Google's phone: Nexus One

New York: Google sure does love shaking up the system.

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 cell phones - 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, on Tuesday, Google took the wraps off what may be the worst-kept secret on the Internet: a brand-new cell phone, 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, Palm Pre and Motorola Droid. You'll pay $529 without a two-year contract for service with T-Mobile or $179 with one.

But the truth is, the Google news this week isn't quite as earthshaking as Google seems to think it is.

First, the new phone. It's almost exactly the size and shape of the iPhone. Like most HTC phones, 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 one-day battery and a camera with a 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 ("unfortunately," "unfortunate," "unfolding"), which you can tap, thus saving yourself more fiddly typing-on-glass.

Radically enough, you can also dictate anywhere you can type. 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. (The free Dragon Dictation app for iPhone does the same thing with better accuracy, but you have to copy and paste the results into your other programs.)

As you'd guess, the Nexus uses Google's own Android operating system, so it's very similar to, for example, the Motorola Droid phone.

You get an impressive, free, turn-by-turn GPS navigation program, and soon you'll be able to buy a bedside dock that automatically turns the Nexus into a terrific alarm clock/weather/music station.

Google did make a few updates to the software especially for the Nexus, though. For example, 10 of the available screen backgrounds (wallpaper) are animated; one of them plasters the screen behind your icons with tall blowing grass against a blue sky that actually darkens as the day turns to night. It's totally pointless and even distracting, but very cool indeed.

There's better integration all around: You can upload pictures and videos straight to YouTube, Picasa, Facebook and so on, for example, and you can tap a person's name and choose how you want to initiate contact (e-mail, phone, text message). And you have five "home screens" to fill with the icons of your apps (up from three on the Droid). All of these changes will soon come to other Android phones as a software update.

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 18,000 fun little games; there are well over 100,000 for the iPhone.

Worse, even if you find a lot of good ones, you might not have anywhere to install them. The Nexus can accommodate memory cards up to 32 gigabytes (a 4 gigabyte card comes with it) - and yet, inexplicably, the Nexus allots only the tiniest sliver of that (190 megabytes) for downloaded apps.

The Nexus doesn't come with any iTunes-style companion software, either. Enterprising geeks know about the free DoubleTwist program for Mac or Windows, which simulates iTunes for the purposes of loading up your phone with music, photos and videos. But even DoubleTwist doesn't let you shop the Android app store from the comfort of your computer; you have to do it on the cramped little phone.

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, as you can on the iPhone and Palm phones.

Sadly, the Nexus One also lacks a multi-touch screen like the iPhone's. 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. One of the animated wallpapers freezes the phone with a message that says: "Sorry! The application Android Live Wallpapers has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again." (Note to Google: I did. The same thing happened.)

But maybe it doesn't matter if the Nexus One isn't nirvana. Google says it's only the first Google phone of many, with one store to sell them all.

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. No more "You want an iPhone? Then you get AT&T."

Well, it's about time! Rise up in the streets! Power to the people! Truth shall triumph!

Or not.

I mean, it's a great idea and all. It's just that, well, apart from the iPhone, who really cares which carrier has a certain phone? In the list of complaints about American cell phone carriers sent to me by readers, that one is waaaaaay down the list.

Besides, the Google phone store doesn't really do much to solve the problem. In this country, there are two competing network formats. There's CDMA (used by Verizon and Sprint) and there's GSM (favored by AT&T and T-Mobile, and most other countries).

The current Nexus One is a GSM phone. So when you buy it online, you get the following vast menu of carriers: T-Mobile.

Wow, that changes everything, doesn't it?

Google says that a CDMA version for Verizon is coming in the spring. If you already have an AT&T SIM card, you insert that and the phone will work with AT&T service - but only on its slow last-generation EDGE network.

But still, how is this any different from the way current phones (BlackBerry, Palm Treo, etc.) are offered by different carriers?

Google offers the Nexus either with a contract (if you're lucky enough to live where T-Mobile has a signal) or without one.

If you buy the no-contract phone, you pay T-Mobile $20 a month less for your service than someone who opts for the two-year contract. Which makes sense, since the whole point of the two-year contract is for you to reimburse the carrier for the full price of that phone over time.

But that's T-Mobile's brave policy, not Google's. There's no word yet on whether the Verizon version will offer the same no-contract discount, but I'm not holding my breath. (Furthermore, you can buy any T-Mobile phone at full price, with a lower monthly service plan. This, too, is not a Google exclusive.)

This is all supposed to be a huge break from the current way of doing cell phone 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 - you do all of the choosing on one Web site, and your phone comes in the mail already activated - but it's really not such a new idea.

Google hopes to expand its online phone store, to really shake things up, to put some fear into the entrenched industry players. It plans to sell more phones, from Google and other companies, each with a choice of carriers. It's a noble ambition.

But at the start, at least, the results are a pair of head-scratchers. The Nexus One is an excellent app phone, fast and powerful but marred by some glitches and missing features - a worthy competitor to the Droid, if not the iPhone. The Google phone store is a neat, centralized place to buy phones, but so far, it offers zero advantages over buying a T-Mobile phone any other way.

Even so, you should root for the Google Store's success, because the obnoxious policies and fees of the American cell phone companies have gotten out of control. Anything with even a fighting chance of putting power and choice back in your hands is cause for celebration.