BUILD & DESIGN

The Nexus S looks like most smartphones available today, with a black exterior and a minimum of buttons and controls so that the overall look is streamlined and modern. Then again, you might have trouble picking out your phone if you put it on a table next to a few other smartphones at dinner, because there is nothing that really stands out about the Nexus S in a stylistic sense.

At 4.8-inches by 2.48-inches and 0.43-inches thick. the Nexus S is comparable to other large-screen smartphones available today. It does seem to be somewhat lighter than many of the other phones I’ve recently reviewed–when I first took it out of the box I looked for a battery to install, but it was already in the device. It might create a bulge in your pocket, but it won’t weigh you down. My key ring, with its large assortment of office and home keys, weighs more than the Nexus S.

Display
The screen on the Nexus S is simply beautiful. It’s a 4-inch WVGA (480 x 800) Super AMOLED display, so it is extremely sharp and bright. Even when I’m outside in full sunlight I can see the display clearly, which is a nice change from squinting and trying to shade the screen with my hand. There isn’t any ghosting during video playback, and photos looks especially vibrant.

It’s also the first phone with a Contour display, which means exactly what it sounds like — the screen of the phone is slightly curved. The idea is to make it more comfortable in your hand and against your face, when you’re using the Nexus S as a phone. The curve is quite subtle, I didn’t notice too much of a difference except that the phone does seem to fit in my hand a little better than other devices I’ve reviewed recently.

There is an anti-fingerprint coating on the screen, and while I can’t say that it works perfectly — there are still plenty of fingerprints on the screen — it does seem to extend the time between my compulsive screen wiping and cleaning sessions. I simply can’t stand smudgy screens, so something that cuts down on the frustration is a step in the right direction, and the Nexus S delivers on that point.

Keyboard
The Nexus S doesn’t have a physical keyboard, so you’ll be doing your text entry on the virtual on-screen one. This has been improved in this new version of Google’s operating system, so you’ll see slightly larger keys thanks to an optimized, clutter-free layout. It has punctuation at the top for convenience, and works quite nicely.

Of course you can bypass the keyboard entirely using Google’s speech recognition, which works amazingly well on the Nexus S. No matter which way you choose, text entry is fast and easy.

Other Buttons & Controls
The Nexus S has very few buttons or other hardware features. The power button is on the upper right side of the device, and the volume rocker is on the left.

The only other controls are the standard Back, Menu, Search, and Home controls underneath the display, the camera lens on the back, and the headphone jack and charge/sync port on the bottom edge of the device.

There is no microSD card slot, which is unfortunate. I know that everything is “in the cloud” these days, but I like to keep a lot of music, photos, and ebooks on my device, and the 16 GB of internal memory can fill up all too fast since there’s no option to add more with an expansion card.

PERFORMANCE

Under the hood, the Samsung Nexus S is powered by a 1 GHz Samsung Cortex A8 Hummingbird processor. It is extremely fast, carrying out my every desire almost immediately. The only slowdowns I noticed were network related (more on this point later).

Android OS 2.3 — sometimes better known by its code-name: Gingerbread – includes a number of small improvements throughout that leads to a better overall experience. There are more options on calendar appointments, and the new copy and paste scheme is truly delightful.

A simple tap on a word brings up the text markers, and you can move them to the beginning and the end of what you want to copy by sliding them to the proper spot on the screen. The word or phrase is then automatically copied to the clipboard. I love the new method, because it is so much easier to use and so much more precise than what previous versions of Android could offer. No more worries about random spaces or punctuation marks getting in the way because it is now much easier to copy exactly what you want.

Some Nexus S users have complained about some troubling glitches — random reboots, text messages being sent to the wrong contact, and some graphical issues with icons on the homescreen. I haven’t encountered any of those problems on this test device, but enough users have complained that it seems likely these aren’t isolated issues.

Communication
Unfortunately, call quality on this device is very poor. One of my test subjects likened it to “a tin can connected to a tin can” and another said that I sounded very tinny and distant. In both cases I could hear them on the other end very well, they just had problems hearing me. It wasn’t due to background noise either, because none of my callers were able to identify exactly what was going on the background (construction, children at a playground, a nearby fountain, or a busy street).

I don’t have a great deal of experience with T-Mobile, so this could be a network issue, but I live in a major city and tried the phone inside and outside of my office, at home, and while I was out shopping, with notable voice quality issues each time.

