app store either.
Stock messaging app is pretty weak. Sure Handcent SMS fixes everything, but it'd be nice to buy a phone that is ready to go out of the box. (for instance, group texting doesn't happen in the Android SMS app)
Music app is lame. Lame lame lame. I hope this is the next thing to go on Android 2.whatever. It's really unintuitive and horribly ugly. Luckily the music widget is actually nice to look at.
Android Market is still kinda weak. There are probably 50 really good apps, but most could really use a UI update. Hopefully, with Google getting behind their phones in a big way with the N1, more developers will get on board Android.
No media sync.
Overall, this phone is amazing. Some iphone users could never go to Android because of the disjointed UX, but I could never get an iphone after multi-tasking (this is HUGE) on an Android phone. Plus I don't want to be forced in the Apple ecosystem. So for me, this phone is finally superior to the iphone.
But what I love the most about this phone, is that it is Google's phone, which means that every new update with hit this thing first. For me, Android is still very much a work in progress and really needs updates to the contacts app, music app, some media syncing, optimization of animated transitions and some spit and polish on the menus. But the hardware is truly next-gen, so I can keep this phone for a while knowing that it will only get better with time.
Hope this helps anyone out there considering this phone. Feel free to ask if you have any questions about it. Don't listen to the reviews. Gizmodo, BGR and Engadget can eat it.
This is for all you guys out there sitting on the fence. Hope it helps you make a decision.
The Good:
The screen. UN-believable. Feels much larger than the Droid screen, even though it's not. Colors are incredibly saturated (even a bit too much) and this thing is tack sharp. Plus, you can view it from just about any angle without getting the normal distortion.
This thing is fast fast fast. Web pages load over wi-fi same speed as on my desktop. That's pretty amazing. Launching and switching between apps is a breeze - I feel 100% more productive on this thing than the Hero. For example, Advanced Task Killer would take up to 5 seconds to load on the Hero and I had to hit the "kill tasks" button a million times before it would work. The N1 loads it up in about 1 second at the most.
Trackball is really nice to have. I wish people would quit criticizing it. Try to browse a forum on the web and hit the "next page" button with your finger. Just try it.
Live wallpapers are really cool. Consumer oriented smartphones to me should be about having fun, and these little touches really help. Even if the clock wallpaper doesn't work.
Gallery is awesome. It's so smooth an easy to navigate through a ton of pictures and I actually prefer the zoom buttons on this app vs the multi touch on the Hero. Before you all go crazy, let me explain why. This screen is big enough for you to see just about any picture really well when it fills the screen. Hitting the + button once does just that. I don't really need to pinch and zoom in to get a good look at my image on a 3.7 inch screen.
The new app menu animation and button are much better than the old app tray. Call me lazy, but I prefer to tap a button to swiping up, and the old grey bar was just ugly. The new UI fits a next-gen device such as this.
The clock feature is great. Goodbye old alarm clock! Now if they would only sell me that dock...
Speech to text is amazing. I spent about an hour talking to my girlfriend through Google Talk, trying to stump it. Those who say it doesn't work seriously need to learn to speak English. Or not - this thing knows Spanish as well! You don't even have to switch a setting, just start talking. I found it works about 95% of the time if you speak using real sentences because it seems to base a lot of its decisions on context. For instance, I said the following and it got it right: "I have 2 pizzas. You need pizza two." And it knew when to use "damn" and not "dam."
The Bad:
The touch buttons at the bottom suck. Just give me normal buttons. Seriously.
Every other complaint is Android related. HTC did an amazing job with this phone. I wish they had done the UI. Bravo anybody??
Despite the Snapdragon processor, it still stutters. This seems all down to the coding in the transitions. The menus and apps still load lightning fast, but the animations drop frames like crazy. Swiping between home screens causes stutters every time (it's much smoother using the little dot buttons at the bottom for some reason) and closing an app causes stuttering in the animations. Google, please fix this. Home screen transitions were smoother on the Hero. I know the N1 is pushing 2.6 times the pixels but come on.
Contacts app is just decent. Taping on a contact's picture to interact with them is really cool, but the Sense UI way of organizing all the emails, text, stats updates, and photos of each contact is genius. There were no better replacements in the app store either.
Stock messaging app is pretty weak. Sure Handcent SMS fixes everything, but it'd be nice to buy a phone that is ready to go out of the box. (for instance, group texting doesn't happen in the Android SMS app)
Music app is lame. Lame lame lame. I hope this is the next thing to go on Android 2.whatever. It's really unintuitive and horribly ugly. Luckily the music widget is actually nice to look at.
Android Market is still kinda weak. There are probably 50 really good apps, but most could really use a UI update. Hopefully, with Google getting behind their phones in a big way with the N1, more developers will get on board Android.
No media sync.
Overall, this phone is amazing. Some iphone users could never go to Android because of the disjointed UX, but I could never get an iphone after multi-tasking (this is HUGE) on an Android phone. Plus I don't want to be forced in the Apple ecosystem. So for me, this phone is finally superior to the iphone.
But what I love the most about this phone, is that it is Google's phone, which means that every new update with hit this thing first. For me, Android is still very much a work in progress and really needs updates to the contacts app, music app, some media syncing, optimization of animated transitions and some spit and polish on the menus. But the hardware is truly next-gen, so I can keep this phone for a while knowing that it will only get better with time.
Hope this helps anyone out there considering this phone. Feel free to ask if you have any questions about it. Don't listen to the reviews. Gizmodo, BGR and Engadget can eat it.
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