Dear Forum,
If you scroll through the beginning pages of this thread and some others, you'll see some really, really negative reviews I wrote about the Nexus One. I stand by those reviews, because they accurately reflect the experience I had with the device, HTC service, etc.
However, after switching back to the iPhone 3GS, i noticed that there were several key features of the phone that really made me miss my Nexus One. Specifically, the lack of speech to text, google voice integration, slow gmail integration, paying for cloud service, inability of applications to communicate with each other (like fitness programs that can scan the barcodes of foods you eat), and a few other aspects of the phone really stood out as drawbacks.
Over the past week, I've been doing an experiment. I went back to a Nexus One. I bought it directly from Google and this time, I bought a dock along with the phone.
My experience now has been COMPLETELY different than my first experience. The phone has a touchscreen that is as responsive as my iphone. I can type incredibly fast. There are no issues whatsoever. I never installed task manager and I never had to. The hardware and software have been running PERFECTLY over a week of heavy use. The dock has been a dream. I pair the phone with the dock and listen to pandora radio at my desk. I can do anything I want to with the phone as I'm doing this (like walk around the house). The other advantage of the dock is I can just slide - more like drop - the phone into the holder. It's convenient, it's easy, it makes me keep the phone charged much more.
The multitasking on the phone just works well. For example, I just went for a run, listening to pandora while using Google's innovative app, MyTracks. Along the way, i stopped to take a photo. I did all of this at the same time. Brilliant.
The speech to text feature of the phone has also clearly improved over the last month. I find myself speaking into the phone rather than typing into it in almost all text fields. It works well and it works quickly. It's much quicker than typing.
Some people don't like the calendar app, but it's actually pretty nice once you figure out how to use it. For example, I would see the month display when i first launched it - which is useless. I would then go into menu and scroll to get the day field. this is time consuming and unescessairy. Now, what I do is launch the calendar and you can actually click on the day and your schedule pops up. Better yet, I keep a calendar widget on a side window so I don't even need to launch the calendar entry. I see my day instantly and it looks beautiful.
Even the little things that slightly bothered me about the Nexus One are gone. For example, I first thought the trackball was ugly and useless. However, now that I've had a chance to better review and compare the nexus to the iphone, I've noticed that the trackball means that I can move the cursor around if I'm editing some text waaay better than the pop up bubble that I would get with the iphone. It's also a really effective - and beautiful - notification light.
It has just been a week, so I must still be somewhat cautious. But, if the phone continues to perform so well over my trial period, I will definitely be keeping this phone. I won't be switching to the incredible, I will just be happy! It's a shame that it took me two bad phones to get to this good phone. For anyone who has had difficulty with their Nexus, I recommend returning it to HTC and having them replace the phone again. It seems that this phone can be an incredible phone. I really hope I end up keeping this phone!