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth work great, though I’m not too happy about the new Wi-Fi settings screen. When you join a new network you don’t get the quick and simple user name and password box anymore; that area is farther down and requires scrolling past security certificates, etc. to access. I’m not sure why Google decided to rearrange things to make it more difficult to join a new network, but at least it’s the sort of thing you usually do just once when you set up the phone.

The email and web browsing experience is also great, as I have come to expect on Android devices. Reading my Gmail or navigating from page to page on the Web is fast, with smooth scrolling and a rich experience.

There aren’t any social networking apps included, but you can get Facebook and Twitter clients on the Android Market, most of them for free.

Productivity
The Samsung Nexus S has all of the standard PIM apps that you would expect to find on any Android phone, including calendar, contacts, clock, calculator, and a News & Weather app that provides the local weather forecast and all of the top news and sports headlines.

Gingerbread brings some enhancements in this area, most notably with the addition of guests/invitations in the calendar app and time zone support for appointments. The new appointment interface is much cleaner than before, and more attractive.

The new features in Google Maps 5.0 with Navigation are quite impressive. Multi-touch allows you to use two fingers to explore 3D maps, dragging up and down to tilt and twisting to rotate the map. There’s a compass mode that reorients the map to the direction you’re facing, and improvements to map caching with offline rerouting means that you won’t lose your way even if you lose your data connection. I like being able to choose between driving, biking, walking, and public transit directions, and I was perfectly directed on each of my test trips.

There is no Microsoft Office compatible software included with the phone, such as QuickOffice, but if you receive a Microsoft Word or Excel document as an email attachment you will be able to view it with the built-in ThinkFree Write Mobile or ThinkFree Calc Mobile. There are also more productivity apps available on the Android Market.

Entertainment
The Android OS music player will keep you entertained listening to your favorite tunes. The external speaker will is capable of extremely loud volumes if you desire, with a minimum of distortion. Plus, there’s a video player if you want to transfer TV shows or movies you get off the Web. Just keep in mind that 16 GB storage limit I mentioned earlier.

The included YouTube client showcases web videos quite nicely, with full screen viewing and good sound quality.

Since the Nexus S is sold as an unlocked phone, you won’t find all of the games and demos you typically see on phones that have been more heavily customized by mobile carriers. I downloaded a few games from the Android Market and found that my usual favorites like Jewels and Sudoku played well, with no stuttering or lag and with bright vivid colors.

If you have some time to kill and want to play games or watch videos, the Nexus S can definitely handle your mobile entertainment needs.

Camera
The Nexus S has two cameras, one on the back that takes five megapixel still photos and can capture video as well, plus a VGA camera on the front for video calling.

The five megapixel camera takes excellent photos, even under difficult lighting conditions, and I’m impressed with the level of quality and detail I was able to capture.

White balance, flash, scene mode, focus mode (including macro), and exposure are all easily adjusted by tapping on the screen, though I was disappointed by the lack of any sort of zoom capability.

The only other issue is with action shots, as demonstrated by my photo of cars speeding by on a busy street. You might be able to capture some sports shots if you’re lucky, but you may end up with some blurring or may miss the shot if the camera isn’t able to work fast enough to keep up with you. It works best for portrait and landscape shots, so if you’re planning to take lots of kid or pet shots this might not be the best cameraphone for you.

Battery Life
You won’t have to worry about running out of juice with the Nexus S, because it seems to go on and on forever. I can get three days of relatively heavy use out of it, with Wi-Fi on, taking shots with the camera, constantly checking my email, and watching two or three YouTube videos each day.

You should certainly be able to make it through the day without having your phone go dead during your evening commute, and you might even be able to get away without packing the charger on a weekend trip.

CONCLUSION

I like the Samsung Nexus S, mostly because of Android OS 2.3/Gingerbread, the responsive nature of the device — I hate waiting for apps to open — and the nice camera.

It’s not perfect, though. While this smartphone generally performed well and I didn’t see any of the glitches that have plagued other users, I’m extremely disappointed with the voice quality of the device when I’m on phone calls.

Of course it’s important to have a great email and web browsing experience, and there are times when you have a few spare minutes to play games or watch a video on YouTube, and it’s great that our phone can do all of those things. But they should first of all be really good phones, and the Nexus S doesn’t live up to my standards in that regard. It is possible that the issues I experienced are all due to the T-Mobile network in my area, but that is impossible to know for sure.

If you have strong T-Mobile coverage in your area, or are planning to use the Nexus S with another GSM carrier such as AT&T, it deserves a closer look because it performed well in all other respects.

