The Nexus One is one of the finest Android phones ever made—and it still proves Google knew exactly what a “Google phone” should be long before Pixel existed.
Hardware: HTC build, Google priorities
The Nexus One looks like classic HTC because it is classic HTC. You’re getting a 3.7-inch AMOLED panel in a 119 x 59.8 x 11.5 mm body at 130 g, wrapped in a metallic front frame and rubberized back. It’s slim, dense, and feels more serious tool than fashion accessory.
There’s no design drama here, just small, deliberate choices. The asymmetric metal frame, soft brushed finish, and subdued colors make it look understated instead of shouty. The build quality is described as excellent, with the slim-but-heavy combo giving it a reassuring in-hand feel.
Controls are minimal. Below the screen you get four capacitive keys (Back, Menu, Home, Search) that occasionally misregister taps. Under those sits a single hardware control: a trackball that doubles as a camera shutter. It’s not strictly needed for navigation, but it’s precise for link selection and has that old-school “BlackBerry era” tactile charm.
The rest of the layout is predictable: long volume rocker on the left, nothing on the right, 3.5mm headphone jack and Power/Lock up top, microUSB and dock pins at the bottom. On the back you get a 5MP camera, LED flash, and small loudspeaker. Under the cover lives a 1400 mAh battery and a microSD slot you can’t hot-swap because it’s blocked by the battery.
The in-box kit is actually decent: USB charger, microUSB cable, 4GB microSD card, one-piece wired headset with controls, and a pouch. The much-teased Desktop Dock is sold separately.
Display and performance: fast phone, flawed screen
On paper, the 3.7-inch AMOLED is a highlight. Deep blacks, vibrant colors, and excellent contrast indoors make it exactly what early Android nerds wanted. It’s capacitive and very sensitive to light touches, and with WVGA resolution it looks clean enough for its era.
Then the sun comes out and it falls apart. The panel is highly reflective, lacks an oleophobic coating, and uses weaker backlighting than TFT rivals. Result: poor sunlight legibility that makes outdoor use a chore. Smudging is a problem too, and fingerprints are hard to wipe once they’ve settled in.
Where the Nexus One does deliver is speed. It’s the first Snapdragon-powered Android phone in this review set, running a 1 GHz Snapdragon CPU with Android 2.1. The OS “runs like a charm,” with rare lag even with added eye-candy like 3D scroll effects and live wallpapers. If there’s a bottleneck to the UX, it’s the occasionally flaky capacitive keys, not the SoC.
Battery is a 1400 mAh unit quoted at up to 10 hours of 2G talk time or 7 hours on 3G, with standby up to 290 hours (2G) and 250 hours (3G). For the thickness, that capacity is described as surprisingly large—though you’re trading any hot-swap flexibility for it because of that buried microSD slot.
Android 2.1: small tweaks, smarter home
Android 2.1 doesn’t completely redesign the OS, but it pushes the platform in more polished directions. The homescreen grows to five panes (HTC’s Desire goes further with seven), and the classic sliding app drawer is replaced with a virtual launcher button. The app grid now animates in with a 3D “roller” effect as you scroll.
Live wallpapers are one of the few truly new, visible features. They react to touch or music with effects ranging from water ripples to visual meters. They look cool but burn roughly 5% more battery, so anyone optimizing endurance will probably turn them off.
Widgets and folders get more useful. Power Control finally centralizes toggles like Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth, and brightness. Live folders auto-populate content—contacts, Facebook phonebook, Bluetooth received files—and can be used for quirky tricks like auto-updated contact lists or RSS-style lists.
Notifications remain a core Android strength. The drop-down shade shows all recent events with context-aware actions and can be accessed from anywhere without yanking you out of your current app. A long-press on Home still brings up a six-app task switcher, though some of those apps may be hibernated.
Text input improves via a better keyboard layout, multi-touch-aware typing, and a smarter dictionary that learns from usage and contact names. In portrait the keyboard is cramped; in landscape it becomes genuinely usable for long messages. If you’re obsessed with typing speed, though, the Milestone’s hardware QWERTY is still the benchmark here.
Messaging and email now support multiple accounts, including Exchange (if the OEM enables it), a combined inbox, SMS/MMS search, and a quick-contact interface where you tap a photo to call, text, or email. You can also cap thread lengths so older messages autodelete.
The missing piece: smart dialing and voice dialing from the dialer. Those are still absent, which is a weird gap given how mature the rest of the communication stack feels.
Camera, media, and browser: progress with caveats
The 5MP camera with LED flash adds long-overdue features to Android’s camera stack: flash support, digital zoom, scene modes, white balance, color effects, and macro focus. That list sounds basic by modern standards, but older Android builds didn’t even support flash properly without hacky workarounds.
