Nexus One Follow-Up: 1 Year In

An article by chrisbellman    No Comments

This post has been sitting in my drafts as “6 months in” for, well, six months.  So I ordered my Nexus One on January 5th, 2010.  It’s now been a year; and what a year it has been.  I was reading over some of my old posts about the Nexus One a few weeks back and I was surprised by how future proof I thought the phone would be…  I’m not upset with where I stand right now (in the sense of “oh no!  I’m outdated!”), but I definitely don’t think I even dreamed that I would be contemplating selling it and buying another phone at this point…

So where do I stand?  Well, I still love my Nexus One.  I’m a little upset at Google because Gingerbread has been out for a WHILE now and I still don’t have the update…I tried putting a custom Gingerbread ROM on but not everything worked and it seemed as if Google was coming out with a real update for the phone any day (still waiting…).  So I’m sitting on a rooted Froyo, and now that the SMS Update got pushed, I’m having to hit “Install Later” every few hours.

Sidetracked a bit.  So in 2010-11, we saw a lot of phones get bigger screens, front-facing cameras, HD cameras/movie modes, and dual-core processors, among other things.  I’m still pretty content with my single core processor, I only slightly miss not having a front facing camera and am reasonably content with picture/video quality, and I still hate the fact that the Nexus One’s  touchscreen really wasn’t meant for multi-touch, even though this isn’t a problem I run into daily.  (For those not up-to-speed, the Nexus One’s touchscreen has slight issues tracking two fingers and sometimes thinks your fingers have switched axis when they haven’t…it really doesn’t affect overall performance much except making pinch-to-zoom a little lackluster).

So I still love Android (with all my heart) and love this phone.  It’s a really solid piece of hardware, has pretty good battery life (I easily get through the day), and doesn’t have many problems.  I’ve used a lot of other Android phones that run into a lot of lag problems…not so much in this case.  Even though it’s no longer at the top of the list specs wise, it still has some great “guts”.  The only things I’ve run into is running out of internal storage because I love having a lot of apps installed…and moving to SD helps a bit, but I’d still prefer there to be more internal memory so I didn’t ever have to worry about it.

I’ve dropped this phone quite a bit on carpet, never really on cement or concrete, except for once at the very end of my vacation this summer…the middle right and lower left corners got scratched.  I really don’t mind except that it decreases resale value quite a bit.

Taking a look now at things I mentioned in my original review.  This phone gets pretty decent service.  Cincinnati Bell isn’t the best carrier in the world, but I often find myself having service when others don’t.  I don’t remember how great my G1’s service was (I originally said that seemed to have better service), but I think the service this phone has has gotten better over the year due to radio updates…  I still think this phone is extremely fast.  I went back to my G1 for a bit and it seemed horribly slow, to the point where I couldn’t really get anything done.  I’m currently using the Gingerbread keyboard but used HTC_IME from XDA for most of the year.  I still dislike all on-screen keyboards and am planning on my next phone having a keyboard.  I find it comical that I said the screen is “HUGE and gorgeous”, considering everything that’s come out this year.  It is gorgeous, but it’s not huge…then again I guess it was coming from the G1.  The bottom touch buttons give me little difficulty, as I’ve learned to hit a little North of them to get them to work.

All in all, I’m still really content I bought the phone, even though it cost a LOT of money.  It’s been a great phone with very few problems.  The “rooting” / XDA community for the phone is great, as I expected when I bought it.  GPS works like a charm.  The phone performs amazingly well on Cincinnati Bell (I had over 1800kbps down while tethering in the Atlanta airport).  Minor issues here and there and Android is still a work in progress, but I’m extremely content with my purchase.  Hit up the comments if you have any questions…or comments!