Pros

• Latest version of the Android OS
• Excellent screen
• Responsive device
• Good photo quality, with accessible controls for white balance, exposure, scene mode, etc.
• Light weight
• Good volume and sound quality on external speaker
• Long battery life

Cons

• Extremely low voice quality
• No memory card slot
• No zoom on the camera

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BUILD & DESIGN

While many current Android devices are thinly veiled attempts to mimic the iPhone, the Droid Pro clearly has another target: the segment of business users that are mostly addicted to the BlackBerry and it’s constant email access.

I’m not a BlackBerry user myself, but I am a member of the demographic that must have a keyboard, preferably in a one-piece design like this. So I came into this review curious about the Droid Pro, both because of it’s slightly unusual design, and because it seemed to have the qualities I look for in a smartphone: a great spec sheet, simple design, and — hopefully — a solid operating system.

Screen
A key difference between the Droid Pro and its rivals is that while QWERTY-bar phones often include a relatively small  screen with a landscape orientation, the Pro has a larger portrait-oriented screen. This makes it a little longer than it’s relatives within the class, but considering everything that is packed into this device, the Droid Pro is actually surprisingly compact.

Compared directly to my usual phone, a Samsung Jack, the Droid Pro is about a third of an inch taller — and that’s it. They’re the same width, and roughly the same thickness, though the Droid Pro is actually a tiny bit thinner over most of the casing, with a small bulge along the top rear. Even granted that my Jack is cheaper and is a year old, I was pleasantly surprised by the size.

Despite it’s compact footprint, it squeezes in a 3.1 inch, half-VGA screen — not the largest or highest resolution on an Android-based device, but roughly comparable to the first three generations of iPhones.

Keyboard
Given the device’s size constraints, I had been half expecting the keyboard to be cramped. So it was another pleasant surprise that it was, in fact, every bit as usable as the better thumb keyboards I’ve tried out.

Good key travel, key separation, and feel. The number keys are spread out along the top row, instead of being placed in a conventional grid formation. The good news, though is that this is made up for by a large and very usable on-screen keypad available from the phone dialer application. Or, you can just speak the number that you want to call — but we’ll get to that later.

Other Buttons & Controls
One of the ways the Droid Pro saves space is by not having a directional pad or directional control of any kind, which is a departure for most QWERTY-bar style phones. At first, I didn’t think that I was going to be happy about that omission. Now, after having gotten to use it a bit, I’m not nearly as put out as I expected to be. Yes, there’s some situations where it would be nice to have a physical directional control — particularly navigating cramped web page elements, or relocating a cursor for text entry. But for the most part I’ve gotten along quite well using touchscreen gestures for scrolling and practicing accurate fingertip clicking.

My biggest complaint about the Droid Pro’s design lies in the four navigation buttons right above the keyboard. Because they’re part of the screen, and therefore touch sensitive, it’s fairly easy to accidentally “push” them if your finger brushes the screen accidentally. Since the center two buttons — those most likely to be hit accidentally — both take you back out of the application you’re using, it can be very annoying to have to go back and re-start what you were doing. Since you can’t vary the sensitivity of these buttons — and they really do have a hair trigger — the only real cure for this is time and practice, to get used to having them there and not letting your fingers stray.

With the memory card tucked under the battery cover, the only open ports are the Micro-USB plug on the lower left hand side, and the 3.5 mm audio jack on top. It’s nice to have a standard audio plug again, though I wouldn’t object to having all the plugs on the bottom, so that I could have a nice car dock for the thing, but that’s rather a nitpick.

Overall, the build quality feels good, the design is sleek and very usable, and it packs all it’s features into a very reasonable size and weight.

PERFORMANCE

Even if you thought the physical design of the Motorola Droid Pro was a bit basic, you’ll love what’s under the hood. On paper, this model has almost everything you could possibly want packed into a business phone.

It starts with a hardware set designed for performance: a 1 GHz TI OMAP 3620 processor and 512 MB of RAM, plus 1.5 GB of internal storage for your data. There’s also a 2 GB microSD card included.

All of this stacks up to mean amazing performance. Full-screen transitions, sliding gestures, window animations, even with plenty of stuff running in the background, it was all as smooth as an oil slick behind a Zamboni. I’m certain that there’s some situation or program which could slow this thing down, but I couldn’t find it, even when running high end games or applications.

Wireless/Call Quality
Add to that high performance base the standard wireless accessories: CDMA/EV-DO Rev. A for-voice and data on Verizon in the U.S., GPS with network-assistance and geotagging, WiFi b/g/n, and Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR.

Then you start on the rarer components. A secondary cell phone connection in the form of quad-band GSM/EDGE and tri-band HSPA adds worldwide coverage: unlike most Verizon phones, you can take this phone overseas and it will still work.

