Taking a long time to really get used to Google's 'new standard' Nexus S smartphone running Android 2.3 ('Gingerbread') reveals it as market-leading in many respects - although there are still areas to improve on, notably the keyboard
Let's get something out of the way first, and then we can get into the review proper. Ready?
Better than the iPhone 4. That's my review in a nutshell: the basic version of the Google Nexus S is better than the basic version of Apple's iPhone 4, assuming both are on a data contract - and that you have a Google account, which is pretty much essential to use an Android phone. That's based on nearly two months' use of the Nexus S, enough to have prodded around all its little foibles and either gotten used to them or remained frustrated by them, and comparing it for some time in parallel to an iPhone 4 (generously loaned by 3) and the rest of the time to an iPod Touch.
Unlock: keys to the kingdom
Home screen: make yourself at..
Battery life: it's got some
Buttons: a standard layout at last?
Web display: functionally better
Phone: it's meant to do this too
Press-and-hold: the key to the context
Notifications: another improvement on iOS
Keyboard: Houston, we have a prrebjsl
Autocorrect: this may be a failing
Market: or car boot sale?
Video: too
Multitasking: all together
Voice input: perhaps
NFC: nifty, if...
Overall: the verdict
That isn't to say that there aren't areas where the iPhone 4 is better than the Nexus S; there are. For instance, camera picture quality, keyboard autocorrection, keyboard, unified mailbox view, inbuilt ability to forward contacts via MMS, trustability of the app store, stability of apps.
But for me, using the Nexus S as a phone and a connectivity device with a Google account, the flexibility of the Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" operating system puts it ahead of the iPhone 4.2.1 in a number of areas: notably, the ability to pin phone numbers to screens, contextual settings, webpage display for reading, notification system, and - noticeably - battery life.
Let's begin then with the basics. The Google Nexus S is available via the Carphone Warehouse, and is Google's second venture into "own-branded" handsets (the first being the Google Nexus One about a year ago). It's actually made by Samsung. It has a slightly curved shape which fits well to the face. My biggest gripe there is that it is featureless - no physical buttons on the front face - that I found it difficult on pulling it from a pocket to know which way up I was holding it.
Unlocking
One feature of Android that I've always liked is its unlock system: rather than a PIN, it lets you swipe a pattern covering at least six points on a 3x3 grid to unlock it. (This is the system used within Google itself.) This seems to me the best match of easy to remember by the owner, yet hard to crack by others; and you can do it with one hand if you need to. A PIN system (like that offered by Apple, and Android as an alternative) is typically only four numbers, and harder to do one-handed because you have to lift your thumb from the screen.
Home screen
You get five screens, each able to hold 16 (4x4) apps; the constant element in each is an icon menu which goes to the phone interface, the full apps folder, and the browser. By default the main home screen is empty - a perplexing choice, since you would at the very least want your contacts, email, text/MMS messaging and calendar apps there.
It's easy enough to add apps from the main folder, but forcing you to do it seems perverse. There's minimal, and then there's hands-off. This is the latter. Compare the iPhone, and Symbian, where the home screen comes pre-populated.
Battery life
Worth mentioning this early. It's excellent - I could easily get two days from a full charge with constant 3G data access and Wi-Fi use. (Other people have reported different experiences, but this was Nokia-class, ie very good.) It's better than the iPhone 4, which starts looking peaky after a day of heavy use.
Buttons
This being Google's design, the choice of button ordering on the bottom of the screen should be optimal, shouldn't it? (It's an OLED screen, and the buttons are virtual rather than physical.) The huge variation in Android phone button order has been rightly criticised, and Microsoft's decision to standardise it in Windows Phone 7 rightly praised. Here, it's Back / Contextual menu / Contextual search / Home. (On WP7 it's Back / Home / Search.) If Android phone manufacturers standardised around this layout, it would make it easier for Android users to switch phones without upsetting muscle memory. Then again, perhaps the manufacturers view that upset as a useful barrier.
The buttons did cause me problems sometimes. For example, in the official Twitter app, the "reply to this tweet" icon is on the bottom left of the screen - scant millimetres above the hard-coded back button, which takes you back to whatever you were just doing (which might or might not be reading Twitter). Many, many times I hit the "all back" rather than "reply" button - and remember that this was over the course of two months, so it wasn't a novice mistake. I simply could not adapt to it. My fingers never got smarter, and the screen certainly wasn't going to get larger.
