My Nexus One Android experience, Day by day

Ok, my phone has arrived! It is awesome and beautiful! Not as beautiful as my wife and daughter, but enough to keep the both of them on their toes and best behavior.

So, Google gives you 14 days to try out the phone (30 if you live in California) and if you don't like it, you can return it for nothing more than the restocking fee of $45. Not too bad. I figure I've spent more than that seeing horrible bands playing while drinking awful beer, 2 weeks with a cool device is a reasonable $45 spend. My task is to see what happens in those 14 days. Will I keep it? Will I get rid of it? We shall see

I'm not going to post pics of unboxing it because I made a mess and it's really not something unique to the internet, so I'll just link you to someone else who has done that part for me.

This should do, thanks Ars Technica, much better than I would have done (not could have done):

Ars Technica - Nexus One Photo Gallery

My first impressions: Ooooh. Sleek. Sexy. This thing is nice, doesn't weight too much, and I love the way it feels. Conversely, the iPhone, while also sleek, is a fingerprint and grease magnet. I'm Italian, so the chances of my holding on to the iPhone without a case when I remove it from my pocket has been proven by scientists to be somewhere around the 18% mark. For such a pricey phone, I don't like my odds.

With the Nexus? It's somewhere around 96%. Big difference.

Turning it on was fun, I got a nice little multicolored X on the screen and then it started going all crazy like it was being torn apart molecule by molecule. Neat effect. Boot screens have come a long way since the 9 minute hourglass flips of the ol' Blackberries. Speaking of, have those changed? Do you still have to reboot Blackberries to do any damn thing worthwhile?

I hate Blackberry, btw, the Pearl should have been shot and killed before it ever left the warehouse. Ugh. Worst phone I've ever owned. It was like someone said "here, I'm going to give you this jar filled with hope." But when you finally opened up the jar after getting home, it was just a picture of hope and boy do you feel stupid. And since the picture was taken with the Pearl, it was grainy as hell and mostly green tinged.

After playing around with the phone for a few hours here's my initial usage impressions:

• Oh notifications how I've missed you. I forgot how a real phone handles them. For those of you who have only used an iPhone, I assure you that really lame popups that interrupt what you're doing, aren't stored, and are seen in reverse chronological order (you see the most recent ones first) is NOT a good way to do things. Other phones have been doing them better since probably 1991 when phones were carried around in briefcases. For some reason the iPhone wants you to have an empty task bar at the top. Android doesn't - it's used to show you the message and have an icon showing you how many you have. Smart. This reason alone will make going back to the iPhone difficult
• The media player is so-so, but it has the one feature I've been missing from iPods since forever: Current artist song choices. Meaning, if I'm listening to Mr Bungle and I want to hear more songs from Mr Bungle, I can touch and hold on Mr Bungle and an option to either buy songs or search my device for songs by that artist are the options. Pick the search and I can see all the songs from them. Awesome! This also works for the album and probably the song, though I'm not sure why you'd search a song you already have.
  
• Also, unlike the iPhone, when my phone is rotated on its "side" (meaning, barely tilted) like it often is in the car, playback options are not rendered useless. The iPhone gives you their "Magical, awesome, innovative" cover flow. What this really means that instead of being able to actually do anything, you have to see covers of albums. Skip a song? No, you have to rotate to portrait view first, wait for the lame animation to catch up, then skip your song. Yeah Apple, that's certainly easier than sticking a skip button in the 40% of the screen that has nothing on it.
• Oooh, live wallpapers are mesmerizing. And probably draining the battery. Who cares.
  
• I created a playlist in Linux and moved it over to my phone in seconds. No more 2 hour syncs! Yeah I had to build a new playlist, but who cares, I'm finally Linux native and it was quick as any media transfer could be.
• Editing text is awesome. You can tap to where you want to edit, or there's the trackball. I know people have been dogging the trackball, but it's hardly used, so I don't think it's going to die as quickly as someone who has to use it 2700 times a day like a Blackberry. But you can use the trackball to scroll over to the letters and edit them. Compare this to the iPhone where you had to tap and hold, get that stupid magnifying glass, then move over to what you wanted to edit. God forbid you had something near the edge of the screen, you might as well just leave it misspelled. You're not changing it. Now you can, all thanks to the wonderful, magical power of the trackball (See Jobs, other 10-year old features can be magical too).
• Apps. They're there, and they're not all over the place with no possible way to organize them. The Android has some "Home Screens" or some junk where you can put the app icons you want to use. Kind of like how Apple has app pages, but in this one you only drag over the ones you want. The long list is also available, which would be similar to accessing your 11 pages of iPhone apps, but it scrolls without breaking up (unlike page swipes) AND they're simply in alphabetical order. The iPhone has them inserted in order of download.. unless you've deleted an app and there's a space left like somewhere on page 4 in the middle, then your app would be downloaded there. Good luck finding it. So this home screen is nice. I have about 5 apps there that I've been using, I can add more later. Other screens have a couple other ones like Gmail or Phone
• Widgets! Such a dumb word, but they work. On my second page from home I had, by default, a widget that shows the current weather and some news. If I go one page the other way I have a widget that was there that lets you turn the following on or off: Wifi, Bluetooth, Location, Syncing, and then there's 3 brightness levels (0, 50, 100). Wow, wanna take a clue from this, Apple? I mean, as fun as it is to do 8 taps just to turn off wi-fi, and another 8 to turn it back on at home, 1 swipe and 1 tap IS quite preferable ya know.
• Voice recognition. I think it's still in beta or something but I did do a few texts with only my voice. This may come in handy so I can get something across while driving but not type it in and crash head-on into school buses again.

So far so good. After one day with it we'll see if this holds up. Already there's features I would sadly miss if I went back to the land of iPhone.