Mind you, if you intend to use Verizon’s overseas roaming service you’re going to be charged by the limb, but that’s kind of to be expected. You can, of course, get the GSM module unlocked, and then use cheaper prepaid services around the world, at the expense of not having your usual phone number.

It also features dual CDMA antennas for better than average signal performance, giving me multiple bars in areas that are normally sketchy.

Productivity
Despite the fact that I’ve been neck deep in mobile technology for many years, the Droid Pro is actually my first extended chance to use a device running Google’s Android OS. I was very curious to see how it would turn out, since I hadn’t really developed a firm impression or opinion of the Android platform from the brief look and play opportunities I’d had.

My first impressions were extremely positive. Granted one has to attribute a lot of the software experience to having good quality hardware behind it — the smooth-as-glass performance, the advanced looks, and the robust storage all help to ease the learning curve. But more important than the performance is the true software experience. Complete interoperability between applications, down to the level of being able to hand off a scanned barcode from one app to another from a different, competing developer. Or the integration of OS-level security into the mix to allow you the protection of guaranteed apps, as well as the freedom to go beyond what Google gives you.

Speaking of apps, they’re the centerpiece of the experience. The minute that I got into the Android Marketplace, I think I fell in love. It is, to put it simply, the sort of one-look-one-touch system for finding and installing applications I’ve been looking for for years. Or put another way, the thing that Microsoft never did for Windows Mobile, and should have. If it had, the company might have been in the position Google is right now, instead of having to jettison their entire former platform and start over.

The apps that come with the Droid Pro are basic but good — a complete Office suite and PDF viewer, multiple-account email client with support for a variety of platforms, navigation apps (both Google’s own and Verizon’s VZ Navigator), along with the usual packing peanuts.

Unsurprisingly, the device’s email implementation is most friendly toward GMail. Since I normally use Exchange Server synchronization on my Samsung Jack, I attempted to set up the same, only to discover that it’s a little more complicated. Not that I should be surprised, since Exchange is a Microsoft platform, and here I am asking it to play nice with Google. Eventually, I got it working with the help of the instructions off the Motorola website, but the lesson is to plan for a little more complexity when interfacing across platform brands. Nevertheless, it does work out of the box, even before the wandering eye is drawn to Google’s support framework.

Here’s what I did: I touched the button on the phone marked “Marketplace.” About ten seconds later I was scrolling through a list of hundreds of brilliant, absolutely free applications, all of which could be downloaded and installed in the background with two button presses, while I kept searching for more apps. It’s hard to overstate how easy to use it is.

And these aren’t your run of the mill free calculators and miniature pocket dictionaries. These are some amazingly powerful applications. One of the first ones I downloaded was Google Translate — and if you’ve never actually seen this app in action, it is hard to describe just how impressive it is. Speak any phrase into it, and within seconds it can read aloud a proper translation for the phrase in the language of your choice. This ranges from “Where is the airport” to “Do you enjoy anchovies on your pizza?” For that matter, it will tell you how to ask about anchovies in Welsh or Yiddish.

Or let’s talk about Google Sky Map. This free app uses the device’s internal gyrosensor to track where exactly you’re pointing the thing, and act like a perfect window to display constellations through, and can adjust the orientation automatically based on your GPS location.

Or ZXing Barcode Scanner, which can use the camera to automatically read and look up both 2D and 3D barcodes, including the QR codes that provide instant links to application downloads or websites. And it reads them right off the computer screen.

From Google-search-by-voice to recording DVD-resolution video; from being able to solve complicated math questions almost as fast as you can read them out loud to being able to signal in Morse code using the camera’s LED flash, the standard software package is impressive, and the available add-ons are even more so.

I also need to mention the voice command integration. The impressive part about the Droid Pro’s voice command system isn’t that Android has it — we’ve been experimenting with voice-commanded computers for a very long time. The impressive part is how ruthlessly accurate it is. I have yet to have it get a word wrong when I’m enunciating properly, and it’s still far better than 90% when speaking casually. In fact, I just read the previous sentence to it, and it picked the thing up word for word. I even tested it with obscure, easily missed words like “ferrets,” “anchovies,” and “Wookie.” For the record, it had the most trouble with “ferrets,” which it mistook about half the time for “parents.” But it recognized “Wookie” fine.

