Mario Queiroz, Vice President of Product Management for Google, holds up the Nexus One. (AFP Photo)

Google Always Shaking Things Up

Google sure does love shaking up the system. The technology giant presented its new Nexus One smartphone this week, which advances the state of the art and adds to the catalog of great app phones.

Remember the original Google search page? It made news because your search results popped up fast and weren’t cluttered with ads. Remember when Google went public? It made news because the founders auctioned off shares to the public. Remember when Gmail came out? It made news because it offered 1,000 times the free storage space of competitors like Hotmail and Yahoo.

And now Google wants to shake up the way we buy cellphones — by letting you shop for the phone and the service independently on a new Google Web site, Google.com/phone.

To introduce this phone store, Google took the wraps off a brand-new cellphone, designed by Google and made by HTC, called the Nexus One. It’s pretty sweet, it advances the state of the art and it’s a welcome addition to the catalog of great app phones like the iPhone and Motorola Droid.

You’ll have to pay $529 without a service-provider contract. But the Google news this week isn’t quite as earthshaking as Google seems to think it is.

First, the new phone is almost exactly the size and shape of the iPhone. It’s bland-looking. But it’s so thin and rounded, it feels terrific in your hand.

It’s loaded with gleaming, attractive features. It’s hard to choose which is more gratifying: the speed — instant, smooth response when you’re opening programs and scrolling — or the huge, 3.7-inch touch screen, which has much finer resolution than the iPhone (480 by 800 pixels, versus 320 by 480).

There’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, like an iPhone, but also a removable battery and a camera with an LED flash, autofocus and picture settings, although the photos themselves are roughly on par with the iPhone’s.

The Nexus has no physical keyboard — only an on-screen keyboard, with a handy suggestion feature that I actually prefer to the iPhone’s: as you start typing a word (“unfo”), the Nexus displays an entire row of likely candidates, which you can tap, thus saving yourself more fiddly typing-on-glass.

Radically enough, you can also dictate. The transcriptions aren’t what you’d call miraculous — accuracy is maybe 90 percent — but if you have simple messages, speak clearly and remember to pronounce your punctuation, this “experimental” feature is often much faster than typing.

There’s better integration all around: you can upload pictures and videos straight to YouTube, Picasa, Facebook and so on, and you can tap a person’s name and choose how you want to initiate contact.

Despite these goodies, the Nexus is missing some important features that iPhone fans take for granted.

For starters, the Google app store is much smaller, featuring just 18,000 little games; there are well over 100,000 for the iPhone.

Worse, even if you find good ones, you might not have space to install them. The Nexus can accommodate memory cards up to 32 gigabytes and yet, inexplicably, the Nexus allots only a tiny 190 megabytes for downloaded apps.

The Nexus doesn’t come with any iTunes-style companion software, either.

There’s no physical ringer on-off switch (you have to do it on the screen), and therefore no way to tell by touch if the ringer is off.

The Nexus One also lacks a multi-touch screen like the iPhone. So zooming into photos and Web pages is awkward and hard to control.

Finally, the Nexus just doesn’t attain the iPhone’s fit and finish. The buttons under the screen (Back, Menu, Home, Search) are balky, often ignoring your finger-presses completely.

But maybe it doesn’t matter if the Nexus One isn’t nirvana. Google says it’s only the first Google phone of many.

The idea of the Google phone store is pure, giddy idealism: You’ll buy the phone you want, then you’ll shop for the cell plan you want, from the carrier you want.

This is all supposed to be a huge break from the current way of doing business, but plenty of phones (from Nokia and Sony Ericsson, for example) are already sold this way: over the Web, unlocked, to be outfitted with cell service later. Google’s system makes this much easier but it’s really not such a new idea.

You should root for the Google Store’s success, because the obnoxious policies and fees of cellphone companies have gotten out of control.

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