Goodbye iPhone 3Gs, Hello Nexus One

I have really enjoyed my iPhone and mobile Safari but AT&T and Apple will not unlock an iPhone for any reason. I am moving to Ghana and there is no way that I will be roaming with an AT&T international plan. It seems that iPhones are not yet sold in Ghana so I would have to try to buy an unlocked one in Amsterdam in transit or buy something in Ghana.

I couldn’t resist the new Google Nexus One. It was almost tailor-made for solving my problem. MTN in Ghana has 900MHz UMTS, which is supported by the Nexus One. And, of course, the Nexus One is sold unlocked.

Initial key selling points:

• Unlocked
• Can be tethered (via rooting or PDANet)
• Integration with Google Apps
• Multitasking
• Not tied to iTunes or any other desktop software

Android is a Java-like VM called Dalvik which runs on top of a core Linux OS and some C libraries like WebKit and SQLite. I was definitely concerned that the phone would be sluggish or klunky. It is neither. It is fast and it is slick.

My initial impression is that this phone has everything that I loved about the iPhone and either has built-in or add-on fixes for all the things that annoyed me.

Initial observations:

• Phone “activation” is dead simple. You sign in with a Google Apps, regular Google or Exchange account (or a combo) and you’re done.
• This thing seems faster than the iPhone 3Gs.
• WiFi performance is great and Edge (I’m still on AT&T) seems the same as the “3G” (which often falls back to Edge) performance I have been getting in my little slice of Washington, DC.
• The Voice app is like Visual Voicemail on steroids. Yeah, sometimes the transcripts are bad but then you fall back to the same behavior as Visual Voicemail. Incidentally, you don’t need a Google number for Voice to work. It sets itself up with your carrier to replace the voicemail system provided by your carrier and you can turn it off if you want to go back.
• Gadgets are a cool way to embed applications like calendar, weather and news and search right in your home screens.
• The Google Market store for apps is well done and it’s a nice touch that there is an Amazon music store app.
• Listen is fantastic at pulling down podcasts over the air and caching them. It also can pull them down in real time and I can still surf the web at the same time. On iPhone this wasn’t possible because the media streaming component of Safari is modal. You can’t do anything else with Safari unless you kill the stream.
• I love that the alarm clock has a cock crowing ringtone.

I have been seeing more and more Droid phones popping up around town. This feels like the future.

[Via http://thoughtfulcode.wordpress.com]