Speculation on what to get.

S

Spyros

New member
Hey all, like most I was an early adopter of android and bought the my touch 3g right away when it came out. Then felt the neglect of having old hardware like 6 months later. Well I'm now finally going to upgrade but I am caught between what to get.

I have T-Mobile. I freaking love the Nexus One. Everything about it is appealing to me. Except that I feel like it's been out for a while and I'll buy it then 4 months from now it will be "old hardware".

I love the specs for the Samsung Galaxy S on paper. It is definitely tempting. But it looks cheap IMHO. The custom UI and plastic casing scares me away. I dislike plastic phones due too after 6 months of heavy use (like on my mt3g) the plastic especially where you hold it, gets worn and like oxidized. I could always use a case, but I like to enjoy the phone as is instead of covering it up with a bunch of stuff. Bareback is always win in my opinion .

I'm also tempted to jump ship and run to Verizon and get the Droid X. But with how retarded Verizon is about data tether and the recent news of motorola encrypting the boot loader so I can't root scares me away.

So that leaves me with the good ol' Nexus One.

What do you guys' think? Should I just play it safe and get the well supported N1? Or take a chance with the Behold 3 (LOL) or Verizon.
 
I was an early adopter too, I had a G1, then got a MyTouch 3G when the lack of memory and terrible battery life got to me with the G1, then I upgraded to the Nexus One in January.

With a few of the well documented issues kind of getting on my nerves, I was really looking at the Galaxy S as a potential upgrade as well, but with FroYo, the N1 feels like a brand new phone, it's super fast, the new features rock and it's working better than it did the day I bought it. The only problem I have with my N1 now is I use it so much more I'm killing the battery lol.

I'm still curious to see the speed and quality of the Galaxy S, but I don't think I could give up my Nexus now for anything less than a 4.3 in screen and 1.5-2ghz processor. I love it all over again.
 
Let me put your fears of the custom UI on the SGS to rest. Watch this video: http://androidandme.com/2010/07/phones/touchwiz-3-0-walkthrough-with-the-samsung-captivate-galaxy-s/

You'll see that for the most part the UI is just a slightly polished version of the standard Android UI. There are also a number of improvements, and greater choice. But you can use stuff that's identical to the standard Android UI if you want. There really isn't anything that can't be the same or almost identical to the standard Android UI.

The SGS is plastic, yes. But I've also got experience with a number of other phones that use this kind of matt effect like what you get on the G1, HTC Desire, etc. They suffer from the same kind of wear as plastic cases - the matt effect polishes out and becomes shiny on the locations that get worn. It'll scratch just as easily as a gloss finish.

However, because the SGS is a gloss finish, it won't look any different if you put an invisibleSHIELD on it. That will protect it brilliantly and be hardly noticeable on the SGS.

Side by side the the HTC Desire (which is almost identical to the Nexus One), the SGS just blows the Desire out of the water. Because the SGS has the fastest responding touch screen on the planet, most accurate touch screen, and fastest GPU, everything feels so much more responsive and smooth on the SGS. You'd have to use them side by side to appreciate this really.

I was all set to get the HTC Desire, to the point that I go the phone added to my signature. I was THAT sure. But after using the SGS on a store along with a Desire for 15 minutes or so I immediately changed my mind. Also the screen is just so much brighter, higher contrast, better viewing angles, and better colours than on the Desire.

Because the SGS's GPU is so fast, it is still faster than an N1 running ForYo in some circumstances. Of course, in most circumstances it isn't. However, as the SGS will get 2.2 before the end of the year (promised by Samsung) possibly even as early as August, you won't have long to wait before it's just as fast in all circumstances, or up to 3x faster for graphics intensive stuff, as a Nexus One. If you want, you can root the SGS and there's already people cooking up FroYo ROMs. There's one already out for the Russian SGS.

I don't know much about the Droid X as it's carrier specific to the US and not available over here in the UK, so I can't comment on the pros/cons of that phone.
 
I love my Nexus One, I have 2 lines and thought about getting the Galaxy S for my other line that's currently running my G1. But the more I look at the Galaxy S the less I like it. It's just missing too many things I consider fundamental like camera flash and a notification light. I'll be waiting a couple months because I know the pre-holiday phones are gonna be great. But if I had to get a phone for my other line right now, I'd probably just get another Nexus. Motorola and Droid X are so far beyond fail right now with the locked bootloader and eFuse that will blow up your phone(not literally) if you try to put custom roms on it, I wouldn't even consider a Motorola phone. I appreciate what they did for Android with the original Droid but after this, it'd take something special to get my support back.
 
Just to defend the SGS a little here JoshHart...

I too will greatly miss the notification LED, but I've found ways to work around it with repeat notification apps, and I wrote an app myself to do this for Calendar alerts as there wasn't one on the Market, including the ability to flash the screen or repeat the notification tone at set intervals (it'll be on the Market soon). It was nearly a deal breaker, but I'm happy with audio alerts and/or screen flashing.

The Camera flash I'm really not bothered about for the basic reason that LED camera flashes pretty much ruin any photo they're used with. LED flashes have such a limited usable range where they do make a photo look better, usually measured in single figure inches, that you generally end up with massive blue/white saturation on anything closer to the camera than that range, and complete darkness behind that. Luckily, the SGS camera is much more sensitive than most other sensors. Do a Google search for low level light tests on Android phones and compare the pics for yourself. There are many cases where photos look almost completely black on some cameras, but the SGS produces a reasonable picture in the same lighting conditions.
 
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