Google Nexus One - My First Smartphone

[sleepyhead]

As some of you may know I took the plunge and hit buy for a a silly expensive phone. Currently it is on charge with no SIM (soon to be installed).

This is more of an overview of a nub, me, buying, recieving and upacking the phone. I'll try and keep this updated as I keep using the phone but if any prospective buyers out there have a specific query, I can try my best to test it out and give you feed back. Anyhow, lets start!

Purchasing:
Buying the phone is silly easy. Go to website, click buy, fill in details. Done. I encountered a slight issue with my credit card sticking a block on due to two new purchases within a week, that totalled more than £700 - out of "behaviour pattern" for me. Once that cleared up, payment went through and the process continued.

Shipping:
DHL...where I live, they fail...big style. So I took a one day delay.

Length of time from ordering to getting the phone:
I asked for the phone to be engraved so read about how it would ship within 72 hours of ordering, not expecting to see the phone till early next week. I ordered at about 10:30pm on Tuesday night and (after the 24 hour delay with DHL) got it Friday afternoon. Pretty slick I say.

Onto the juicey bit...unpacking the box that it arrived in! Well you probably all bored of this but I'l gonna throw some pictures up anyway!

The delivery box


The warning label on the side


Inside was some pockets filled with air


Under all that was two boxes, the phone and a UK charger


UK charger out of it's box in some weird...bag thing..not quite plastic. Can't describe it really...


UK charger works well in all voltage conditions. Good to know


At the bottom of the box are the accessories. Top to bottom, you get USB lead, headphones and batteries, and at the bottom is the US charger


Oh? what's this? It works in the same voltage range. Grr...

NOTE: To those who want to buy this phone, don't bother with the UK adapter...

The bits of paper you get in the box


The phone...ahhhhh!!




Battery cover off and you can see the engraving...lol


That's it for now...

Other Nexus One owners more than welcome to post here too! I might learn something other than text, dial and answer

[Disturbedguy]

Pwetty phone..can I have it?

[Flibb]

Did the shipper pay the customs fees? If not DHL might invoice you for duty etc at a later date, for some reason they often deliver then invoice later. Thats assuming you are UK based

[sleepyhead]

VAT invoice will be posted to me soon with DHL admin fee of something like £2.

So far, first fail of the day...importing all my contact numbers! lol.

So it's SIM out, SIM in....SIM out...SIM in...

EDIT
OK, this is completely different experience. Just imported my contacts from my SIM card. All is good.

EDIT 2
w00t. Phone is now on my wi-fi network. Simple.

[matty-hodgson]

do you mind me asking how much?

[sleepyhead]

$577.65 for the phone, UK charger and shipping to UK. So roughly £365 give or take £2 or 3 depending on exchange rates.

Still waiting for the VAT invoice.

Right I am bamboolzed by this phone....it's got crap loads of features and I am swamped with it all. I'll have to just take it a day at a time

had some hilarious google voice mis-translations...

"I got a new phone" = "uncle timmy phone"

[jimborae]

Hope you don't mind Sleepyhead but i'll chip in my first thoughts regarding this phone as well.

1. Yes the bag material for the accessories is weird, a cross between fabric & plastic.
2. Compared to my previous android phones it's quick to boot up and very responsive.
3. The lack of onboard widgets really pisses me off, especially no email or contacts widgets! HTC's Sense UI is much better in this respect.
4. Can't find anyway to restrict the email client to how many emails it downloads, either by age or number.
5. The facebook client doesn't appear to play very well with Eclair 2.1, some of my contacts have the wrong photo against their entry. This is also true of my Magic which does the same the same thing and is also running Eclair.
6. I don't like the fact that to bring the phone out of sleep you have to press the standby button on the top of the phone. All my other Android phones you can use one of the physical buttons on the front of the phone. This makes it a bit awkward to bring the Nexus out of sleep using one hand.
7. The onboard speaker is tinny & rubbish but that's because the phone is so slim.
8. The size of the phone is not right for my hands, too thin & too wide so it seems to fall out of my hand too easily.
9. Battery life and reception seem pretty good compared to previous android handsets I've used.
10. Compared to the iPhone 3G(S) I also picked up yesterday I still massively prefer android as an OS. Within 5mins I was becoming infuriated with restrictiveness of the iPhone.

[sleepyhead]

Yep. Agree with lack of Widgets that come installed. Guess that is where the apps store comes in handy. However i am posting from my phone. Google voice is mostly accurate. Internet page loading via wifi of my home network is very slick.

EDIT
LoL..never post when you just woke up and you grab your phone to play.

Jimborae: Post all you want, I honestly have no expectations of this phone, no prior knowledge to android or smartphones so really, all of this has blown me away. Your comparative feedback would be alot more helpful for others. For me, I just turn it on and go "wow" lol. I didn't find an issue with facebook, at least not yet.

Battery life on standby seems pretty decent...though that may change if i can work out how to get play mkv files

I'm still getting used to the touch screen keyboard...though it doesn't help that my fingers, for whatever reason, don't play well with laptop touchpads nor as it seems, touch screens.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

im an android developer and the OS has potential to run games as good as iphone because it supports open GL

[kalniel]

im an android developer and the OS has potential to run games as good as iphone because it supports open GL

OpenGL, or just the ES subset?

[jimborae]

im an android developer and the OS has potential to run games as good as iphone because it supports open GL

Can you build us email & contacts widgets then please similar to HTC's...please, pretty please

Can't find anything in Market that comes remotely close.

[sleepyhead]

I'm probably using the phone in a different way that you are jimborae. The one thing that is bugging me is setting a unique ringtone for text messages and playback of mp4 videos. Generally I'm using the phone for the net and media. Battery life is decent. Still on first charge.

[sleepyhead]

OK, worked out how to set unique notification ringtones. Google is my friend.

Anyhow, seeing as my current contract has no "free" data services, how do I know if it is using any at all? I've stopped anything I can from synchronising and i got rid of the news/weather feed and stopped a service from running (that feeds to the news/weather feed).

Anything else i should switch off?

This is until i get my hands on getting some free data services, else I am back to the C905 (which i kinda need to as the contacts on my SIM are old...and out of date).

[Funkstar]

This is until i get my hands on getting some free data services, else I am back to the C905 (which i kinda need to as the contacts on my SIM are old...and out of date).

Can't you send all your contacts from your C905 to the Nexus via bluetooth?

This is what I did until I got my first Windows Mobile smartphone, after that Outlook Sync and now my hosted Exchange account handles all my contacts.

[sleepyhead]

Can't you send all your contacts from your C905 to the Nexus via bluetooth?

This is what I did until I got my first Windows Mobile smartphone, after that Outlook Sync and now my hosted Exchange account handles all my contacts.

Possibly. I'll see if either phone will play ball with no SIM (2 phones, 1 SIM).

[digit]

If you've linked your google account with your phone it may be easier to add all your numbers into your gmail contacts then sync that with your phone.