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Phones · Google Nexus

Google Nexus One

11owners with an opinion
73%of verdicts positive
2/0positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and design; criticized for software.

What people wrote

Likes it
> I continue to be surprised that so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN - chose and continue to choose the iPhone over Android when Apple dictates what apps they can install and locks third-party accessories out of certain features. I bought a Nexus One the day it became available, installed endless third party ROMs on it, tweaked it to my heart's desire. Got a Nexus 4, then 5. Today I have an iPhone. I just need something that works, just because I can tweak endlessly doesn't mean it's a good use of my time. Honestly one of the original biggest motivators was iMessage. A rock solid messaging system ought to be table stakes for a mobile OS but Google has reinvented the wheel so many times I've lost track. Also FaceTime for calling distant relatives. Sad to say, I don't find myself missing the relative openness of Android at all.
Likes it
Last month I opened a drawer and found my Google Nexus One smartphone. It hadn't been turned on for 10 years and I figured the (easily removable) battery was done. I tried charging it anyway and to my surprise, it actually recovered and charged. It worked fine when I turned it on, but it's essentially a paperweight now because the US mobile carriers have all upgraded to 5G, and this is a 3G phone. The thing that struck me while doing this is just how tiny the Nexus One is. It's a full-featured (for the day) smartphone, but it's less than half the size of pretty much all the mainstream smart phones today. Battery life was decent, and the apps were pretty functional. My current phone is about twice the length, 50% wider, and twice as heavy. Battery life has been getting progressively worse with background apps draining your battery so they can scoop up and market whatever information about you they can. Battery life has also been impacted by the BLE tracking features, which run all the time. I wish I could upgrade the Nexus One with a 5G radio -- it would be a great phone today.
Doesn’t like it
Yup, originally had Nexus One, found out it couldn't be upgraded after a couple of years because of the decision to make the installation space so small. Upgraded to Nexus 4. Battery expanded like a blowfish after a year. Bought a Nexus 5. The Gorilla glass wasn't as durable as my clumsiness confirmed. In between the 4 and 5, bought a Nexus 7 (I think, it was a pad device), it's display stopped working almost 1 year to the day. Back to the Nexus 5, after dropping the 5 accidentally and destroying it, upgraded to a mid-range LG phone. Wow. It was great. Still works like 5 or 6 years later though 2 years after buying it, LG announced they would exit the smart phone business. That was a blow. The LG will works but is slow now so the only option left was a Samsung phone, mid-upper range. About a year later so far so good but I had to disable a thousand crap apps they install and revert a thousand more crap default settings. Worse than buying a new Windows PC which is why I use Ubuntu Linux on my PC.
Doesn’t like it
It's funny I've been down voted for speaking my mind about observations I've made over years of using my current phone and the trend is true for my past android phones. I've had 3 other android phones. The last one, Nexus 6, I dropped and the gorilla glass cracked really bad, figured it was a loss and got my current LG phone and it has been great except for the suspicious slow downs which cannot be attributed to wear of the storage. I say that as someone who has been a technological person for 5 decades and a paid software engineer for almost 3 decades. The one before that, Nexus 4, the thing was charging on my desk, I looked over and saw it bulging like it was going to explode. The one before that, Nexus One, I still have, had to stop using it when the hard wired paltry amount of system space and increasing OS size made it unusable. Glad they stopped that practice of forcing the OS into a tiny space. I like my LG so it's too bad they got out of or announced they are leaving the phone business. I've traded several thousand of my dollars to Google for their phones since they started making them. I never owned iPhone, have no plans to either.
Likes it
I used 9x4 Thai keyboard layout on my 3.7" Nexus One. I mastered it and reached 40wpm without autocorrect/suggestions. After upgrading to 4.7" Nexus 4 I found that the screen is too big and I'd have to use swipe keyboard. I don't think I ever reached 40wpm again. Then again, that was when in high school. Maybe my fingers grew bigger.
Likes it
the first time it was a G1, that would have been my first year so I think it was 2008. That wasn't the best phone (although I loved the keyboard). I ported a physics engine to it, and it ran, but the phone got very hot very quickly. The next year was the nexus one, the excitement was palpable. The nexus one was truly sexy at the time, definitely the first android phone that I loved. As for that Googler- well, there were always a bunch of people there who had some or another circumstance that made them incompatible with the larger Google culture.
Doesn’t like it
I agree, but here is my rough memory: - the Nexus One died when the power button broke - the Nexus S died when half the touch screen stopped working - the Galaxy Nexus died for some hardware reason that I cannot remember - one of my Nexus 4 died when the battery ballooned and shattered the glass - another Nexus 4 died in an infinite boot loop - the spare BLU brand phone died in an infinite boot loop - the Moto X died when the radio antenna (both WiFi and cell) stopped working - the Nexus 5X died in an infinite boot loop
Likes it
Your next sentence wasn't particularly useful, as there aren't any other choices. If I want what I consider a reasonably-sized phone (~4.2"), I have to settle for something with crap specs. I use a few apps that poorly implement the top-left button such that left-swiping doesn't do anything. Sigh. Yeah, just playing with mine, and noting how I readjust my grip to do various things. I just always feel like I'm about to drop my phone when I have to do that. And I just realized: I've never dropped and broken the screen on a phone until I got my Nexus 4 (which I've broken 3 times). My Nexus One and Nexus S lived happily break-free (well, ok, my S broke because someone [accidentally] violently elbowed it out of my hand, but that's hardly due to the size of the phone). We'll see if the market "fixes" this. I'm skeptical, as phones have been larger than my preference for at least 2 years now, and they're still growing.