In a much more practical application, right out of the box you can order it to dial your contacts by name — without recording voice tags or doing any other setup work. Once it had slurped down my contact information, I simply said “Call Adama,” and my regular cell phone was ringing. You can also dictate text messages and emails with a fair degree of accuracy — not something that you’d need to do in most circumstances, but highly useful if, say, you’re driving somewhere and need to write an urgent reply.

Entertainment
The Droid Pro isn’t sold as a multimedia phone — it’s solidly targeted at business users, a fact Motorola isn’t shy of, emphasizing the bundling of Office applications and the strong password administration support. But make no mistake, if you don’t mind the slightly smaller screen, you can have a very happy multimedia experience.

To emphasize that, the Droid Pro comes equipped for working with Digital Living Network Alliance products, a system for allowing various entertainment products to work together. For instance, being able to stream video from a set-top digital video recorder, or use the Droid Pro to control the interaction of other DLNA equipment like a remote. Lacking any other DLNA-certified equipment, I couldn’t really test this, but the concept looks like it could be brilliant if it takes off and is implemented well.

Even the default browser is quite comfortable, more so even than my usual standby of Opera Mini. I suspect that would change outside of 3G range and the high browsing speed it provides, but for now, the dynamic zoom and automatic reflowing win the day.

As mentioned above, the Droid Pro is faster than hell. And it handles all it’s applications like a champion, even the high end ones that it’s not marketed towards.

Battery Life
The only sour note I have to sound about the Droid Pro’s performance is the one which, when you think about it, is fairly obvious. The more you use all that amazing hardware, the faster you’re going to eat the battery.

I had my review unit fully charged at 2:30, and by 7 PM with all the playing I had done, the battery was down to 15%. I’ve seen worse, but it’s certainly nothing to write home about. I’m accustomed to getting a full day of heavy use, but that expectation isn’t based on a larger screen and what is, in fact, a relatively small battery for the hardware it’s powering.

There’s a nifty little OS component that will tell you in detail what is consuming your battery life. To no surprise, 65% of my power drain was in the form of the screen. The Droid Pro does have a setting to automatically adjust the screen’s brightness, however the automatic setting is too low for my taste relative to the ambient lighting, and unlike on other devices with a light sensor, you can’t give it any guidance as to whether you’d like it just a little brighter or darker than its defaults.

It doesn’t help that Android’s default menus and screens are almost all white text on black backgrounds, making them much harder to see in a lit environment. Indeed, I had to turn up the brightness considerably to be able to see clearly, which led me to my second noteworthy complaint. Specifically, Android doesn’t make it easy for you to choose anything but the default color scheme. There is no way built into the device to choose different colors, and even with some of the third party launcher replacements, you can only get part of the way. I installed ADW Launcher, which allowed me to change the color of the app drawer, but menus were still all white text on black backdrop.

This may seem like a little thing, but it’s important because it has to do with user comfort. Users shouldn’t need to crank up their screen brightness to compensate for absurdly dark colors they can’t change. When you’re not dealing with that, the automatic screen brightness is much more to my taste.

As far as the larger power issue goes, there are some settings you can tweak to help reduce battery drain, such as the frequency of data and GPS updates, there’s supposed to be an extended battery option available soon through Verizon, however it’s rated at 1820 mAh, only 28% larger than the standard 1420 mAh cell. I’d really like to see an option to add a little padding to the entire back of the device in trade for, say, 2 to 2.5 times the standard battery power. That would give the power hogs like myself the guarantee that we could get through a rough day without worrying overmuch about conserving juice. If I’m lost and depending on the GPS, or making a lot of calls to manage a situation, I don’t want to worry whether the battery will hold out.

While these two things are my biggest issues with the Droid Pro as a device, in the big picture they’re relatively minimal. Both can be either fixed or reduced by software eventually, and frequent charging is a reality of life for smartphone users, particularly high end ones.

CONCLUSION

I have to say that it’s been quite a long while since I got the raw thrill from playing with a gadget that I have from the Motorola Droid Pro.

While it’s obvious that the state of the art in mobile tech improves, the difference is more than just a hardware upgrade — it’s the fact that the Droid Pro and the Android platform are well thought out and robust in ways that others simply aren’t.

The difference is like driving every day in a basic sedan, and then suddenly being handed the keys to a well built luxury car. It shows you all the little things that you didn’t realize could be done so much better. And while in the end you may not technically need those things, I dare say that most people would choose to have them.

The Droid Pro delivers a solid business-oriented device that also makes plenty of room for recreational use. I’m sold.

Pros:

• Great hardware specs
• Sleek, easy-to-use design
• Excellent operating system

Cons:

• Can eat battery power quickly
• Some buttons too easy to push

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