Hawon's World.

Many of you probably know about this. I purchased Google Nexus One for my own birthday gift. I ordered on January 6th midnight and received on January 7thin the morning. I know it has been almost a month and I will pretty much write What I felt having this phone.

Hardware

The design doesn’t look that well built and well fitted from pictures but wait until you hold one on your hands, it’ll definitely change your mind. Yes it is not sexy as iPhone but how it mixed with slight curve at the top and bottom makes phone a lot easier to hold and two color mixed together makes this phone feel like a sharp and elegant style. Also the finish of the hardware is scratch proof and not slippery so when I hold the phone it feels just perfect to me. Also it is a bit thiner than iPhone and little less heavier in weight. It makes me totally comfortable holding it around and using it.

3.7-inch AMOLED display is stunning. 480×800 displays  pictures, websites, map, movies, and everything else crispy clear. I love the screen. A lot brighter and more clear than iPhone 3G I had or any other phones I had before. Many were saying reds and oranges are over-saturated but I personally haven’t notice it much. Only issue  with the display is direct sunlight. Unless I set it to the maximum brightness it is not usable. Unfortunately that’s how any AMOLED displays are but it isn’t that terrible. Touch screen isn’t as good as iPhone though. Still does everything fine w/out multi-touch (now with update you can do multi-touch in few apps), but around bottom four soft keys it has some sensitivity problem and especially when I’m typing lack of multi-touch kills it.

Camera is a lot better than I thought too. I remember when I had G1, Camera app took forever to work and focus. With Nexus One, android takes picture slowly is an old news. With 5-megapixel camera with LED flash light, you can take sharp picture almost every where. Don’t forget, it is still a camera inside cellphone. Do not expect DSLR quality pictures with it!

Built in speaker is a joke… It is so quite sometimes I don’t hear the phone rings or in the car using speaker phone is not a smart decision to do.

Software (with update 1)

Nexus One is now running Android 2.1 update-1. It officially released yesterday, Feb. 2nd, and enhanced few features. I’ll post what has been included this update later.

There are not much to talk about it to me. I used G1 back in 2009 January, even before cupcake has been released. So to me, this is almost spanking new Operating System to me but compare to my friends’ and co-worker’s Droid it isn’t too new other than Nexus One works a lot more snappier and faster.

Few things I really like is home screen now i have five homescreen compare to 3 before. Car Home works pretty nice but it seems like draining a lot of battery if i use it. Google voice implement is golden! Dynamic wallpapers are cool but honestly i don’t really use it. Do you remember how you used to drag up to see all the apps you have? Now there’s a section you just touch it and all your apps shows up. To me one nice visual touch is how it scrolls up and down so smoothly with all those apps stacking up on top or bottom.

I love how gallery works. It automatically searches all the pictures you have on android and shows. Movie clips plays right away from gallery too w/out any application. One thing I can’t tolerate is music player. Coming from iPhone UI for iPod was way superior. Not even a competition. I wonder if Google will work on this some time soon!.

Honestly I don’t really care about multi-touch. Actually a lot of multi-touch has been implemented after quick update 1. Except only one area that I really enjoy multi-touch; THE VIRTUAL KEYBOARD. This is probably what I miss about iPhone. With multi-touch support with smart system they have that guesses what I’m typing, iPhone’s virtual keyboard was golden. With Android, although now i got used to type slower for accuracy, if I type little bit fast then often I see lots of misspellings. Google, would you please implement this and improve virtual keyboard?

Battery Life

First few days I thought battery was kind of weak but after few days it rocks. I use it more often than iPhone 3G I had and it lasts a lot longer. I typically can use 13~14 hours of little bit heavy uses such as 2~3 hrs of music listening, 2~3 hrs of browsing, 30+ minutes of talk, 30~50 texts, and frequent checking my google reader, twitter, and Facebook. BUT you definitely have to plug it in every night!

My favorite Apps

I really didn’t use that many apps on iPhone either but here are few lists of my favorite apps on Android

• OliveTree BibleReader (Although iPhone version was a lot better)
• TweetCaster (I think so far it is the best twitter app on android)
• Greed (Google Reader)
• Google Voice
• Documents to Go
• Goggles
• WordPress
• Evernote
• AK Notepad
• Astro filemanager
• USA Today

AT&T vs. T-Mobile

Well, it seems like there will be a AT&T version of Nexus One will be out sometime near future but still to people who are wondering. I used my first 2 weeks with AT&T and now I’m with T-Mobile. The phone is perfectly usable with AT&T’s EDGE network. Web browsing is extremely slow but map, car home, email, twitter, and Facebook except picture are perfectly fine. Then why did I switch to T-Mobile? It is a lot more reliable network in my opinion in Chicago land area. I don’t get drop calls anymore, I get signals about everywhere I go and actually can make calls and browse (which I wasn’t able to do with AT&T often in downtown and many other areas). More than anything, you have to choose based upon how good service you can get.

Conclusion

Honestly this is the closest to what I’ve been looking for in smartphone. Since Treo 600, I went through good number of smartphones; Palm Treo 600, 650, 755, 800w, BlackBerry Curve, Bold, iPhone 3G, G1, Sony Xperia X1a, and Palm Pre. Of course this is not the perfect phone. I don’t believe there will be any phone that will be perfect to every one on earth. Simply we are all unique and it is impossible to fullfil everyone’s desire and wish lists. User experience point of view this was by far the most satisfying to me.

This is my review of the phone and if you have any questions feel free to leave me comments!