Google's
Nexus One Phone is officially out and thankfully it's not exclusively on the
iPhone-user-hated AT&T Network (cheers!). It's already drawing a lot of reviews, some comparing it to the iPhone, others to Droid, or just by itself.
The
Nexus One Phone's on the T-Mobile Network, and the best news is that existing T-Mobile customers like me are eligible for an upgrade to what I will now call "The G-phone". Verizon mobile users will have to wait until spring of this year for service activation.
There are a slew of reviews of the videoblogger-ready Google Phone by everyone except
Iron Man 2's Robert Downey, Jr, as "Tony Stark".
TechCrunch founder
Michael Arrington explains that he's (like Fred Wilson) had a G-Phone since mid-December and has used it as his primary mobile phone. That's quite a switch for Arrington, who could be seen using an iPhone as his primary mobile device for some time before the introduction of the G-Phone.
Arrington says that while the G-Phone looks like the iPhone, it's better "in most ways" and is the fastest and "most elegant smartphone" available to date. Michael's main reason is the Google Voice provision in the G-Phone. With it,
Google Voice users can use their number and use it to make outbound calls and messages. And the phone comes with something called Google Voice Keyboard.
Google Voice Keyboard is such that according to Michael Arrington, you can talk into the phone and it converts your speech to text. He says it's "90 percent accurate".
Engadget is less excited about the G-Phone, stating "it's not in any way the Earth-shattering, paradigm-skewing device the media and community cheerleaders have built it up to be" and in some cases prefers Droid over it. Yikes. But in reading Engadget's review, it seems as if authors Joshua Topolsky and Chris Ziegler were so, well, nit-picky, that they left themselves without a way to escape with anything other than a somewhat negative assessment.
The New York Times' David Pogue, channeling Engadget,
writes that "the Google news this week is not quite as earth-shaking as Google seems to think it is".
Interesting.
Sometimes this is done as a way to achieve what the writer feels is a certain element of "cool" but the approach has grown tired of late. It's OK to be genuinely excited, guys.
A lot of video about the Google Nexus Phone
The Google Nexus Phone is already the subject of a slew of videos, some of which are below:
Official Google Video:
MacWorld:
Even kids
get into the act:
Stay tuned!
