iPhone vs. Nexus One

Having been an iPhone user for a couple of years now, my acquisition of a Nexus One at the GDC conference gave me an excellent opportunity to compare the latest Apple and Google offerings in the mobile space. I put my SIM card into the Nexus One and used that device exclusively for a few days to get a feel for the experience it delivers.

What I Liked

1. The OLED screen on the Nexus One is really nice. The higher resolution is noticeable and the brightness and color look great.
2. I liked the way the on-screen keyboard gives you several suggested "opt-in" auto-completions as you type. They are arranged horizontally just above the keyboard and I found I was using them quite a bit. This feels much nicer than the iPhone's auto-complete where one is constantly trying to "opt-out" of suggestions by hitting a microscopic 'x' next to the word.
3. The voice recognition seems to work pretty well. Next to many text input fields is a button with a microphone icon which, when pressed, allows you to say what you want it to type. I did have a few egg freckles incidents, but I was overall impressed with the level of accuracy without having to train the device.
4. The camera on the Nexus One is much higher resolution and even has a little LED flash on it. I didn't find the flash to be super effective, but its inclusion is a welcome one.
5. The Android marketplace, while not having the sheer number of apps the iTunes App Store has, definitely seems well done. We'll see if not having Apple's level of control over app quality is a good or bad thing for Android. I'll view it as a good thing for now, although it didn't give me a warm fuzzy to see so many "Test" and "Hello World" apps in the list. On the other hand, I was exicted to be able to download several emulators (Commodore 64, Nintendo, etc.).

What I Didn't Like

1. UPDATE (3/17/10): While I have the Nexus One's screen listed as a positive, that applies to indoors only. You can hardly see the screen at all in direct sunlight. And while we're on the subject of the screen quality, going back to using the iPhone again made me realize how well Apple's touchscreen works. Even though it's display resolution is less, it seems to register touches way more accurately than the Nexus One does. I never really appreciated this until I used another touch device for a few days. We won't even get into Android 2.1's buggy multi-touch implementation which flat-out forced me to abort porting my simplest iPhone app.
2. As much as people whine and complain that the iPhone doesn't have multi-tasking, I now appreciate the virtues of only a single app running at a given time. For those unaware, the iPhone forces an application to quite before returning to the home screen whereas Android allows the app to continue running in the background. While the backgrounding approach certainly has some advantages, it consumes memory and I found on more than once occasion the phone warning me that memory was low. I ultimately downloaded a free "task killer" app so that I could manage what was running. The whole thing, while certainly being geek-friendly, was definitely not end-user friendly. I can't imagine trying to explain killing background processes to my parents for example. So while I acknowledge that background tasks are useful, Android's implementation of managing them leaves much to be desired.
3. I had a couple of bizarre incidents where the Android keyboard would not register the correct keys as I typed on the on-screen keyboard. It was almost like the touchscreen got out of calibration. A reboot of the phone seemed to solve the issue, but nasty bugs like that diminish the "polish" of the device.
4. I really missed the physical silence switch on the iPhone. Android does it from the touchscreen.
5. Android transitions didn't feel particularly smooth and the device on the whole just didn't feel as responsive as the iPhone. This is ironic given that the Nexus One has a much faster processor than the iPhone 3GS.

Conclusion

Android definitely seems to be the strongest competitor to iPhone yet. Certain essential tasks such as browsing and e-mail seem to be very similar between the two. However, the iPhone still has Apple's incredible polish throughout all aspects of the UI experience -- it's really hard to say what the Android experience would feel like without the biases that the iPhone has created. In some ways the Android feels like a step forward and in others a step backwards; I couldn't help but be reminded of my days using Windows Mobile 6 as I used Android.

I'm definitely excited to see Google continue to make improvements to Android and further competition that will benefit everyone in the mobile space.