After The First Weekend With The Nexus S

Last Thursday the Nexus S went on sale at Best Buy, I ordered one that afternoon and received it the following day. I spent the weekend making the switch to the Nexus S as my primary personal phone, and made note of the things I like and dislike about the phone. Here are my observations about the Nexus S after the first weekend. The Nexus S is a worthy successor to the Nexus One, and I believe the Nexus S is the best smartphone that I have personally owned so far. To my eyes the screen on the Nexus S is more vibrant, making everything easier to read. I like that the Nexus S is lighter and I am surprised by how much I really like the location of the power button, which is on the right side of the phone rather than on the top. Unfortunately, Google has not yet released the Android 2.3 upgrade for the Nexus One, so I can't make a fair comparison of Android on the two phones. Android 2.3 is not revolutionary in terms of features, but the overall user interface is much more refined, and it has a noticable performance improvement. I am happy enough with the stock Android keyboard that I have not installed SwiftKey on the Nexus S. I am typing almost as fast on the Nexus S as I type on the HD7, and the word recognition is pretty darn good. It is much easier to control the cursor in Android 2.3 than in prior versions. You just tap the screen and a large cursor control button appears that you can easily slide to move. Selecting text for copy and paste is just as easy, with two large markers indicating the beginning and ending of the selection that you can easily slide on the screen. While I am very happy with the Nexus S, there are a few things about it that I don't like. The Nexus S has 16 GB of internal storage and unlike other Android phones, it does not support removable storage. I can live with 16 GB of storage, but I don't understand why Android partitions it between about 1 GB of internal storage and 14 GB of USB storage. While the 1 GB of internal storage in the Nexus S is much more than the 196 MB in the Nexus One, it still represents a cap that I will have to manage some time in the future. Why not treat all of the storage as one bucket like Windows Phone 7? The Nexus S does not have a LED light, which means that it cannot support the LED notifications that I use on the Nexus One, like yellow for Tweetdeck updates and green for Google Voice text messages. What is even more strange is that the Nexus S has no visible indication that the battery is being charged or that it is completely charged, you have to turn the phone on to see the battery status. I like the fact that the Nexus One provides me information without my even having to turn the phone on, and this is one new feature in the Nexus S that I hope other hardware manufacturers do not adopt. In comparison to the Nexus One, the Nexus S is a better smartphone, but in comparison with other Android smartphones, I don't think it has any features that make it stand out. The people who are going to buy the Nexus S are most likely interested in getting updates to Android before everyone else and prefer a pure Google user environment. It will be interesting to see whether Best Buy selling the Nexus S will lead to more sales than the Nexus One.

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After The First Weekend With The Nexus S

Frank McPherson

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Frank McPherson