I've used the Nexus One intensively for a few days at CES; what follows are my impressions from that experience. We also have a full review of the phone in the works, complete with benchmarks and comparisons with the Motorola DROID.

There was a considerable amount of "what's the big deal" in the collective online response to Google's Nexus One phone announcement, but you wouldn't know that from the show floor at CES. Everyone's talking about it, everyone wants to see it, and when I pull mine out and give a brief demo, I get a small taste of what it must be like to be a real celebrity.

In fact, the Nexus One is easily the most talked-about gadget from a vendor who has no presence at CES, and the mystery and rarity of the device are probably a large part of what have kept people talking.

But does the reality live up to the hype, especially after a few days of heavy use? The preliminary answer from this former iPhone and (probably former) Pre user is a qualified "sorta." Here are my thoughts on the Nexus One review unit that Google provided, in no particular order.

The hardware

I'm a sucker for the first-gen iPhone. I still have mine, and I like the way it feels: it's solid, dense, sturdy, and thin. It just feels less "cheap" than the iPhone 3G. This affection for the original iPhone form factor positively disposed me toward the Nexus One, because the new Google phone feels almost the same. The rounded corners, the metal, the glass touchscreen—it's as if HTC deliberately set out to resurrect the feel of the first iPhone.

As for the display, the 3.7 inch, 800 x 480 AMOLED screen is probably the device's biggest selling point. I'm not someone who reads much on the phone, mainly because the blogs I read in my spare time tend to have lots of photos, charts, graphs, and other non-text objects embedded in them. Neither the iPhone nor the Pre really have enough pixels to do this kind of reading justice, but the Nexus One gets considerably closer.

The OLED technology makes the screen a pleasure to use. My eyes feel more relaxed when I'm reading on the Nexus One, and it's a significant upgrade from even the best LCD screens in a way that's hard to quantify. In fact, I would actually rather read on the Nexus One than on my Macbook Air's LED LCD; I could even see myself reading long-form content on the phone, and I hope that Amazon brings a Kindle app to it, soon.

Google and HTC included a small bit of haptic feedback in the device, and it really works well. Whenever you tap certain core interface buttons, the device vibrates slightly, letting you know that you've tapped something important.

My only criticism of the hardware is that the little glowing pearl at the bottom of the screen seems pointless, but this could be because I'm not in the habit of using it. In most apps, it just acts as a scroll wheel, but by habit I use my finger to scroll. The pearl also glows different colors for different types of notifications, but I haven't bothered to learn what the color code is and I don't expect that I will.

The battery life on the Nexus One is excellent, so far. I've subjected it to a few days of hard use, Tweeting, IMing, e-mailing, doing RSS, surfing, and making a few brief voice calls, and the battery lasts all day. I haven't done any real benchmarking, but subjectively the battery life seems considerably superior to that of the Palm Pre.

On a final note, I've gotten very good results from T-Mobile both here in Vegas and in San Francisco. The only place I've had connection problems was the Las Vegas Airport; everywhere else, including on the CES show floor, calls have been clear and webpages have loaded quickly.

Meanwhile, gaming editor Ben Kuchera's iPhone has been practically unusable. Dropped calls and a slow 3G connections have given him fits, to the point where he forced me (at Nerf gunpoint) to include this comment on wireless service despite the fact that I planned to stick to hardware and software.

A word about Android

The Android 2.1 software is at once my favorite and least favorite part of the Nexus One experience. On the one hand, I'm thrilled to once again have access to an app store with more than 500 apps in it—I love downloading and trying new apps, and the 10,000-app Android Marketplace lets me scratch that itch.

Some of the individual apps are great, too: Seesmic is a solid Twitter client, and Gread works well with Google Reader for RSS, and most of the native Google apps are fantastic (the calendar is lame, however).

But when it comes to fit-and-finish, Apple's iPhone OS and Palm's webOS have Android 2.1 beat. Both Apple's and Palm's OS have many more nice touches and polished corners than Android, which is still slightly rough around the edges in the UI department. Android still feels Linux-y to me in places, but I'm sure that will change as the OS evolves. Fortunately, apart from the calendar app, there's nothing that I look at and go "ewwww."

Aside from general UI polish, my current Pre still has two non-trivial advantages over Android and the iPhone: Synergy and the multitasking paradigm. The former is something that could probably be ported to Android, at least on an app-by-app basis (e.g., a contacts app that combines contacts from all of your services, and an IM app that bundles SMS and IM). The latter, though, presents a deeper problem.

The webOS "card" metaphor is a really great way to do multitasking on a mobile phone, and neither Apple nor Google have anything that matches it. You can definitely multitask on Android, but if you really want to manage your running apps you have to use third-party process viewers, killing off apps that you don't want to run.

Criticisms aside, though, the advantages of the Nexus One add up to offer a smartphone experience that's superior to the Pre and comparable to the iPhone. To be more specific, if webOS ran on the Nexus One's hardware, and if Palm's app store had a few thousand apps, I wouldn't even consider switching. As far as the iPhone 3GS is concerned, the Nexus One is more of a very pleasant, viable Apple alternative than an "iPhone killer."

While Apple need not feel threatened, yet, Palm will really need to shake things up on the hardware and software front to prevent the mobile scene from turning into a two-horse race.