Month: February 2011

Review: Nexus One

Recently one of the guys at work offered me his “old” Nexus One for a crazy price, so crazy I actually talked him into accepting more. I immediately wiped the ROM that was on there and installed cyanogenmod – for this review I’ll stick to my impressions based on using the Nexus One for the first couple of weeks.

First impression: Fast. So very fast. Second impression – argh, no physical keyboard – no buttons either! Then the fact that the Nexus has so much more RAM available than the G1 did starts to sink in, and the speed – did I mention it was fast? I was sold, but really hoped that the keyboard / button thing was going to quickly become a non-issue.

The headline photo is a comparison shot of the Nexus (far left), and iPhone 3G (middle) and the G1 (right). Things get interesting when we look at the side profile.

The Nexus is the thinnest of the bunch. Let’s take a look at some of the specifications

Nexus One HTC G1
CPU 1 GHz Snapdragon 528 MHz ARM11
RAM 512MB 192MB
Screen Size 3.7″ 3.2″
Resolution 480×800 320×480
Weight 130g / 4.6oz 158g / 5.6oz

Some big differences, with twice the CPU frequency and more than twice the RAM – even needing to drive the larger resolution screen isn’t going to be enough to slow it down.

After a few days I got used to the ‘soft’ buttons for home, menu, back and search. The ROM has haptic feedback (it vibrates) when you hit these buttons. Initially the back button gave me some trouble, specifically in twitter where the reply button on screen is just above the back button – I kept hitting reply instead of back. As I got more familiar with the phone this was much less of an issue.  I still manage to hit the home button when using the track ball for some reason.

Having a real headphone jack is very nice, something I really found annoying with the G1. Having the dock to charge means no messing with cables, you just drop it in. The predictive keyboard is actually quite good, and once you get used to using it – the on screen keyboard is just fine. I still sometimes miss the physical keys, but everything else on this phone is so nice I’m willing to live without them.

Review: ADATA microsd 8Gb class 6

Last march when I got a G1 it came with a 1Gb microsd card. That’s enough for some apps and the usual kind of data you might want to carry around, but is isn’t enough if you want music and video (enough to keep you entertained on a cross continent airplane ride). At the time 16Gb cards seemed too expensive, but 8Gb was a nice sweet spot – for under $30 I could get a class 6 card from ADATA (the price has dropped in half since then).

This card worked reliably for me until things went wrong in early January of this year. Luckily I have a couple of 1Gb cards around that I could swap in as substitutes.  A couple of days later after drooling over 16Gb cards which are now reasonably cheap (if you drop to class 4) I realized that ADATA offers a lifetime warranty. There didn’t seem to be any sensible manner to claim this warranty, but I filled in the web based form to get some technical support. A few days went by, but then I got an email back.

The email was quite helpful. It was somewhat a form letter, but pointed me at the SD Formatter tool which in theory knows how to properly format an SD card. I had already tried multiple readers / machines to validate it was really a problem, but I gave the official tool a shot anyways. The same email contained a form document file that I needed to complete and send in to get an RMA #.

It took me a couple of days to get around to filling in the form, but the response with an RMA # was fairly prompt.  I sent off the card (cost me $2.88 postage – but it was well padded) and figured I’d see what happened. Well, today a rather large box (pictured at top of post) arrived. In it was a new card and two ADATA lanyards. Sweet, and I thought I had excessively packaged the card on return.

ADATA is one of the lower cost brands, yet from what I’ve read in various forums those with ADATA cards haven’t had more problems than any other brand. When the card failed, I was planning to just abandon an avoid ADATA in the future – the quality of the customer service (and the warranty) has me sold on ADATA being a good brand to buy. I will without hesitation buy ADATA again, and I’ll recommend it to others.

[Update: June 7, 2011 – I’m no longer using this ADATA card. The replacement started to exhibit strange behaviour in my phone – I replaced it with a 16Gb class 4 Patriot card. Not sure at this point if I’d recommend the ADATA brand]