Birthday money gone on a netbook, property tax due, unexpected purchase of NCAA tickets, and now…Google drops a Nexus One with AT&T frequencies.
That’s just cruel.
So here, in no particular order, is a rundown of my thoughts:
* It’s completely unlocked. And costs about what I paid for a similarly unlocked SonyEricsson P800 back in 2003 in a shady Chinese cellphone shop in the Bowery, which ought to be a cautionary tale as I sold that joint within a year for a quarter of what I paid for it.
* It’s got a lot of stuff I want. 5 MP camera with flash (!) and video capture, noise-cancellation built in, high-res display, and most of all that blinding-fast processor. Not to mention integration with Google Voice *and* the Navigator function of Google Maps, which would make an end to ever needing a GPS.
* It’s got some glitches. The video camera only gets 20fps, the OLED screen actually has a less rich color palette and is supposedly almost useless in bright sun, the virtual keyboard is awkwardly placed in horizontal orientation (leading to trouble with space bar vs silkscreened buttons), the camera doesn’t have touch-to-focus and doesn’t take the best shots for a 5MP job, and the text-to-speech options are supposedly limited to certain fields.
* The geekery factor is a lot higher with the Nexus One. Multitasking, widgets, the ability to do much more granular monitoring of resources (i.e. find out what’s killing my battery!) and to sideload apps at random in addition to the goods of an unlimited Marketplace…lots of lots of LOTS of potential there.
* But the fit and polish isn’t quite there relative to the iPhone – again, it’s like Ubuntu vs Mac OS X, and how much are you willing to trade away for interface consistency and fit-and-finish. Plus I would want the stuff I’m used to – Facebook app, Tweetie, DirecTV programming, March Madness On Demand, top-notch RSS reader, Kindle app, Caltrain schedule, the $ILLY sleep-cycle alarm clock…don’t know how much of that is there yet.
* And it’s tough to tell – everything with the Android devices, you do THROUGH THE PHONE. There’s no web version of the Android Marketplace, there’s no sync to the PC – you sync everything in the clouuuuuud. Which brings us back to the “GOOGLE PWNS JOO” problem – exactly how much of your life are you willing to hand over to these guys?
Long story short (TOO LATE), I think this is the deal: we now have the leader in the clubhouse. Apple has until September to produce a compelling fourth-wave iPhone that will keep me in the barn, with the additional caveat that an unlocked Nexus One would prevent my having to do anything contract-wise. In fact, the Nexus One would let me do away with the personal plan altogether and go over to a work account, with work-paid 4G, and switch between them at random if I liked…
Hmmmmmmmm….
Your move, Cupertino. Better make it good.