Nexus One Developer Phone | Hacker News Reader

Nexus One Developer Phone

android-developers.blogspot.com

70 pointsdavidw35 comments

Answers to FFAQs (future FAQs):

1. T-Mobile-only 3G freqs at this time. No AT&T 3G-compatible model currently available. The phone will work on AT&T with the slower EDGE data, however.

2. It still uses an AMOLED screen. It does not use an LCD as recently reported in the media.

3. Limit 10 phones per developer.

4. Limited shipping destinations, per:

The Nexus One is carrier independent, and available for purchase in the approved markets (Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States) by any developer registered with Android Market™.

I'm using my Nexus One on AT&T with 3G. Is it somehow a different model?

Yes, there is a separate model compatible with AT&T's 3G.

(no longer for sale)

I'd love to see Mexico added to that list :(

I wonder about the applications we would be able to hack up (and the excellent handset we would be able to lay our hands over).

Do you know what networks it works with in other countries? I'm interested in getting one in the UK. Or is it just a matter of using a SIM that has 3G support etc.

You should be good to go. The UMTS bands utilized in the UK are 2100/900.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMTS_frequency_bands#Multi-band

Wrong 2100, I think. The European IMT band (2100 down 1900 up) is not compatible with the North American AWS band (2100 down, 1700 up). The Nexus One will be stuck on Edge in the UK as far as I know.

The t-mob version works fine on Voda 3G here in the UK

Looking at the specs it seems the N1 supports UMTS GSM band 8 (900MHz), which is probably what vodaphone is using.

I used my US/T-mobile enabled Nexus One in the UK just a few weeks ago when traveling to EuroPython in Birmingham, UK. When I arrived in London's Paddington Station, I bought a pre-paid £20 Vodafone SIM chip (don't forget to ask for data access, too!) I was quite happy with the results. No problems whatsover. Android 2.2's wifi tethering worked very well -- I loved having 'net access when the rest of the conference wifi network was a tad flaky. The £20 lasted for a full week of several calls back to the states and tons of data usage. If you're local to the UK, I'm sure you can get a better deal on a SIM chip.

It should work with all networks in the UK. It's a nice phone for international usage due to the supported frequencies. The reason the US has problems is their two main networks use incompatible technologies.

You would need to ask your provider about frequency compatibility.

If your provider supports the UMTS bands listed below, you're good to go. Most likely, your UK provider does not, so you would only be able to utilize EDGE.

The SIM normally doesnt have anything to do with whether you get 3G or not.

Phone specs for reference: * UMTS Bands (900/AWS/2100 MHz) HSDPA 7.2 Mbps HSUPA 2 Mbps GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz) *

I hope this helps.

Still no info on how much the shipping will cost outside the US as usual.

See here for shipping rates and import fees for various countries:

http://android.brightstarcorp.com/help.htm

Why can't they just have an iPod Touch like alternative with just wi-fi? That's probably a lot cheaper and even be easier on the students side thereby possibly spawning wonderful classes like the Stanford iPhone one.

It's worth noting that it's not for sale worldwide, unlike the previous dev phone (?):

> The Nexus One is carrier independent, and available for purchase in the approved markets (Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States) by any developer registered with Android Market™.

I ordered a Nexus One to Norway a couple of weeks ago, and I had to use a proxy delivery service; Google only shipped to US addresses. So I think this is unchanged.

Ah, great news. I'm a big fan of the android platform, but it's severely hamstrung by the providers and the manufacturers - even HTC slaps Sense on top of android, and the Wifi tethering feature isn't earning many friends from the networks. The N1 is about the only unadulterated Android out there, so it's good to know they're still available.

As well as being an outstanding developer platform, it's a really nice everyday phone;

IIRC, previous developer phones were not allowed to download/run paid Market applications, to reduce piracy. Is that also the case for this phone? If so, that might make it less desirable as an everyday phone.

I believe the block was actually only on Market apps that had the copy-protect flag enabled.

Google has (as of last week with the release of the licensing service) changed their stance on the copy protection flag, advising developers to use the new licensing service instead and not set the copy protect flag at all.

This limitation has been gone for at least 6 months, even on the previous phone. At least for HTC ION, (it's the only phone I had with this limitation).

I thought it already was the developer phone. Is this just making that official?

Pretty much. And since anybody can sign up as a "developer", this is really a way for Google to keep selling the N1 to geeks without having to pretend to care about customer support. Which is probably the best way to go; those of us who want an unlocked and unrestricted Android phone can get one, and it won't annoy the carriers quite as much since it's not targeted at general consumers.

A Motorola Droid is $440ish, almost $100 cheaper for what looks to me like a better phone.

Any thoughts? I'm an iPhone developer, but I'm considering dipping my toe in the Android water, and I'll need a decent phone. I'm thinking of going 2.0 and up, rather than kill myself supporting a whole bunch of different apis.

The Motorola Droid is nearly a year old and has lower specs - half the RAM and slower processor. Plus the Droid won't fully support all of the new features in 2.2, such as tethering. Droid 2 apparently launches next week and will be on par with the Nexus One/Desire/Incredible/Galaxy S/Evo/Droid X.

If you just want a device to develop apps with just buy a used Droid for under $200.

For me, the killer feature of Android 2.2 (and the Nexus One) is the built-in wifi tethering support. T-mobile is kind enough to not charge for this feature. Find out if you can run Android 2.2 on your phone, and if (or how much) your carrier will charge for it. For N1+Tmobile, the answers are "Yes", and "No extra charge".

For the Droid and Verizon, the answers are 1) You can run 2.2, 3) but the built-in tethering is disabled.

The main advantage of having an official "developer" model like the N1 is immediate access to the latest OS. Google pushes updates to the developer models much faster than carriers do, which means you get all the updated features on actual hardware much sooner than your carrier-locked counterparts.

The Droid does have a physical keyboard, but after owning both a G1 and a Palm Pre, I don't really trust any sliding keyboard mechanism to not get crunchy and/or loose after a few months' use.

With the little exception that some users will miss out because of their carrier, pretty worthless phone to have without the 3G

At one point in time the unlocked developer phone they sold was the G1: http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/google-offers-unlocked-a...

Does anyone know if the developer phone come with a warranty and customer support? The original Nexus One sold by Google had a 1 year warranty and phone support.

Does anyone else hit a SQL error when trying to order from Canada?

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No, as a reference implementation without random stuff added by whatever manufacturer.

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