Pros: First phone with Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" OS. Elegant design. Fast UI. Only U.S. phone with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.
Cons: Mediocre voice performance. Multimedia performance behind class leaders. No HSPA+. Not many NFC applications.
Bottom Line:The Google Nexus S for T-Mobile promises frequent Android updates, but average consumers can find even-better high-end smartphones.
The Nexus S for T-Mobile is a cell phone for developers, designed by Google and Samsung to always have the newest, freshest version of Google's Android cell phone OS. It's a decent high-end phone to be sure, but there are better buys out there if you aren't enticed by Google's promise of being the first on the block to get software upgrades.
There are a lot of people out there who think "Nexus" means "absolutely cutting edge in every way." They're going to be disappointed. I think this Nexus S shows that Google is pretty happy with the way Android hardware innovation is going. Rather, the company wants to make sure there's a clean version of Android in developers' hands.
Google has wisely chosen to abandon its Web-sales model for the Nexus S. The earlier Nexus One phone was initially available only online, with Web-based support, as part of a Utopian scheme to shatter carriers' control of the U.S. mobile-phone market by selling the same phone, compatible with every carrier, direct to consumers. That didn't work out. Now the Nexus S is available at Best Buy stores for $529 without contract or $199 with a two year contract, and it will be supported by T-Mobile. In general, this is a model that Americans are much more comfortable with.
Specifications
- Service Provider: T-Mobile
- Operating System: Android OS
- Screen Size: 4 inches
- Screen Details: 800-by-480 TFT LCD capacitive touch screen
- Camera: Yes
- Network: GSM, UMTS
- Bands: 850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100, 1700
- High-Speed Data: GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA
- Processor Speed: 1 GHz
At 4.9 by 2.5 by .4 inches and 4.5 ounces, the Nexus S is a black slab phone similar in size and shape to Samsung's popular Galaxy S line, especially the Samsung Vibrant ($199, 4 stars). The Nexus looks more elegant because it uses more rounded corners and a black bezel, rather than cheaper-looking chromed plastic. The 4-inch, 800-by-480 Super AMOLED screen is curved to cradle your face, but, in use, I couldn't find any difference between it and a perfectly flat screen.
The one major new hardware feature here is NFC (Near Field Communication technology), which lets the phone interact with physical tags and could eventually let you use your phone as a credit card or to, say, check in with Foursquare by tapping on a restaurant's welcome sign. For now it's essentially useless in the U.S., though.
The Nexus S connects to the Internet either through HSPA 7.2 on T-Mobile's or foreign networks, or through Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n. While the S isn't compatible with T-Mobile's faster HSPA+ system, I got very good speeds for an HSPA 7.2 phone, as high as 2.2Mbps down and 1.3Mbps up. The phone can also be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot.
I wasn't thrilled by the voice performance. RF reception is fine, on par with the Editor's Choice T-Mobile myTouch 4G ($199, 4.5 stars), but the phone sometimes had trouble finding a signal after leaving a dead zone. Voice quality is just okay. The earpiece is clear and of moderate volume, and the speakerphone is nice and loud. But with transmissions through the mic, I had trouble with background and wind noise, and wind could sometimes cause skips in the earpiece audio.
The Nexus S paired easily with my Aliph Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset, and voice dialing performance was unusually good; it had no trouble recognizing names or numbers.
The phone registered six hours and 2 minutes of continuous talk time, which is decent, but I had some other battery life issues.
OS, Software, and Apps
The Nexus S is the first phone with Android 2.3, also called "Gingerbread." The handset has zero bloatware, and it's always guaranteed to get Google's updates first. Neither Samsung nor T-Mobile get to have anything to do with this phone's software, which will be a major selling point to some consumers.
The Nexus S uses the same basic hardware platform as the Samsung Vibrant, based on a 1GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor. The UI is faster all around than on Android 2.2 phones, though Web performance isn't; I got the same page load times using Wi-Fi on this phone as on the myTouch HD. Our Android benchmarks showed better performance on memory and file-management tasks.
The UI in general has more transparency, the keyboard supports multitouch and there's a new camera app. The UI improvements total up to a lot of little things, but nothing to get excited about. There's also limited voice-over-IP support based on the enterprise-friendly SIP protocol (which isn't used by U.S. consumers much.)
Gingerbread spends some time focusing on power management. You can clearly see what's eating up your battery, and a new UI theme with more black spends less power lighting up the screen. But whatever issue that caused the Microsoft Exchange push e-mail client to manically drain the battery in Android 2.2 is still there, and I didn't get longer battery life with the Nexus S than with Froyo phones.
As this has a clean build of Android, there aren't many apps on here to start with; it doesn't even integrate Facebook and Twitter contacts until you download third-party clients. Of course, you do have 100,000 Android Market applications at your disposal.
I also ran into one very annoying bug: The built-in Maps and Navigation programs couldn't initialize the GPS for the first time after a factory reset. Downloading a free program called "GPS Test" fixed the problem, after which, the feature worked fine.
Multimedia and Conclusions
The Nexus S is a pretty good media phone, although it's not quite as solid as other top-of-the-line phones. For one thing, there's no removable memory; only a non-expandable 16GB of internal storage.
Audio and video support also have some trouble with key codecs. The music player supports most file types except WMA, and high-bit rate H.264 video files showed visibly jerky frame rates. I'm being picky here, but the Samsung Vibrant and the myTouch 4G don't have a problem with either of those things. Music and video sound great through wired or Bluetooth headphones, though, and YouTube plays in HQ mode if you have sufficient network speed.
The Nexus S has a 5-megapixel camera on the back and a VGA camera on the front, for video calling. There still isn't any adequate Android video calling software, but I found the front camera useful for recording video messages to my family.
The main camera took relatively sharp but somewhat desaturated photos outdoors, but indoors it really struggled with low light; I got very low shutter speeds, leading to blur. Outdoors, the video mode took smooth 720-by-480 videos at 30 frames per second, but that dropped to a jerky 17 frames per second indoors.
Google needs a developer phone with a clean build of Android. The Nexus S fits that bill. But it isn't the best Android phone for T-Mobile users (or for anyone, for that matter.) The T-Mobile myTouch HD outdoes the Nexus S with better battery life, faster Internet, a better camera, removable memory and some cool included software. On Sprint, the Samsung Epic 4G ($199, 4 stars) gives you WiMAX and a keyboard.
If you get all worked into a lather over who's on Android 2.1 and who's on 2.3, the Nexus S is a fine phone for you. Otherwise, it's just another high-quality, high-end Android phone in a crowd of good choices.
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