iPhone 4 vs. Nexus One

Having come from an iPhone 3G and 3GS, and having used the Motorola Milestone/Droid, I am pleasantly surprised by the Nexus 1. For me, its about getting out of the sandbox that is the iPhone, having the choice to customize what I want. I see no obvious differences between the devices, after updating the Nexus 1 to Froyo, it performs well and does what I want. I particularly like how the phone can now access wireless N on the 2.4GHz range, something you can only get with the iPhone 4 and how creating a wireless hot spot comes with the Froyo upgrade, again, only something you can with jailbreaking an iPhone and paying $20.00 for an app to do it. These are little things, admittedly, but with Android, they seem to be able to squeeze more out of the device with OS updates, rather then Apple who just want you to buy new hardware, an attitude I am getting tired of. The iPhone 3GS is a solid phone, absolutely a better MP3 player then the Nexus, but that is not an important feature to me, its a nice to have, not a need to have. I need a phone with excellent reception, clear call quality, reliable OS, excellent messaging capabilities and good battery life, for me the Nexus 1 fits the bill.
 
As much as I love the iPhone 4, I have to disagree with you on some points here.

First, the browser on the Nexus One is definitely good, if not better, than the Safari browser. The only advantage that I see with the iPhone 4 is the better pinch-and-zoom. The Nexus One loads pages faster (pretty important, no?) and has more features (ie: cloud-to-phone, flash). I'm not sure if this is correct, but I thought that Safari doesn't allow you to download anything besides pictures (PDF, MP3, etc.) -- correct me if I am wrong.

I do agree that Google has already dated the Nexus One, but not by the trackball. In fact, personally, I think the trackball notifications are quite unique, while the iPhone 4 doesn't even have a single notification light. I think it's not the trackball that is hurting the Nexus One, but the two-tone grey color, which loses its value pretty quickly.

I've never had touch screen issues; I've heard of them but I don't know if they are real. As for the music quality, I think it sounds as good as my iPod with headphones plugged in. As for plugging into the car, I can't comment on that because I've never done it before.

While I do think that the iPhone 4 is superior, my experience with the Nexus One is nowhere as bad as you make it sound like. The iPhone 4 has great hardware (I want that camera!), but it's missing a lot of basic features that I would normally find on the Nexus One or any other phone for that matter.
 
I'm in the same position you are. I have a 3gs and am trying to decide between the iphone 4 or the nexus one. Although I love the iphone, I've gotten very bored with it, and its lack of customization is annoying. I would love to pick up a droid x or HTC incredible but AT&T has really dropped the ball on getting android phones or really any good phones besides the iphone. I tried an unlocked G1 a while ago and really liked android. I feel that its definitely the future of mobile operating systems considering that windows mobile is slow and more focused on business users, RIM OS is dated and really only useful for business( not tech geeks like me), and the iphone os is too closed. The iPhone 4 has a great display and a nice camera, but its early problems with reception and supposedly fragile screen are a little deterring. Plus, no matter what an iphone always feels like an iphone. To me, its never really that new or exciting because both the phone and the OS always generally look the same. With that being said I love the fact that its so easy to backup through itunes and its so easy to add music and videos. I'm probably going to end up with the nexus one and either wait for the iphone 5 or hope that AT&T can get an iteration of the droid X or evo 4g. If not, then I'll probably just pay a ton of money and try and get a GSM unlocked version of one of these phones.
 
Benchmarks? Show me. Ars Technica has web rendering numbers that showed the Nexus One with Froyo beating the iPhone 4 with iOS4.

Smoother and faster? Nexus One with Froyo is incredibly fast and smooth. I have an iPod Touch 64gb, the equivalent of an iPhone 3GS, and there is no comparison. By the way, the HTC Desire and the Samsung Galaxy S is extremely fluid too, and in my perception, both are even smoother than the Nexus One with Android 2.1. But with Android 2.2, the Nexus One comes out ahead now.

