Experiences in Day 2

After an overnight charge, Nexus S is ready to be used with 100% battery life. Just so happen that this day is my convocation ceremony, so Nexus S can be a perfect companion for calling and photo/video shooting. And this day I have decided to use the phone at full brightness (the auto-brightness is turned off), just to see how well can the battery performed.

Call quality is really good, as mentioned in Day 1, and the user interface for calling is pretty intuitive. Texting with this phone is not bad with the new keyboard in Gingerbread, but it definitely wasn’t designed to be used with one hand. When I am texting one-handed, my thumb always tend to touch the smiley key on the keyboard, which considerably delayed the texting process. To resolve this issue, I decided to install Swype beta in the Nexus S, and this is no longer an issue. However, I have to say the default keyboard definitely works well with two-handed texting, both in landscape and portrait mode.

Camera has been well tested in Day 2, and both the photo and video quality aren’t too bad, though it is definitely not the best, especially considering that quite a number of phones have been equipped with 8MP or higher camera, however, Nexus S camera performing surprisingly well in low-light condition. As a food lover, this phone is a perfect companion to shoot food photos. The auto-focus function of the camera helps a lot in taking macro photos. Nevertheless, the user interface of the camera app giving me a headache to look for the camera settings, especially in landscape mode (they are too well hidden) , which is really bad, considering the amount of studies they have made since Android 1.5. It doesn’t involve rocket science to include a settings button/options somewhere on the camera user interface, so I am fairly disappointed on this one.

Next up, performance. To test the performance of the hardware in Nexus S, benchmark is the only way to go. However, the famous Aurora Softworks’s Quadrant currently doesn’t support Google Nexus S, so the benchmark results most probably not accurate. However, I have decided to just run once to see how is Nexus S performed in the benchmark. The result wasn’t too bad, with the score of 1402, which is slightly higher than the score of Nexus One with Android 2.2+, though it is definitely can’t be used as an official score since Nexus S isn’t supported in Quadrant.

Battery life of Nexus S left 34% after a full 24 hours with random photographs, web browsing, tweeting, email synchronizing, calling etc. with full brightness setting, so the 1500 mAH Lithum Ion battery definitely did its job pretty well in Nexus S. I believe if the optimized brightness setting is used, with push email turned off, Nexus S can definitely last for at least 2 days without charging. How to prove this? This will be my main objective in Day 3 and Day 4.

Stay tuned!