google smartphone

Google Always Shaking Things
Up
Google sure does love shaking
up the system. The technology
giant presented its new Nexus
One smartphone this week,
which advances the state of the
art and adds to the catalog of
great app phones.
Remember the original Google
search page? It made news
because your search results
popped up fast and weren ’t
cluttered with ads. Remember
when Google went public? It
made news because the
founders auctioned off shares to
the public. Remember when
Gmail came out? It made news
because it offered 1,000 times
the free storage space of
competitors like Hotmail and
Yahoo.
And now Google wants to shake
up the way we buy cellphones
— by letting you shop for the
phone and the service
independently on a new Google
Web site, Google.com/phone.
To introduce this phone store,
Google took the wraps off a
brand-new cellphone, designed
by Google and made by HTC,
called the Nexus One. It ’s pretty
sweet, it advances the state of
the art and it ’s a welcome
addition to the catalog of great
app phones like the iPhone and
Motorola Droid.
You ’ll have to pay $529 without
a service-provider contract. But
the Google news this week isn ’t
quite as earthshaking as Google
seems to think it is.
First, the new phone is almost
exactly the size and shape of the
iPhone. It ’s bland-looking. But it’s
so thin and rounded, it feels
terrific in your hand.
It ’s loaded with gleaming,
attractive features. It’s hard to
choose which is more gratifying:
the speed — instant, smooth
response when you’re opening
programs and scrolling — or the
huge, 3.7-inch touch screen,
which has much finer resolution
than the iPhone (480 by 800
pixels, versus 320 by 480).
There ’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, like
an iPhone, but also a removable
battery and a camera with an
LED flash, autofocus and picture
settings, although the photos
themselves are roughly on par
with the iPhone ’s.
The Nexus has no physical
keyboard — only an on-screen
keyboard, with a handy
suggestion feature that I actually
prefer to the iPhone ’s: as you
start typing a word (“unfo”), the
Nexus displays an entire row of
likely candidates, which you can
tap, thus saving yourself more
fiddly typing-on-glass.
Radically enough, you can also
dictate. The transcriptions aren ’t
what you’d call miraculous —
accuracy is maybe 90 percent —
but if you have simple messages,
speak clearly and remember to
pronounce your punctuation,
this “experimental” feature is
often much faster than typing.
There ’s better integration all
around: you can upload pictures
and videos straight to YouTube,
Picasa, Facebook and so on, and
you can tap a person ’s name and
choose how you want to initiate
contact.
Despite these goodies, the Nexus
is missing some important
features that iPhone fans take
for granted.
For starters, the Google app store
is much smaller, featuring just
18,000 little games; there are
well over 100,000 for the
iPhone.
Worse, even if you find good
ones, you might not have space
to install them. The Nexus can
accommodate memory cards up
to 32 gigabytes and yet,
inexplicably, the Nexus allots
only a tiny 190 megabytes for
downloaded apps.
The Nexus doesn ’t come with
any iTunes-style companion
software, either.
There ’s no physical ringer on-off
switch (you have to do it on the
screen), and therefore no way to
tell by touch if the ringer is off.
The Nexus One also lacks a multi-
touch screen like the iPhone. So
zooming into photos and Web
pages is awkward and hard to
control.
Finally, the Nexus just doesn ’t
attain the iPhone’s fit and finish.
The buttons under the screen
(Back, Menu, Home, Search) are
balky, often ignoring your
finger-presses completely.
But maybe it doesn ’t matter if
the Nexus One isn’t nirvana.
Google says it’s only the first
Google phone of many.
The idea of the Google phone
store is pure, giddy idealism:
You ’ll buy the phone you want,
then you’ll shop for the cell plan
you want, from the carrier you
want.
This is all supposed to be a huge
break from the current way of
doing business, but plenty of
phones (from Nokia and Sony
Ericsson, for example) are
already sold this way: over the
Web, unlocked, to be outfitted
with cell service later. Google ’s
system makes this much easier
but it ’s really not such a new
idea.
You should root for the Google
Store ’s success, because the
obnoxious policies and fees of
cellphone companies have
gotten out of control.