Experiences in Day 3

Initial plan for testing out the maximum battery performance is decided to be postponed as I have decided to test the gaming performance of Nexus S. With the Quadrant score of unofficial 1402, I am very interested to see how Nexus S can cope up with the latest 3D games in Android, such as Need for Speed Shift and Dungeon Defenders, as well as the battery performance in gaming.

I got the phone installed with Angry Birds Season, Need for Speed Shift, and Dungeon Defenders. The latter took quite some times as it is a quite a huge game, and not to forget it is the first game in Android which is powered by Unreal Engine 3 Technology. It is a little bit disappointing that Nexus S doesn’t comes with the new nVidia Tegra 2 chip for maximum gaming performance, but the PowerVR SGX540 GPU on the Samsung Hummingbird won’t be too disappointing either.

After some major testing, Angry Birds Season performing smooth on the Nexus S, which is expected for its 1GHz processor. Need for Speed Shift performing pretty well too, though it is a little bit inconvenient to play due to the touch-sensitive buttons on the phone which is very prone to be pressed accidentally during the game. Since Dungeon Defenders has warned that it will only performed the best on the nVidia Tegra 2 based devices, so it is not surprising if the game doesn’t play smooth in the Nexus S. However, the performance of Dungeon Defenders isn’t too disappointed. It is fully playable, with slight lag occasionally, but it is still pretty impressive to play such a nice game on a mobile device. And all of this is done with low power consumption which is an advantage of Samsung Hummingbird, so Nexus S is capable of providing some serious gaming without sacrificing the battery life – Impressive.

Battery life of the Nexus S left 52% after some heavy duty gaming (3-4 hours) with Dungeon Defenders, which is really great. And only in Day 3, I started to look into importing all my contacts from my SIM card into my phone. I was expecting it to be a smooth process, unfortunately, it’s not. I go into Contacts > Import/Export > Import from SIM card > Google Account, and I saw the entire list of contacts stored in my SIM card. I click on one of the contact, then Import. Everything seems to be go correctly, but I failed to find my just-imported contact in my Contacts app. I tried the same thing again and again, but still, none of my contacts show up. After an almost 15 minutes of investigating, I found that my contacts are being filtered and became invisible, which can be changed at Display options. I wasn’t too sure what is happening, but I would think that it is just too ridiculous to hide the imported contacts in the first place. If an experienced Android user would need 15 minutes to figure out how to make the contacts visible, I do not sure the time needed for a new Android user for this. Another failure in user experience, in my opinion.

Next thing I looked into in the Nexus S is the Photo Gallery. The app act as a photo viewer with some basic editing capability, such as crop and rotation, and also tons of sharing options. One great sharing option in the gallery is definitely the dropbox synchronization, which allows you to save your photos into your dropbox wirelessly, without plugging the Nexus S into the computer. Life without internet is pretty hard now, right?

After a full day of gaming, dropbox synchronization, calling, messaging etc. with full brightness setting, Nexus S is left with 29% of battery life. The Samsung Hummingbird definitely play its role pretty well in low power consumption, so it is a right choice for Samsung to have this processor built-in, although it is definitely not a bad idea to build the second Google phone with Tegra 2.

Day 4 will be the day to test the maximum battery life with optimized settings such as low brightness, no vibration, 2G mode, no push email with average usage.