Nexus One Experience
I’ve been using a Nexus One for about the last month on Fido’s network. Overall it’s a good phone and quite a step up from my previous, semi-indestructible, smart-phone; I say “semi” as, though the Nokia E62 handled being dropped numerous times onto pavement, torrential Toronto rain eventually did it in.
Nexus One is the AndroidOS phone that Google sold themselves up until last month, though they’re now looking to sell it through carriers over here as they’ve already started with mobile companies in the U.K. and points east. I haven’t had any real problems running on Fido, so based on my experience, putting it officially on Rogers/Fido would be a natural move – plus it’s a higher-spec. phone than Telus’ current Android models.
Setting up on Fido
While the Nexus runs just fine as a phone on Fido as soon as you pop in the SIM card, it’s not a Rogers/Fido phone so you have to set some things up yourself. For getting G3-speed data running, Brill Bappin has a great page at: brill.pappin.ca on getting the Nexus working on Fido.
Impressions
Overall, the interface is not as polished as the iPhone, but it’s definitely got more stuff in it. A case in point is WiFi; I use the free WiFi that Second Cups offers with BoldStreet networks, the problem I kept getting though with my iPod Touch was it seemed to get them confused when visiting several different Second Cups over a week. This wasn’t a problem with Android, in the odd time it got confused, I just hit the “forget” button under the connection to make it forget the old connection. On the iPhone my best guess is the Forget must be buried somewhere under the settings. On the downside, a lot of websites that seem to be only checking for iPhone and sending up the regular web page.
The camera shoots photos/video quite well during daylight. It has a auto-focus and a LED-flash, but that still doesn’t do much for night photography. One interesting thing is that it records location using the phones build-in location sensors. Using WiFi and the camera will eat up battery life and I find it needs to be charged about every other day with normal usage, though you could probably extend this by turning off WiFi/Bluetooth and background data-sync – all easily done from settings.
Software-wise, you can download apps right onto your phone – in fact, this is one of the things you get used to: not having to plug your phone into a computer to update files. Both Twitter, Facebook and FourSquare have free apps now.
Finally, one problem I had early on was with the on-screen keyboard going wonky. Google recommends: 1) make sure you’re not touching more than one place (including your sleeves), 2) turn off Nexus completely (hold down power switch, select Turn Off).