As for the Safari browser. big pile of horsecrap. I've used that browser for two years. You obviously never used the Dolphin Browser HD before. Try it on a Samsung Galaxy S or Nexus One Froyo. It's *that* smooth. Like liquid butter. You can effect pinch zooms with slight touch. The Dolphin HD browser can initiate a nearly infinite kinetic scroll, like more than a dozen pages with one swipe. Note this is not the default browser, but a third party browser that enhances using the core Android webkit. However, this browser is free and it is typical of the innovation found in the Android Market.

Right now I am looking at the settings of the default Android browser on the Sony Ericsson X10. I am also looking the Safari settings on my iPod Touch. How is the Apple menus more appealing? Not only does it has far less settings, it has this "For Nursery kids" look to it, while the Xperia X10 browser, typical of Android browsers, are color and background themed to the phone UI, creating a much more elegant effect. The way the default Android browser handles bookmarks and history, using tabs, is much more elegant, user friendly, and less visually cryptic than Safari.

Safari better HELL NO. No Tab browsing. No Video. No downloads. No social network sharing. Worst of all, its not ANY FASTER than than what you have on Android. Pinch to zoom, scrolling smoothness, all arguable now. This is the Chrome Javascript engine you're dealing with here, and benches put it at least 2x ahead of Safari and Firefox.

Nexus One RF issues. Mostly gone with an early update. Completely gone with Froyo. In fact, the RF is better still. This is in comparison with all generations of iPhone which never fixed the RF issues after four generations and years and countless updates. Heck, even now the iPhone 4 is being hit with issues again.

You never used them side by side to claim that iPhone 4 with iOS4 is better than the Nexus One with Froyo. Really have you?

I have an iPhone 3GS at home with my wife and an iPod Touch 64gb on myself. I use a Nexus One daily. I have the actual life experience with these devices for months. There is no comparison between the 3GS and the Nexus One, even from the start with Android 2.1. iOS4 fails to impress, mostly catching up with only some features Android has had a long time with, such as ahem, wallpaper.

Look at the iPhone icons. Its still the same boring tiles. Android uses irregular icons. Look at the Opera browser icon on Android and on iOS. On iOS, the O is on a tile. On Android, the entire O outline is the icon. You don't see any tiling. The wallpaper draws right into the O's boundary and then fills inside the O. If its a living wallpaper, the entire animation would actually draw right through the space of the O. That's how sophisticated the graphical API of Android is.
 
With Android, you can tweak/flash anyways to your liking. with different widgets and home screen UIs, the phone just seems new all the time. Now look back to Iphone's home screen, what can you do? Oh yeah...the ability to change your wallpaper. Apple is real innovative.

Not to mention, watch out for the Iphone4. "HOLD DIFFERENT" is the new slogan for Apple. They'll show you a tutorial on how to hold your Iphone4....so that it won't loose signal. ...
 
If your argument that a phone is better and more polished because the on-screen visuals are better... then it seems like you have pretty low standards for a smart phone and how they should be used on a daily basis.
 
its a win win as far as the UI in my books. Yea Android has cool widgets and functions, but apples minimalistic approach works just as well too. Zipping through your homescreens is always faster a iPhone. Oh yea and live wallpapers. Great, but what a battery hog.
 
I'm actually more comfortable with the same experience, and swiping one direction to get to more stuff. I'd love a few feature from Android on my iPhone (notifications and widgets are the two big ones) but other than that iOS4 is a pretty damn solid machine.
 
What tests?

The browser on the Nexus One at Android 2.1 is faster than the iPhone 4. The browser on the Nexus One at Android 2.2 is even faster still. Faster.

Oh, it has some perks too. Enhance the browser with some add on alternatives, such as Skyfire, Dolphin, Flash, etc,. and you can do a lot more things.

Like watch Flash videos on any web page.

Like the ability to share pages and links to Twitter and Facebook directly (Dolphin).

Like being able to download things and stuff.

Like having tabs and all.

A vastly more complete PC like experience and freedom.

I laugh at what you mean by "UI interaction". Do you know that Android can save contact numbers into the homescreen? Do you know how fast I can call friends with my Android that way vs. an iPhone? Want to count the keystrokes needed to access a telephone number shortcut on the homescreen?