Web display
The iPhone moved web display along dramatically through its use of the MobileSafari browser, which could give you an accurate rendition of a standard web page. Gingerbread goes one further, though: double-tap on a page and the text reflows so that you get the text, and any inset pictures (say that take half a column) are pushed aside. That makes it an excellent browser for reading the web; the typeface used is very legible.
As a phone
The phone app is neat enough, breaking it down into a straight phone interface, call log (showing incoming, outgoing and missed, but not subdivided), contacts and favourites. It's good enough, but only as good as Windows Phone 7, which I didn't think was optimal.
The function is actually done better on the iPhone, which shows you "All" and "Missed" calls, and also has a tab to connect directly to voicemail. (With visual voicemail, it would be even better.) But of all the major platforms, Nokia actually does this best, with the Symbian interface showing you incoming, outgoing and missed calls. (Get it while you can - only 150m left.)
What's best is the ability to take a specific phone number and pin it directly to a home screen - so if you have a number (your home, office, spouse etc) that you want to be able to call with a single touch, you can pick it from a full contacts entry (eg if there are three or four numbers for your spouse, you can pick one). That's really excellent functionality which you can't get on Windows Phone 7 or the iPhone.
Press-and-hold
To add one of those numbers to a home screen - and indeed to do a lot of things on Android - the essential action is "press and hold" (also known as the "long press") - either on an element such as a phone number or contact or URL. This brings up a contextual menu which adds all sorts of functionality - share a URL on Twiter, say, email link, and so on. Press-and-hold the Home button and you get the list of the eight most recently used active applications, and you can then switch by touching any of them.
"Press and hold" ("long press") is such a useful functionality that when I was using the iPhone I found myself holding down icons and names uselessly and wondering briefly why nothing was happening. If Apple is smart it will find a way to add this function to future iOS releases.
Yet - and here's the surprise - Google has apparently ruled out press-and-hold from future OS releases (it isn't in Honeycomb, the tablet OS; that has a dedicated multitasking button), apparently because it thinks that the functionality isn't discoverable enough - as in, people don't realise it's there. If that's correct, it's a surprise: it's a simple way of adding lots more functionality to a button and screen.
Notifications
Another thing that Gingerbread handles miles better than the iPhone: telling you when something has changed - email comes in, Twitter mentions, voicemail, whatever. The iPhone either throws up a dialogue that interrupts you (for example if a Wi-Fi network hoves into its view, or a calendar appointment comes due), or makes a noise.
On Gingerbread, by contrast, the top bar (where the phone and battery strength are always visible - are you listening, Windows Phone 7?) is also given over to "notifications" about Wi-Fi strength, phone diverts, Twitter mentions and messages, voicemails, downloads, installs and so on. You can then pull these down to examine them, and navigate straight to them from there, or clear them. You can also get a chime for texts.
Apparently Apple is overhauling notifications for an upcoming iOS release - not before time. Android runs over it on this one.
Keyboard
There's been a lot of excitement on some forums among users of earlier versions of Android about the "Gingerbread" keyboard (you can even download an independent developer's version for free from the Market).
Personally, after a long time of use and effort, I didn't like it. I found it difficult to be accurate over any length of time or at any meaningful speed. That's despite the fact that I used it every day for two months (a fact I keep emphasising because I know that otherwise people will say I haven't made the effort).
And it's also despite the fact that the keyboard is exactly the same size as the iPhone keyboard, which I've also used regularly (on an iPod Touch). In theory there shouldn't be any difference in typing on them, should there? But there is.
Autocorrect
I think the cause of the problem is down to Gingerbread's autocorrect. The Gingerbread system offers spelling corrections as you go along in a strip below the display area: what you've typed appears in white on the left, and the "best pick" word choice beside it in bold orange, and other choices appearing as you keep typing.
If you're mistyping and see the word you meant in that strip below, then you touch it and it's substituted. This does work. But often I found that because the strip in which the words appear is narrow, it's easy to hit a key instead, or something in the display area, either of which completely disrupts what you're doing and makes the problem worse.
An alternative correction system is to hit the space bar, which will again substitute the first pick; but the problem there is that the space bar is (again) scant millimetres from both the "context" and "search" buttons, so in mid-flow you can suddenly find yourself thrown off into picking a URL or a picture. That's confusing, but a natural consequence of the multiple functions being squeezed into a small space. I lost count of the number of times I swore at the keyboard as it put up that giant hurdle to productivity.
The autocorrecting algorithm isn't that good either. The reason why I can type better with the iPhone/iPod Touch keyboard is, i think, because it's better at working out what I'm (mis)typing.
