In the past few days I was using the Nexus One as my only cell phone. My goal was to really give it a honest shot and see if it’s good enough to throw away my iPhone. The results are mixed. Although the Nexus definitely has some advantages over the iPhone, it is still not an iPhone killer, and I can even say it is very far from being one.

Here is a short review of the advantages and disadvantages of the Nexus One over the iPhone:

Advantages

• The Nexus one screen is simply beautiful. With high resolution, vivid colors and a bigger screen real estate, everything simply looks gorgeous on it. The addition of the live wall papers really give it a nice touch.
• It’s no surprise to say that integration with Google services works much better on the Nexus. The Gmail app gives you the same gmail experience you get on the web just on the phone. The Maps works great, voice activation is much better and the Google Translate app can become a killer one for travelers.
• Just when you have multi tasking you start to understand how much you needed it. The ability to use Spotify (or any other music service) and still be able to use the phone for everything else is a bliss. It really makes the Nexus a great music device that already bitten on my use of the Zune HD.
• The Nexus is very fast. Especially when you compare it to the older iPhone models. You click on an app and it just starts.

Disadvantages

• Ironically the easiest way to explain the biggest disadvantage of the Nexus is to compare it to Windows VS Mac. The Android operating system is like Windows (and more like WIn 95 and not Win 7). It’s an operating system that you really need to learn how to use. Many capabilities are hidden from you and every app behave in a different way. I had to spend quite a few hours until I really felt that I mastered it. On the other hand, the iPhone is a device that you take and in about one minute you know how to operate and use almost every application on it. I might enjoy the Nexus now, but I would never buy it to my parents or my younger brothers.
• The statistics shows that the number of apps on the Android marketplace are catching up with the number of apps on the Apple App Store, but these are just numbers – no one measures quality. As it is easier to write an Android app than an iPhone one (you write in the popular language Java and not the more obscure Objective C) there are tons of junk on the Android marketplace. Yes, there is tons of junk also on the Ap Store, but compare the quality of the top 50 applications in each one and you will immediately see the difference. It seems also that some companies simply created the Android version of their iPhone app just in order to say they have one. The Facebook app for example is years behind its iPhone counterpart.
• Let me start and say that in general i hate iTunes. That said, for the first time I really understood the need for it. Nexus One does not have any easy way to synch your photos or music library. The only way to upload them to your phone is by copy files to the phone card. NO way to really synch changes between your computer and your device.

So what is the final conclusion?
Although I really enjoy the Nexus One and I might keep using it more, it still lags behind the iPhone and can’t really compete with it. The only good news for Google are that most of the problems with the Nexus are related to the Android operating system and not the hardware. This means that newer versions can be pushed to existing customers without requiring them to purchase new phones.