The camera UI hides most settings in a side tray, leaving only mode toggle, shutter, and gallery shortcut on screen. It’s clean but slightly inefficient; with so few options, some should really be direct toggles.
Image quality is described as average. Detail is there, but contrast is low and a visible pinkish spot appears in the center of the frame, especially obvious in synthetic tests. Video tops out at D1 (720 x 480) at 30 fps saved as 3GP, which means compression artifacts and again underwhelming contrast, especially on larger screens.
Media playback is a mixed bag. The gallery is visually slick, with 3D stacks for albums, smooth transitions, swipe navigation, and pinch-to-zoom. But it only displays downsized images, so you can’t actually check 100% detail on-device. To make matters worse, compression in the gallery pipeline introduces banding and color patches, fueling those old 65K-color rumors.
On the positive side, Android 2.1 finally supports multiple file selection and Bluetooth transfers directly from the gallery—two seemingly basic features that were oddly missing before.
The built-in video player is barebones and codec support is limited: no DivX or XviD, and H.264 MP4 is your best bet. If you’re willing to convert content, the AMOLED screen is genuinely nice for indoor watching, but this isn’t a media powerhouse.
The music player is unchanged and still minimal. It can browse by artist, album, track, or playlist, offers quick search, and has a neat gesture: long-press any song to search for it on YouTube or via Google. However, there’s no EQ, no advanced views, and no visual flair. Audio output quality, on the other hand, is excellent, with clean frequency response and numbers comparable to high-end competitors like the iPhone 3GS.
The browser is where the Nexus One feels properly “Google Phone.” Based on the latest Android browser of its time, it’s fast, minimal, and functional. The UI gives you just an address bar and zoom buttons that auto-hide; double-tap and pinch-to-zoom are supported, and pages reflow text after zoom to fit the width.
Tabs, bookmarks with thumbnails, “most visited” lists, and in-page find are all there. Performance is strong given the hardware and OS. The sore spot is Flash: no support out of the box, despite the hardware clearly being capable and HTC’s Desire variant running Flash with a different ROM.
A dedicated YouTube app softens the blow, but the wider Flash ecosystem is still missing. Quickoffice (viewer only) covers document reading from Gmail attachments, and the calendar offers agenda, day, week, and month views with quick event creation and alarms.
GPS, navigation, and the early app ecosystem
GPS with A‑GPS gets a lock in reasonable time, and of course Google Maps is preloaded. Turn-by-turn voice navigation is restricted to the US, but even without it you get route plotting and live location on the map. Street View with digital compass support remains one of the most impressive experiences: you can virtually “look around” a location in 360 degrees.
For actual navigation outside the US or without relying on Maps Navigation, the Android Market already has options. Wisepilot offers voice guidance but streams data and needs a license, making it questionable for roaming. AndNav! 2, using OpenStreetMap, stands out with the ability to preload map tiles—either just for your route or for a bigger area. It’s ad-supported and can save data to microSD, so offline-ish navigation is possible if you plan ahead.
The Market itself feels surprisingly mature. Apps are split into Apps and Games tabs, plus a Downloads tab for your history. Each listing includes ratings, description, screenshots, and user comments. Before installing, the system shows what permissions an app wants—storage, location, phone access—which makes privacy red flags visible before you tap Install.
Discovery is simple: type “navigation,” sort by rating and reviews, and you’re set. The catalog skews heavily toward free software, more so than competing platforms at the time, and ranges from trivial utilities (flashlight apps) to essential tools (file managers, nav apps, and more).
Verdict: a reference Android, with familiar flaws
The Nexus One lands as a very clear statement of what Google thought Android hardware should be: fast, clean, and developer-forward rather than feature-stuffed and skinned. Snapdragon plus Android 2.1 delivers excellent performance, the build quality is genuinely high, and the browser, GPS stack, notification system, and audio output hold up impressively.
It also has real weaknesses. The AMOLED panel is basically unusable in bright sun. The capacitive keys are inconsistent. The camera hardware is undermined by average image processing and weak video encoding. Multimedia support is basic, and there’s no smart dialing.
On the ecosystem side, early sales underperformed expectations—blamed more on Google’s marketing and distribution strategy than the hardware itself. And even within this snapshot of the market, the Nexus One is already flanked by serious alternatives: the hardware-twin HTC Desire (with Sense UI and Flash), Motorola’s Milestone for QWERTY fans, Sony Ericsson’s XPERIA X10 for camera and UI extras, and the more affordable HTC Legend.
Still, the review’s conclusion is unambiguous: if you want a top-tier Android in this era, the Nexus One is arguably the best all-round choice. It doesn’t obliterate its siblings, but as a reference device for how Android should feel—fast, clean, and focused—it hits much more often than it misses.
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