Ahh, the Nexus One, the gadget the interweb is all aflutter about. There have been countless reviews at this time but you won’t find the typical “former iPhone 3G-S user switching to Android-based Nexus One” review here, where in my opinion, they don’t “get it” from a developer or UI engineer’s perspective. If you want to read something like that head over to Gizmodo. The following post is not a review about the sleekness of the phone’s chassis or any comparisons to the iPhone (I think one is missing it entirely if they are trying to compare the Nexus One to iPhone, but that’s a separate blog post), no, the following review is what I think is good and bad about the Nexus One from a programmer’s perspective and a UI engineer’s perspective as I like to think of myself as both.
Disclaimer: I have had a G1 since October 2008 and have developed a few Android apps (none publicly released yet, but soon will be). The majority of my bias may come from the upgrade to the Android source (2.1 as of this writing) coupled with a number of hardware related upgrades.
Pros
- Snapdragon 1Ghz processer’s snappy-ness
- The orientation change’s (switching from landscape to portrait and vice versa) responsiveness
- The screen’s clarity and fidelity
- Five pages/screens of “home desktop” real estate
- Voice commands for nearly everything
- 5MP Camera with LED Flash
- Video recording in MPEG-4 quality
- Navigation mode with Street View
- Live Wallpapers
- Auto-adjusting display brightness
Cons
- Haptic response keys’ awkward experience
- No orientation change on home screen(s) plus a bug when attempting to do so
- Power button only means of “awaking” the device
- Gallery application interaction issues
- Unlock screen’s awkward “slide” gesture
- Text input in landscape mode’s poor experience
Programmer’s Perspective
By seeing such features as the Navigation and even the street views available in Google Maps, I have become motivated to start utilizing those APIs or consider using some of the additional features of the Android SDK that I did not consider before, mainly because the phone itself is fast enough at rendering something like Streetview in a rather seamless fashion. Seeing what Google has done with some of their own apps, coupled with the overall speed improvements between orientation changes inspires me no longer worry about programming against a poor experience. However, the speech-to-text feature, and its inclusion in nearly all of the input fields on the device, gave me glimpse into the future of Google’s approach to allowing that faster mobile processor to remain just that: fast.
The speech-to-text feature processes all its data in the cloud. This concept is not something that should be taken lightly. The processing power needed to handle something as complex as speech-to-text recognition would bring the 1Ghz Snapdragon chip to a crawl. However, Android, and more importantly Google is relying on this processing to take place elsewhere (the cloud) and instead rely on the data transfer (and the subsequent data networks) and ultimately the speed of the transfer to create a seamless and pleasant user experience.
The text-to-speech feature is not unique to the Nexus One, but its pervasiveness across input types is (so far). Furthermore, the front and back microphones (for improved noise cancellation) installed on the Nexus One shows a commitment of sorts toward the idea of “more speaking, less typing”. This is inspiring from a programmer’s perspective for if Google does in fact adapt this model for let’s say something like, potentially the managing, streaming, or recording of 3-D camera data, and they handle the intensive processing, but we simply receive back data, then the sky (or cloud) is the limit. The services provided by Google (or potentially other cloud-processing/SaaS vendors) would offload the heavy lifting for programmers so the programmers can focus on creating bleeding edge apps without worrying about the processor’s ability to crunch loads of data. This, from my perspective, is huge.
UI Engineer’s Perspective
Where to begin. The richness and clarity of the screen is enough to make any UI engineer anxious to create an app that simply cycles through RGB values. The AMOLED screen is now more like a canvas. This not only provides obvious benefits for the visual designer but can also pose a problem in regards to fragmentation across devices’ screen resolutions. I think we’ve dealt with issues like this before.
The new animations and simulated 3-D environments across many of the apps including the “Starwars” rollover effect for the Home screen lend to the notion of more animations coming available to the UI designer. The Android SDK comes packaged with some preset animations, but it is interesting to see how Google is using some of the newer animations/transitions on the Nexus One running Android 2.1.
Google has also paid attention to even subtle improvements at interactions with the UI at the application level. For example, the browser renders pages much faster and if the page is a standard site, not a mobile version, it shows the page in nearly in full with the ability of double-tapping to zoom in to the area you wish to see at a more granular level. The double-tap is way more intuitive than the earlier quasi-magnifying glass click then drag and release awkward interaction. Note, this interaction is an Android 2.0 version improvement, not unique to the Nexus One (Motorola Droid).
I would be remiss not discuss the newest bit of eye candy for the UI engineers: Live Wallpapers. The live, moving, seemingly breathing wallpapers that shipped with the Nexus One are definitely the first thing one notices when you turn on the Nexus One. Not only are the wallpapers animated and full of color, but that are fully interactive as well. For example, the “rippling water” live wallpaper not only has leaves falling onto the pool of water thus causing a rippling effect, but a tap anywhere on the desktop of the home screen not occupied by an app or widget shortcut triggers the same rippling effect as if you had actually touched the water. How practical and useful is something like this? Well not so much. What is important is the fact the the animation library Processing was used on a couple of the early prototypes (according to Romain Guy) and an API for developing live wallpapers is due out in the Android 2.1 SDK release. The potential for using Google’s version of a Processing-like class for other uses than actually making live wallpapers is really inspiring.
Final Analysis
Most of what the Nexus One offers as a mobile smart/superphone is not anything game-changing for the device itself or the mobile smart/superphone market. Yet, the Nexus One is not just another smartphone, but more of a showcase of what the Android platform is capable of doing. Given the right hardware and knowledge of the Android platform (and potentially C and/or Linux), vendors and developers can create Android-based devices with the ability of being game-changing or even create new categories for devices altogether. A touchscreen tablet for web browsing? E-readers? Live TV-streaming devices that fit in your pocket? All of these are possible. However, to simply compare the Nexus One next to an iPhone, Palm Pre, or any other slew of mobile smartphone devices, is not, in my opinion the correct comparison. Android is to mobile what Windows is to desktop PCs. The Nexus One just happens to have a telephony as a feature of this mobile device.
