Yesterday I used an Android phone for the first time. It was a Nexus One. I decided after being heckled for using a Samsung flip phone (long story, but thanks @adriarichards...) that I should try a smartphone again. I was able to borrow one for the day. These are some of my thoughts and critiques of the operating system’s UX from the perspective of a brand new, iPhone-savvy user. Keep in mind I used the phone for all of 10 hours, so by no means did I tap into the more advanced features. Thank the iPad for this awful picture.

Setting up my Google account

It started off simple enough- I synced my personal Google account to the phone under “account settings” and then set my synchronization preferences so it would import my contacts. I would have preferred some dialogue box that said “your contacts are being synced, this will take a moment”. Instead I just got a spinning wheel which would go on and off, and I kept going to check if my contacts were there but they weren’t. Eventually they started to come in a few at a time, but I am surprised at how this wasn’t made more transparent. Granted, I was in a rush to call someone and needed their number to appear in contacts ASAP, but still, this could have been made more obvious.

An empty home screen to start

The phone didn’t have any apps on the home screen to start and it asked me to drag apps to my home screen. The focus on customization is cool, but I was annoyed I had to go look for “camera”, “contacts” and especially “messaging.” This is my phone and I am going to want to customize it... but I just got it! At least set something up for me out of the box. I wanted these features to be one touch away. That being said it was super easy to drag the apps I wanted to my home screen.

Using the camera

I played around with the Nexus One camera just a bit and it seems to work fine. Coming from an iPhone 3Gs and a flip phone, the flash addition was cool. However it did seem to take quite awhile for the picture to actually take after pressing the shutter button. This would cause me to press the shutter multiple times in attempt to take a single photo. I think there should be more visual feedback when the photo istaken, like the iPhone does with the closing of the aperture, which I think is genius... unless it’s frozen on that image -_-

Phone-wide back navigation

The Nexus One has functional buttons along the bottom, including a “back” button. As I was playing around, I realized the back arrow button is not restricted to a single app; instead it will go from one app to another. This sort of “phone-wide” navigation method was useful and made the OS experience feel more like a desktop than the sandboxed apps of the iPhone. It was like alt-tabbing on a single click.

Connectivity issues

Unfortunately I was having some real connectivity issues when going inside buildings. I can’t say for sure what was causing this, but it certainly doesn’t cause me to look favorably on the new phone or OS when the first day I’m using it I get data connectivity problems. I was walking around San Francisco trying to get a map to load so I could find an address, but I kept getting the error “no connection to data network.” I tried turning on and off airplane mode, something I always did with the iPhone, but this did not seem to have any effect. After 8 minutes of walking around the financial district it all of a sudden started working. Blargh.

So Becky, iPhone or Android?

You know I actually really started to like the design of the Nexus One. It is super slim, it feels smooth... something about it really works for me. The screen is nice and big, and by the end of the day I was appreciative of this phone-wide back button. Give me another week with the phone and we’ll see what I think of the deeper OS features.

To be honest, I can’t say which I would prefer at the moment. My brother has the iPhone 4s, my mother a Samsung Galaxy, and I am back on the flip phone (stop laughing). But I am planning on getting a smartphone again very soon. The T9 texting thing just ain’t cutting it.