Nexus S Review

I'm a lifelong iPhone user -- well obviously not lifelong but it certainly feels that way. Time has a funny way of contracting; to me 2002 feels like a lifetime ago. When I paid $600 for the original iPhone in 2007 (out of pure envy after holding Ben Maldonado's and Erik Hick's new iPhone), I was upgrading from a trusty Samsung E105 flip phone.

I had the original iPhone, the iPhone 3GS, and the currently use the iPhone 4. This year Google gave every employee a brand new Nexus S (or Google TV, up to you), something they've done in the past with the Nexus One but I wasn't at Google at that time. Here's my impression of it.

First of all, the screen. I've always been so curious about OLED displays (there was a time a few years back when the only consumer product that had one was a Kodak digital camera not even sold in the U.S.). It always seemed to me that, emissive display technology is obviously superior to LCD. I mean look at the gold standard for color and contrast, the venerable CRT tube. That's emissive. It's not a technology that filters white light, it's a technology that emits colored light.

So the screen on this thing, I have to say, coming from the Retina Display it just looks awful. It looks like a checkerboard. I'm not talking about pixelization, that would be fine. It has gaps between the pixels that make everything look all bitmappy. I believe this has to do with the sub-pixel layout but I'm not sure. In these OLED displays they have, instead of R-G-B, r-G-b-G. I don't like it.

Mind you I hate to be negative about a Google product considering that a) I work there and b) Google has a slew of products I know and love. Gmail, Maps, Google App Engine (the Python flavor). But man, the checkerboard effect along with the colors being all weird. The color looks cloudy and distant as if you're looking through thick cataracts. Perhaps it's just "different" and I need to adjust to it. Like when OS X first came out, people coming from Windows complained that the fonts looked all blurry. In early versions of OS X they were kind of blurry but then Apple tightened up their font rendering algorithms and now, if you're demo'ing a web-based product (at Google or anywhere else) you universally use an OS X browser almost solely because the fonts looks so much better.

So anyway, regarding the screen, I'm disappointed. Maybe a more fair comparison would be against the iPhone 3GS display, because the iPhone 4 introduced IPS (in-plane switching) which is truly and completely kick-ass. If you don't know what IPS is all you need to know is that the colors don't get all weird and inverted when looking at an angle. It looks strong and pure at any angle, like a high-end LCD monitor.

I don't have cellular service for this Nexus S so I connected to wi-fi and fired up Google Maps. Again with the disappointment. Put your finger down on the map and drag it around. Chunky, chunky panning. Where my iPhone is smooth as butter panning around a map (I'd estimate at least 30 FPS), I feel like it's about 5 FPS on my Nexus S. It's not laggy, it's just rough.

Fortunately I did find one thing about the Android experience that puts the iPhone to shame. Text completion. On the iPhone when you're typing a word you get one pathetic suggestion (that's usually wrong) and to kill it you have to click this tiny little X. And typically it auto-completes the wrong word right as you hit send. It's like a useless toy. It reminds me of classic OS X, when OS X first came out everyone panned the look and feel as being too cartoon-y with its bright blue plastic-looking buttons and prominent pinstripes. That's what iPhone's auto-complete is, a relic of a first iteration that hasn't received an update.

The Nexus S on the other hand, provides a list of words that you can opt-in to as you type. It's nice.

So overall, since I've only spent less than an hour with Android I can't give it a comprehensive review (nor can I compare this 2.3 Gingerbread to previous versions), but I can say that there's absolutely no way this phone compels me to switch to the Nexus S or to Android in general as my primary smart phone. ✜