A week with an Android

I have now had a week to play with my new Google Nexus S phone, and given the attention that was lavished upon the decision, we thought that we would let you know our first impressions.

A few things to keep in mind:

• We are, in general, comparing the Google Nexus S to the iPhone
• Our iPhone was a 3GS. We will try to keep performance in perspective, as the iPhone 4 clearly ought to outperform our old phone.
• We try to remain neutral, but keep in mind that we are not fond of Apple in this corner of the Internet, and are a bit excited about a new toy.

Phone Build

The phone itself is fantastic.

It’s thinner, lighter and has a superior screen to the iPhone 3GS — we’re not sure about the iPhone 4, on any of these counts — and the curved screen makes it feel a bit more like a phone when using it as such. We are not holding a very expensive brick to our face any longer.

And the phone bits? Wonderful. Much better signal strength, much better sound quality.

It’s almost as if it’s a Smartphone built by a phone manufacturer, rather than an iPod with call-making capabilities built by a computer company.

The one advantage the iPhone has, however, is that the Nexus is lacking in heft — we are still left with the distinct impression that the phone will not handle abuse as well as Apple’s did.

Judging phone elements:
Style … Nexus!
Signal … Nexus!
Call Quality … Nexus!
Screen … Tie!
Heft … iPhone!
Accessibility … Nexus!

OVERALL … Nexus!

Music

We knew that Samsung would make a better phone than Apple, though, in terms of pure phone-ness. What about the music?

Music sync and playback is, to us, one of the most important features on the phone, and the biggest cause for concern when switching over — for all the annoyances, iTunes synchronizes with the iPhone pretty smoothly (or it did, once upon a time), and the iPhone is based upon the iPod — a music-playing device.

After some experimentation — the story of which is long enough to fill its own article — we settled on iSyncr and PowerAMP.

iSyncr enables synchronization over WiFi with iTunes. This has been flawless, and makes synchronizing music easier than it ever was with the iPhone. Not only are there no wires required, but changing the synchronization settings are a breeze, once everything has been set up.

The native Android music player is pretty horrendous, however, so we downloaded PowerAMP and found that suddenly our music collection was sounding better than it ever had on the iPhone.

Judging music elements:
Sync … Nexus!
Playback … Nexus!
Initial setup … iPhone!
Modifying setup … Nexus!

OVERALL … Nexus!

Social Networking

Music was an expected weak point for the Nexus, Social Networking an expected strong point. The key to a social network, after all, is to have people participating in it. With Android being the most popular handset Operating System and an open Android market, surely it must be bursting with excellent and innovative apps. While we found success in locating a Twitter client, we were also left with the impression that the iPhone has a greater range of options, application-wise.

We started with Twitter. Our Desktop Twitter client is TweetDeck, and our iPhone client was TweetList, which is not available on Android.

We decided to try TweetDeck for Android, and were pleasantly surprised. We had previously tried their iPhone application and found it lacking. Either they have redesigned their mobile client since then, or have completely separate design teams for the iPhone and Android. The Android Tweetdeck application is excellent — it puts all my networks into a single feed, and allows me to selectively update to Twitter, Facebook and/or FourSquare. (I believe they do LinkedIn as well, if you’re into that sort of thing).

TweetList is a wonderful iPhone application, with the most intuitive interface I have ever used on a Twitter application — or perhaps any mobile application — and is sorely missed for that. But the extra TweetDeck features are fantastic, as we no longer feel the need to have separate Twitter, Facebook and FourSquare applications on our phone.

Judging:
Choice … iPhone!
Functionality … Nexus!
Intuitiveness … iPhone!

OVERALL … iPhone! (by a whisker, so much here is application-dependent).

Other common uses

So there are other common smartphone uses here, which did not seem to group well, and we didn’t want to put elsewhere.

email … iPhone! The native Google application is surprisingly awful. The best option available appears to be K9, which is pretty good, but still does not quite match up to the Mail app that comes with the iPhone.

Maps and Navigation … Nexus! This should come as little surprise, as the iPhone uses Google Maps. Google happens to do Google Maps better. Offline maps and TFL Journeyplanner applications seem on par with the iPhone, though we have had little chance to press them into use thus far.

RSS Reader … Nexus! Back when we were setting up our iPhone, it took us weeks — literally weeks! — and more downloaded apps than I can remember before we settled on Reeder, which met all our reading needs. It took us 24 hours and two downloads to find NewsRob, which does everything Reeder does, but does it smoother, faster and more pleasingly.

Random observations

Beyond the above, we did note a few random things that bear mentioning.

NFC … Tie! A tie? The Nexus HAS Near Field Communication, the iPhone does not. But it hardly matters, because there are absolutely no functions for NFC at the moment, so we just turn it off so that it doesn’t drain the battery at all. Our dreams of swiping our phone to get on the tube, or pay for a coffee, are probably still outside the lifetime of this phone.

Accessibility … Nexus! It’s fairly evident that one of the benefits of Android is access to the device — users can change the battery, access the filesystem, and other such things. This plays out into a larger advantage than a plug-and-player like myself would have thought. Something as simple as showing how much each application has drained the battery is informative and useful, and Android’s policy of indicating what permissions are given to each installed application helps shape our choices more than we anticipated.

Accessories … iPhone! One thing that we didn’t anticipate was the dearth of phone accessories that would be available. Every phone store sells iPhone cases — and then there’s the Apple store. If you have a Nexus, good luck finding a case at the phone store, nevermind a choice of cases. We bought the Tech 21 case, only to find that it wasn’t actually designed with the curved body of the Nexus S in mind — it just had the right height, width, depth and cut-outs. No good. Our most promising option for a case right now is to order one from America. That just seems wrong.

In their pocket … Tie! However, if you are trying to get out under the thumb of Apple — as we were — Google may feel more free, but that’s not necessarily the case. Our phone’s information is backed up on Google’s servers. Our contacts are Google Contacts. Our photos are synched via Picassa, Google’s cloud photo service.

The great advertiser in the sky knows more about us than ever before.

Overall verdict

So, a week into our new Android life, are we happy with the decision we made? Do we still feel that the Nexus S is superior to the iPhone 4?

Yes, and yes.

We find it nicer to look at, nicer to make calls with, and nicer to listen to music and read with. Its in-built functionality is considerably weaker than that on the iPhone, but unlike the iPhone, these functions can be easily upgraded from the market.

And that’s where the real satisfaction comes in. Both systems are easily extensible, through third party applications. But Apple’s insistence that applications are not permitted to compete with the core Apple-built products on the phone means that upgrading is difficult to impossible.

We would choose Android again in a heartbeat.

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