Indeed, the keyboard interface remains the one - very significant - element that makes me wary of the Nexus S. The iPhone interface doesn't offer those additional contexts. Arguably, that's a defect in the iPhone, because you have to be more organised in how you collect data (say, if you want to tweet a URL or picture), but multitasking is available on either phone, so you can swap between apps, copy a URL and paste it in. I'd rather be able to type accurately.
At this point seasoned Android users will be saying "How stupid - you should just download a different keyboard from the Market!" (Swype was mentioned by some people, but it's not available on the Market, only from the site itself via beta.) Two thoughts on that: most people won't (just as - shock! - the vast majority of people won't root their phone) and second, this is meant to be Google's showcase phone and its showcase smartphone OS version. We're comparing defaults here. Swype may be very fine, but it's not installed. Yes, there are free keyboards on the Market which you can download and install. Pragmatically, though, defaults rule the world.
And: I did try Swiftkey. No difference, I'm afraid - the keyboard is the same size, which meant I kept making mistakes. My advice would be: try the keyboard carefully before buying.
Market
Which takes us logically to the Market. Like the iPhone App Store, there's living proof of Sturgeon's Law there, but without the reassurance that Apple offers that Google is standing behind it. I did download a number of apps - including one which adds the (to me essential, yet omitted from Gingerbread) capability to forward contact details by text message. (With most of the world still on featurephones, this is still a common task, Google.) Plus an app for taking notes. Yup, note-taking should be in the next Android version, Google.
The improvement to the Market by putting it onto the web and letting apps download there is a big step forward, but all the app stores now face a crucial problem. Unlike the web, they don't have reputation and linking. There is no PageRank algorithm. The difference between the Market and the App Store feels to me like the difference between a bazaar (or perhaps a car boot sale) and a bank. You can get fantastic stuff in a car boot sale; you can also get royally ripped off. And banks can get broken into. But on balance, your money is safer in the bank. This seems like a crucial difference; until that gap is closed, there can't be a really successful paid-for ecosystem revolving around the Market.
Take one example: Cineworld, the national cinema chain. There's an iPhone app from within which you can book and buy a ticket anywhere in the country. On the Market, there are two unofficial apps which will show you what's playing where. No book, no buy. Arguably Cineworld is the one that's missing out here, given the popularity of Android phones in the UK. These things are chicken-and-egg, though; what does it take to get big organisations like that to think of writing Android apps?
Yet possibly Google actually likes it that way. After all, ad-funded apps give it more chances to sell ads; it gets nothing from developers' payments.
Video
Everyone wants to know about video performance, as if we lived our lives watching video on our phones. It's good. YouTube plays well. I'm afraid I didn't try Farmville. So sue me.
Multitasking
The Nexus S handles this well (though apps seem to be suspended, rather than running concurrently). One annoyance is that various apps, including system apps, sometimes crash (or halt permanently). The phone itself did the same a couple of times, for no obvious reason, though never during a phone call.
Voice input
This is reckoned (by Google) to be its triumph: you can use voice input for all sorts of things, such as writing texts or searching. It even has a dedicated button on the keyboard. Is it good? It's serviceable (and needs a good data connection - it's not done locally on the phone), but in lots of cases you don't want to be mumbling to your phone. Voice is potentially the biggest step forward in smartphone control; the iPhone and Windows Phone 7 both offer it to varying extents.
NFC
The Nexus S includes Near-Field Communications capability, which could be useful if we ever get mobile payments worked out properly in this country. (They're coming on Visa cards, but their advent to phones is slower.) Useful, at some point.
Overall
Pros: excellent functionality in operating system; press-and-hold ("long press") adds contextual elements; very good integration with Google services; future-proofed if NFC becomes effective.
Cons: keyboard can be extremely frustrating; Market still lacks apps from many big organisations; lack of markings on phone makes it hard to figure out which way you've got it up.
Basically, Gingerbread is arguably the best smartphone operating system you can get at the moment - if you can live with the keyboard. (If we had a more subtle star system, I'd give it 9/10.)
You can get it SIM-free at Amazon for �480. Or at Carphone Warehouse and other outlets.
You can also compare alternative deals via Top10.com - around �25 per month gets you 500MB and a free phone which looks like the best at the moment, but of course caveat emptor.
Further reading/reviews: Engadget; TechRadar (4/5); TechCrunch; Pocket Lint (9/10); CNet UK (9/10).
Have you tried it? Have you compared it? Let us know.
Rating: 5/5
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/28/google-nexus-s-gingerbread-android-review
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