Anand's Google Nexus One Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 3, 2010 3:40 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Barcodes & Goggles - Making Science Fiction Reality
The best way I can put this is that the Nexus One likes to do math on things. If anything it’s a testament to Moore’s Law and the fact that we can do more in the palm of our hands today than we could do on our desks a decade ago.
Android has a built in barcode processing library that it can use alongside the Nexus One’s integrated camera to act as a fancy barcode scanner. The combination has two major implications:
1) There are many applications that allow you to scan any barcode (e.g. off a book at a bookstore or an Xbox 360 at Walmart) and return pricing results. Google’s own shopping website when browsed with an Android phone has a scan barcode button that will activate your phone’s camera and return Google Product Search results. This doesn’t bode well for brick and mortar retailers, but it’s great for walking into Best Buy and quickly finding out if something you want is cheaper online.
2) You can also use the barcode scanner to download apps from the Android Marketplace. You may have seen QR codes before:
Open any barcode scanner application and point the camera at the QR code and your phone will automatically take you to that application in the marketplace.
While the iPhone does have barcode scanning abilities, the infrastructure doesn’t appear to be as well built as what’s in Android. That being said, I thought I’d be using this feature a lot more than I ended up doing.
Such interwoven barcode scanning is super neat at first. I found myself scanning everything physically possible.
Price comparisons in stores are nice, but I rarely shop in brick and mortar stores. If I do, I usually need whatever it is I’m shopping for right then and there so any mobile price comparison doesn’t help. I suspect that for a slightly more mainstream user, this feature has more value.
In downloading Android apps, I find it faster to simply use the marketplace. The exception being if I see a news post about an app I’d like to try out, usually there’s a barcode I can scan in the newspost. The capture and scan of the barcode usually takes long enough (gotta hold your hand still) to make it no faster than just using the marketplace app though. In this case, the Nexus One gets more points on paper but not as many in real world usage.
Google also ships the Goggles app on the Nexus One’s Android build. Similar to the barcode app, Goggles performs a rudimentary image search for anything you point the camera at. It works really well for things like logos right now, but it’s not powerful enough to do much more.
Ultimately the strength in these two apps comes in their ultimate end goal: the ability to point your smartphone camera at anything and find out exactly who or what it is. See a funny looking animal walking around? Point, search, ah-ha results! Does that person look familiar to you? Point, scan, done. We’re not quite there yet but given Google’s data mining origins, it makes sense that its start begins with Android.
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bjacobson - Monday, April 5, 2010 - link
Motorola Droid is no better, my friend has one and OC'd his processor to 1.1Ghz and it still lags just as badly. Both choppy and lags where my finger is. I don't like it at all. This is the main reason I haven't even considered the Android platform yet. I probably will when they fix this.LongTimePCUser - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link
Have you tried the Moto Droid after the Android 2.1 upgrade?My experience was that the ui seemed smoother and faster after the upgrade.
eva2000 - Monday, April 5, 2010 - link
bummer about battery life, sounds like nexus rev2 with 1700-1800mah battery in the near future hehhugov - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
I'm not sure the Adreno 200 is as far behind the SGX530/535 as you suggest. The iPhone 3Gs chip (Samsung S5PC100) states in the docs (http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconduct... that the GPU is capable of up to 10M triangles/sec, a far cry from the 28M reported in popular press recently. QSD8250 docs suggest up to 22M triangles. And the Adreno is a unified shader architecture GPU with no fixed-function pipes, similar to the PowerVR SGX. OTOH, the *drivers* appear to be quite lacking compared to the PowerVR drivers, at least on Linux/Android.TheHolyLancer - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
I mean wow that dog seems to be focused directly on something above the camera, is that a treat or something?ThePooBurner - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
I really enjoyed reading through this review. I have been wanting to move to a smart phone, but haven't been able to decide what i want. This helps put android devices into perspective in terms of what they can do and what i can expect. I happen to abhor apple, and so i will never own an iphone. I can't stand closed platforms or someone else telling me what i can and can't do with a device that i own. Their stance on "jail-breaking" sickens me. It's like telling me i can't put a new engine in my car if i want to. But that is besides the point. Windows P7 looks like it might be good, but that is a ways off. The Pre-pro looks the most appealing of the phones i have seen reviewed.However, there are 2 devices that i would love to see added to the list of reviewed smart phones: The Nokia n900, and the Samsung Omnia II. For the n900, I would love for you to do a review of it and show us what the Maemo platform can do, as well as a quantifiable battery life test. The phone can do just about everything, but knowing how much doing all of that affects the battery life would be great. The device from a hardware standpoint isn't that different from some of the other smart phones out. It's an Cortex A8 at 600mhz. It's got 32GB of storage (expandable to 48), 5mp camera with flash, WiFi, BT, and it also has an FM transmitter. So on paper it looks great, but there haven't really been any solid reviews on the device from good review sites that use quantifiable testing, or from non-marketing type sites. I know that it also has integration with google voice and google chat. The Omnia 2 has an 800Mhz CPU, and a lot of the same hardware features and uses the TouchWiz 2.0 WM6.5 GUI, which appears to be samsung's platform of choice going forward. It's fairly new so there isn't a whole lot of information out there on this phone yet, but it seems to be marketed as the flagship product from samsung at the moment.
Do you think that you could review these for us? From what i have seen they both look pretty good (though the N900 looks better), but 600$ is a lot to spend without having more than marketing to go off of.
If nothing else this article has at least brought me up to speed on android and it's benefits.
pepsi_max2k - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
"For example, typing yjomh instead of thong won’t autocorrect, although on the iPhone it will. "And I think I speak for everyone, Anand, when I say: Under what situation did you actually find this highly intriguing piece of information out?
SuperFly03 - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Ugh, this review is full of misinformation. I had to say something.http://forum.xcpus.com/blogs/superfly03-341.htm
coolVariable - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
1. No mention of the lacking exchange sync.2. No mention of the lacking copy & paste within emails
3. No mention of the connectivity issues.
4. No mention of attachment issues (sending or saving).
5. No mention of file download issues.
...
What a BAD review.
SuperFly03 - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
I'm not sure what Google phone you are using but the only problem I've had is no. 2. You can't copy paste within emails. I do believe that is a silly limitation but I do not think it is a big problem in the grand scheme of things.No. 1 is complete BS. I have been hooked into my exchange account since day 1 and have never had any issues.
No. 3 is about as generic as you can get. I realize it is a problem that is on the Google sub-forums but likely a firmware issue not an Android issue.
No. 4 and 5 is just laughable.