Carroll’s Quest Our resident handset expert Michael Carroll, steadfastly refuses to use the iPhone. But his resistance is weakening. So we at mobileSQUARED have set him the challenge of uncovering a handset that rivals the iPhone. Here, he puts the Nexus One through its paces. In the 1970s, magician Paul Daniels (of the “that’s magic” catchphrase fame) frequently made his assistant the “lovely Debbie Mcgee” disappear live on stage in front of a captivated audience, before she returned in a box conveniently positioned elsewhere on the stage. To wit, Daniels would receive rapturous applause. Jump forward 35 years, and the two magicians (or should that be digital alchemists?) captivating their global audience, go by the names of Jobs and Schmidt. At this year’s Mobile World Congress it was the turn of the latter to receive all the plaudits. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt drew an enthusiastic round of applause from delegates in Barcelona last month simply by pulling a Nexus One out of his pocket – some might say “that’s magic”. But this here mobile handset expert can pull a trick of two of his own. And as I watched the delegates around me applaud the device being hailed by many sectors of the wireless industry as a worthy iPhone challenger, I tapped my shirt pocket where my Nexus One nestled. My initial impression was the device is easily a rival to the iPhone, because it is impossible to use. I was quickly assured by colleagues that my inability to use the phone was entirely my fault. When I complained the virtual QWERTY keyboard was difficult to use, they banged out 100 words per minute. Comments that the virtual keypad was clumsy and unresponsive were refuted with the input of 10-digit numbers complete with international dialling codes in a matter of seconds.
However, my UI troubles had the welcome side-effect of showing me how good the Nexus One’s cloud-based voice recognition application is. I turned to speech input after getting frustrated by my inability to enter a simple SMS, and it proved remarkably accurate given that I have a Scottish accent. My accent has always been the downfall of previous, embedded, voice recognition systems, which didn’t have as large a database of words to work with. Google’s system was probably accurate 50-60% of the time – a nightand-day shift from those older systems. The applications available offer a good mix of fun and practicality. I particularly enjoyed playing with Google Goggles, which scans a picture and automatically searches for relevant Web info, which is then displayed on the handset’s browser. Where the Nexus One falters is in its look and the Android operating system. Put bluntly, neither is sufficiently different from the iPhone. There’s nothing wrong with the Android operating system – in fact it did quite well, with very little lag when opening applications. But it could have been any phone – there was very little to set it apart from other devices. That generic quality could be one reason sales of the device have been slow since it launched in the US in January. The Nexus One is easily on-par with the iPhone, and will certainly make a good alternative to Apple’s device, however carriers might have difficulty persuading consumers of that. michael@mobilesquared.co.uk
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