My Google Nexus One Experience

I bought my Google Nexus One on the 17th of February 2010 and have been using it since. So I wanted to share some information about this phone.

I think this is an excellent phone and I don't have any regrets.

How did I get my hands on it?

I friend of mine bought it in America and shipped it to New Zealand and I bought it from him. The phone came with the latest update which meant that I had pinch to zoom out of the box.

You cant tell how good a phone is until you try it.

Features of the phone which I really like:

• Unlike the iPhone you can have widgets on any of the 5 home pages. Some really cool widgets are:
• The power control - There are 5 buttons on this widget which allow you to turn on and off the following.
1. WI-FI
2. Bluetooth
3. GPS
4. Auto-sync
5. Screen brightness
• The flashing trackball.
• When you get any sort of notification you can choose what things should happen. One of them is making the trackball blink ever x seconds.
• This is very handy. You can see if you have any notifications without having to turn the phone on.
• The integration with all the Google applications are excellent. Obviously its a Google Phone.
• The contact sync is excellent. Update your contacts in GMail or on your phone any everything is in sync.
• The android market is great. Easy to browse and install apps. I have not seen the apple app store from an apple device so I can't make any comparison. The android market displays screenshots of the apps so this helps when you are trying to decide which application to install.
• Multi-tasking is great. How does it work?
• Lets say you are writing a SMS, but you need to look up something on the Internet.
• Click on the home button. This will save the state of the SMS.
• Go and find whatever you wanted on the Internet.
• Hold the home button down and you will see the last 6 applications that you have used.
• Select the SMS application and continue working.
• The notification bar at the top of the phone is excellent. All your notifications can be seen it one place.

Some problems with the phone:

• Every now and then I have to restart the phone. I don't know if you to do this on the iPhone also. 
• Sometimes after playing a game or working with an app, the touch screen calibrations is not accurate. I would touch somewhere on the screen and it would actually think its somewhere a little below that.
• Solution: Just lock and unlock your phone using the button at the top of the phone and everything is fine again.
• Games are not as good as one the apple devices. (iPhone and iPod touch)
• The animation and effects are good on the phone, but not as good as on the iPhone.
• When you turn the phone from portrait to landscape, iPhone does the nice rotate. The Nexus One just changes screens normally.
• On the iPhone when you send a message, the message flows beautifully from the compose section to the threaded view.

Currently I am waiting for the android 2.2 update. Its suppose to make the phone 4 to 5 times faster and has lots more improved features. I personally am looking forward to the following in android 2.2

• Next to the all apps button at the bottom, there will also be a phone and Internet icon. This will be very handy because I make a lots of calls.
• USB tethering and WI-FI hotpot.
• Update all of your apps with a single click.
• The phone is already this fast, how much faster can it get.

I hope that gives you an insight off the pros and cons of the Nexus One.

Unreliable Internet Connection

I recently experienced a very unreliable internet connection at home. My internet kept on disconnecting and at times would not even connect.

So I lodged a fault with my ISP and someone came around to investigate. This is what happened.

The first thing was to test the phone jack that the ASDL Modem was plugged into. The technical had a device which plugs into the phone jack and connects to the exchange and can generate some statistics like speed, noise etc.

Before coming to my house, the technical was at the exchange testing my connection. He said that connection speed at the exchange was 16mbps and at my house it was 11mbps. He said that I live approximately 3km from the exchange. He made the point that I am very lucky to get those sort of speeds. He said people down the road we only getting about 2 to 3mbps.

For some reason, his device was not connecting and eventually it did connect. The technician decided to try another phone jack because it shouldn't take that long to connect. But surprisingly it connected straight away at the other phone jack. That meant something was wrong with the first phone jack.

So he plugged in his device into the original phone jack and it connect ok. He called the ISP to check that the statistics he is viewing on his device has the same readings as the ISP and they were the same.
So the technician said that my ADSL router might be the problem.

I have a netgear router. And the technician said these routers work very well when they are new and as they get older they dont perform that well and can play up. I have personally noticed that the performace of my wireless has degraded over time.

I then asked the technician if there was something wrong with the phone jack itself. Some sort of lose wiring. So he opened it up and had a long look at the connection. He pointed out some mold/fungus in the connection and that could be causing the problem.

He then installed a new phone jack and tested it again. The statistics where slightly better than before. I plugged my router into the phone jack and it also connected relatively quickly. I had to just monitor my connection over the next couple of days.

He suggested that if I experience these problems agains, to try another router because everything else seems to be fine.

Conclusion
The cause of my unreliable internet connection was some mold/fungus in the wiring in the phone jack. Who would have thought this would be the problem! After the phone jack was changed, my internet has been very reliable.

Note: Having an alarm system is also known to cause internet problems. If you have a monitored alarm, some special wiring needs to be done so the alarm is using the correct channels of the phone line and does not interfer with the internet connection. Its some sort of splitting so that you dont have to use line filters in the house.