What about swiping to access this and that? I see a message on my notification bar that is a Twitter reply, I click on that message, and wallah, it opens the message directly with the app. I don't have to swipe screens and launch Tweetie to get to that message.

As a matter of fact, I may not need to launch a Twitter app at all to read the messages. An onscreen widget would have displayed such right there on the screen.

Fully polished product? You call losing signal bars when holding a fully polished product? I never experienced that on a single Android phone. You call issues on the proximity sensor a fully polished product? All the stories of cracked phones that fall on the floor, a polished product?

Polish? You call that iOS4 multitasking polished? How many strokes does it take to kill 10 apps on the tasking bar? With Android's Advanced Task Manager I can kill 50 in a single press of the button. Whatever deficiencies Android has, its more than compensated by apps that are allowed to creatively enhance the core functionality. Cant do that on iOS4.
 
I LOVE the Nexus One, but i hate to have to juggle around with a task manager. Oh, and battery life is a no brainer. I just hit 4% after not charging my iPhone since yesterday at 6am (its now 8pm the next day. If the nexus was polished enough to not have to worry about managing tasks, and the battery live was even 75% of what iPhone 4 has, i would drop apple like a bad habbit. I still question myself if i should trade my iPhone for a Nexus almost daily tho.
 
Actually, Google advises against Task Managers. Android efficiently manages all tasks on its own and it was improved moreso with Eclair. Apps share common processes and so it may look like the app is being launched but it actually is just sitting there not taking up any processing power. In fact, running a task manager uses up more battery as it has to constantly monitor the apps and killing the apps takes more processing power every time you run it than to let them idle. Task Managers may also make the phone unstable by killing essential system processes. Eclair and onwards has an app manager for the purpose of killing apps that don't close properly if needed. But all in all you shouldn't be hassling with a task manager unless you have an app that crashed.

http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/
 
To each his own. To me, every few days I visit XDA forum and there is always a new improvement on N1 Rom for me to flash. Froyo on N1 is fast, wait until you try different custom Roms. Even faster than the stock Google's Froyo.

Regarding the trackball on N1, yes...it does feel kindda pointless to have the trackball. Most of the time i don't even notice/or use it. However, it function very well if you need it....oh wait...The trackball actually Flash Green when i have email, Red when i miss a call, Blue when there a text....etc...and i don't even have to turn on the phone to check. Now lets see if the Iphone4 has that kind of flash notifications.
 
Also one more note about the battery on the Nexus One. I personally don't have a Nexus One but reading about it from others who have it. They're getting the same battery life as the iPhone 3GS which is about a whole day on normal use. So I'm not exactly sure how that's bad for battery life. You can probably make that argument for an HTC Evo but even then people who cycled their batteries are getting crazy battery life (think 30+ hours) on their phones which you can read about in the HTC Facebook discussion group:


http://www.facebook.com/evophone?ref=ts#!/evophone?v=app_2373072738&ref=ts


On my Google Ion I can get anywhere from 1-2 days of moderate phone use (1-2 hrs) with heavy wifi surfing (5-6 hrs) without having to cycle the battery. (Oh and my phone is overclocked to 528 Mhz which is a lot more than stock.) And its been getting this type of battery life from the first day I owned it. So it definitely comes down to how you use the phone. The people who are getting crappy battery life are probably the ones running their task killers every 15 mins, leaving their brightness high, syncing on, and gps on as the phone comes with those on from the get go. Just my .02 cents.
 
Well now that I've used both the 3gs and the Nexus One (Both on AT&T) I can weigh in and give my opinion. The nexus one has a bigger screen, a faster processor, an more open OS, better camera, more opportunity to mod, faster browser, multitasking, along with much more. On paper it should be the better phone by far, but is it...absolutely not.

While the Nexus excels in many areas, it fails in some of the most simple ones which make it a pain to use and a difficult phone to live with. First the battery life is terrible. I'm coming from an iphone which has mediocre battery life so my standards arent too high, but the nexus one couldnt even last an entire day with light to moderate use. I turned the brightness down, turned off interactive wallpapers, forced 2g etc and still couldnt get a full days use out of the phone. It also charges incredible slowly.

