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I’ve been reading a lot of reviews around the web about the Nexus One, a lot of them disparaging it for not being the iPhone, and I felt that it was time that I, as a devout Nexus One user, finally speak up and write a review of my Nexus One.  I won’t cover a lot of the more obvious things that have been debated to death, but instead I’ll try to focus on the things that I think make the Nexus One/Android really worth using.  I know this is off-topic for this blog, so if you don’t care, feel free to skip this one— I promise I’ll be back to posting more jams soon— otherwise, read on!

First off is, of course, multitasking.  It’s funny for me to read reviews of Android from Apple fanboys where they try to dismiss multitasking.  They usually do a little bit of handwaving and say things like, “I don’t need to be able to update my todo list and check my email at the same time,” or make some excuse about how Apple hasn’t done multitasking because nobody’s figured out how to do the UI for it properly.  I’m sorry, but these are all just sad excuses— multitasking is completely awesome on the Nexus One and probably the one feature that would preclude me from going back to using an iPhone.

It’s not even so much the fact that I need to be able to use multiple apps that the same time— sure, it’s sometimes nice to be able to quickly hop between two apps by just holding down the home button— but the fact that apps can run in the background.  As I sit here writing this, my Nexus One is updating my RSS/Google Reader feeds, checking for new podcasts, looking for updates on multiple Twitter accounts, seeing if I’ve marked anything new in Read It Later, etc…  The fact that the iPhone can’t do this means that it is, in my book, at a severe disadvantage.

Consider, for example, Read It Later.  One of the most popular apps on the iPhone is Instapaper and I’m sure it’s quite nice.  Android has a similar app, called Paperdroid, and I’m completely in love with it.  Paperdroid syncs with Google Reader (starred items) and Read It Later.  This means that I can be on my desktop at work or on my laptop at home browsing the web, find an article that I like but don’t have time for right now, and simply hit the “Read It Later” button in my browser toolbar.  That’s it— the article is now wirelessly synced to my phone. On the iPhone, I’d have to take out my phone, open up the app, wait for it to sync and then I’d be OK.  Not exactly an elegant user experience.

This makes the Nexus One leaps and bounds better than the iPhone in my book.  I live in New York City and I take the Subway to commute to work.  When I am standing on the platform in the morning with no service, I can still take out my phone and check out the latest items on Twitter, Read It Later, Google Reader, etc. because my phone had background processes running that synced the items from the web and fetched offline copies of the articles.  I can then read them, annotate them, etc. while riding the train and put the phone back in my pocket— by the time I get to work, the updates will have probably already been pushed from my phone to the web without any interaction necessary from me.

Another area where Android excels, obviously, is the fact that the OS is open. This may seem like not a huge deal on the surface, but it’s already starting to bear fruit and I can only imagine it’ll get better in the future.

Take, for example, the use case of Swype, a keyboard alternative developed by one of the guys responsible for T9. It’s an incredibly useful keyboard and in order to use it, all I have to do is download the .apk from a website and install it.  The iPhone won’t even let you install third-party software without voiding your warranty, much less allow you to download an app off the web and use it to replace the virtual keyboard.  Even nicer, this pluggable keyboard is supported at the OS level and it’s trivial to switch back and forth between it and the Android native keyboard.  The settings for Swype are even integrated into the Keyboard section of the OS settings menu.

Another key point for me is the fact that this phone is truly cloud-based.  When you get the phone, it asks you to sign in to your Google Account.  Once you do that, you’re pretty much good to go.  If you use Google products, your email, contacts, calendars, etc. are all wirelessly synced.  If you have Google Voice, it’s seamlessly integrated.  Listen, the podcast app, runs on the phone and manages your subscriptions/downloads without ever having to touch a computer.

Since I bought my phone, I’ve only plugged it into a computer to transfer files once, and that was when I wanted to put four movies on my SD card before a long flight.

Speaking of SD cards, the Nexus One has one.  It ships with 4GB and it’s expandable.  More importantly, it just shows up as a removable USB drive when you plug your phone into your computer.  If you want to copy files to or from it, it’s a no-brainer.  You don’t have to deal with iTunes or anything ridiculous like that just to put a file on your phone or get one off of it.

Another amazing feature of the phone is its voice integration. At first, I was skeptical of this and didn’t even bother to try it out, but now I absolutely love it. You hold down the search button on the home screen and say “call john doe” and their phone will be ringing in a few seconds.  Say “directions to taco bell” and it’ll figure out your location using GPS, open up Maps, do a search for the nearest Taco Bell and give you directions there, all without having to type anything.

In addition to this, the voice recognition actually works incredibly well for text input.  Anywhere that you can enter text with the keyboard, you can also just hit the little microphone button, speak what you want to say, and it’ll input it into the form as if you typed it.  It works very well and, since it’s done in the cloud, I can only imagine that it’ll get better.

Anyway, as I said before, this is off-topic for this blog and getting a bit long-winded, but I just wanted to throw this out there.  Overall, I’m totally in love with the Nexus One and I’d recommend it to anybody— I’ve already talked two of my roommates into getting one, for example.