Google Nexus One first impressions

Well Google's Nexus One arrived today Here's a little video of the unveiling or at least it being taken out the box.

Android 2.1 (Eclair) doesn't look that different to other versions of Android, but some applications acted a bit weirdly and hung for a while and Android then noticed and offered to "kill the offending program" or "wait", sometime waiting would work, others not.

It's definitely a pretty phone and the screen is very nice to look at, however it takes getting used to, especially pressing it as you seem to have to be holding the phone with the hand that's pressing a button/etc or it may not respond. Lying the phone on a table and hitting buttons on screen doesn't seem to work.

The phone is pretty fast and the Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU running at 1GHz is noticeable, but some applications still seem sluggish.

The Nexus One comes with a Facebook client, which can sync data between Facebook and contacts on the phone, either all FB contacts (which will just be used in the FB app), just those in the Android contacts or none. You can upload or view pictures, notifications etc. However when a mail notification comes in, you're sent to the mobile Facebook website to actually read it. Even the Blackberry FB client can read and compose FB mail within the app itself.

In order to run things properly you MUST have a Google Email account, this hooks into Mail, Contacts, Calendar etc. Anything that requires sign-in will use that Google address if available. That can make life very easy, but does mean Google know exactly what you're doing on the device (there's a surprise).

The 5MP autofocus camera works well and the LED flash is a bonus. It can do photos and video.

It's a nice slim design and looks good. When setting the system up it defaults to 2G only, though in a modern data centric world that's a bad thing, it does make a huge difference to battery life which gets sucked dry in 3G mode. Having charged the unit fully at about 6pm, there was significantly noticeable drainage by 11pm (just under a 1/3 was gone). Another user reported their Nexus One had completely lost charge and was running around trying to find a charger (it uses the microUSB interface - which is the new 'standard' for phone agreed by several manufacturers, but it's only modern phones that seem to have adopted it.

More info as it comes in.