The keyboard is also not nearly as smooth as the one on the iphone. I was running the official froyo 2.2 on my nexus on every once in a while I would still get some keyboard lag. The spellcheck/word replacement on the nexus is inferior to the iphones and often times it would incorrectly change one of my words.

Browsing on the nexus is definitely quicker, but the problems with the keyboard make typing a chore and in general the browsers arent as easy to navigate as safari. Especially because on the nexus you need to use a combo of the 4 buttons on the bottom with the touch screen.

Multitasking is great and there are times when I miss it on my iPhone, but on the Nexus one and all other powerful android phones(evo 4g, droid x etc) is that it burns up battery life on phones that already have weak batteries. I tried not using an app killer as suggested in previous posts, and I tried using one and neither improved the battery life. Multitasking isnt useful when you're running out of battery at 2pm everyday.

I have more minor gripes, but those were the main few I encountered. Don't get me wrong I loved the Nexus. I used the mobile hotspot which worked fantastically and I loved the ability to mod the phone. But the iPhone is simply more polished and more consistent. Once the iPhone 4's antenna problems are solved and a jailbreak is released for it, it will become the most complete phone on the market.
 
Just going off the tests of the N1 vs. 3GS the 3GS consistenly beat it out in graphix and 3D rendering. iPhone 4 is obviously faster so naturally would be even faster. What I mean by UI interaction is how fast the phone's os reacts to your touch,swipes and scrolls. The iPhone is just faster/smoother.\

As far as the browser goes. You can list all the features you want I've remember when the Symbian nokia people made the same arguments in the end most would agree the iPhone browser is still BETTER. Even they do now. And none of the 3rd party browsers you mention can match safari's pinch to zoom ease and accuracy of its tap to zoom features. It just renders and operates in a superior fashion to any browser out there. PERIOD.

And yes the iPhone 4 like it or not is an extremely polished device compared to the n1. The swiping across screens is smoother, scrolling is more fluid, menu transitions are nicer, the settings menus are more visually apealing as opposed to the text based android menus. Also the touchscreen is more responsive and dosen't have all the issues the n1 suffers from which are well documented. Not to mention how bad the amoled screen from N1 performs in direct sunlight, its pretty unacceptable. And also if you remember/read up the Nexus was the original phone that "you couldn't hold a certain way" becuase it had such serious reception issues.

I don't have it out for Android in fact I'm seriously looking at the XT720 android phone. I just realize the the Android os still has a way to go be as smooth as iOS.

I'm done argueing. As I said before 3GS vs. N1 is a more fair comparison because iPhone 4 is just a much better device. It is undeniable when they are used side by side.
 
I think there must be something wrong with you're phone, I have experienced nothing of the sort you mention, no particularly hideous battery drain, no keyboard lag, and the apps will close themselves, there is no need for an app killer, Froyo takes care of it all by itself. I will agree that typing is not as good on the Nexus as it is on the iphone, but it takes getting used to. What gets me is that I have to jailbreak my iphone to get everything the Nexus one gives me already. I don't have to spend $20.00 buying an app to turn my phone in to a wifi hot spot, or to buy themes, although you can buy them on the android market. Personally, I am sick of the Apple 'sandbox' and want to break away from their exclusiveness, I want to embrace open source and will put up with the few idiosyncrasies that the Nexus has over the iphone 3GS or 4, because every phone has them.
 
Same, and ever since the latest 2.2 OTA download, my battery life has been awesome. I used to have to charge every day (unplug at 5pm, by 5am, it's like 64%), but since last update I only have to charge every two days. Go FROYO!
 
Personally, it just depends what you like. in terms of media, iPhone wins hands down right now. There are apps that let you sync your itunes library with your Nexus One but it's still not the same as with the iPhone. As far a usability, customization, and openness, Nexus One is far ahead of the iPhone. It really just comes down to your personal preference in the end. For myself, Android does exactly what I need, and yes I have used an iPhone, several times actualyl and owning it twice, and Android is just a friendlier experience. It's best to say what you want in a phone and honeslty finding friends that have them so that you can see which suits you best



that's a personal taste really, just depends how you like it.
 
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