TL;DR: Good handset, Android does work, not as polished or reliable as but more flexible than iOS, not as boring or annoying as BlackBerry, makes calls, sends texts, takes good pictures, plays Angry Birds.

So.

The Google Nexus One.

Nerd facts:

Hardware
800x480 AMOLED display with capacitative multitouch
1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU
512MB RAM
512MB on-board storage
16GB MicroSD storage
Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and Tri band HSDPA/HSUPA
A-GPS and digital compass (and a 3-axis accelerometer)
802.11b/g/n Wifi
Bluetooth 2.0
Noise-cancelling dual microphones
5MP camera with LED light and autofocus
Trackball with funky coloured LEDs

Software
Android 2.2.1 (CyanogenMod 6.1)

I bought this from a friend a couple of weeks ago (top chap, it was in great condition with all the bits, deal in confidence etc etc), it arrived last week, and I've had a week or so to play with it and get used to it.

The hardware is good; fit and finish is neat and tidy for the most part. There are two parts of the battery door that could be better; the surround of the camera lens has a nice-when-new-but-will-mark-if-you-breathe-on-it finish, and where the door meets the top of the phone, it's not quite flush. It's only fractions of a millimetre out, but it's noticeable.

The phone has a very solid feel in the hand, and weighs enough to lend confidence but is light enough to make extended talking on it very comfortable. One thing I noticed, though, and this is a general observation about smartphones these days, is that it doesn't half get warm if you exercise the CPU by, for example, playing a lot of Angry Birds.

I like the trackball - not for its tracking ball features (although this is handy when selecting text) but for the fact that it can be made to light up in a colour of your choosing when notifications occur. This was one of the very few features of BlackBerry OS (albeit with the BeBuzz third-party add-on) that I liked unreservedly.

There are few external controls; other than the trackball, there's a volume control on the top-left side, and a lock button on top. That's it. Speaking of volume, the ringer isn't all that loud, even at top whack. Thankfully, the vibrate is vigorous.

The AMOLED display is very bright and clear - I've never seen blacks as deep on a phone's screen - with a responsive touchscreen. One oddity I encountered is that, a couple of times, the touchscreen didn't want to respond when I had the phone connected to my Mac via USB; I had to unplug it to let me answer the phone. Weirdly, I could still do other things (like unlock it and run apps and whatnot), so I think that may be a little bugette in Android. I like the haptic feedback a lot; it really works well to let you know that you did actually press that button.

The basic phone functions - talking and SMS - work well. I like the Messaging application and the way it presents texts in a conversation, and I like both the phone dialler and the way the Contacts application integrates with everything. Call logging is very good, but oddly there are no overall call timers. I don't know why I care about how long I've been on the phone, but I do, and short of buying third-party applications or adding it up yourself, there seems to be no way of getting this summarised information.

In daily use as a phone, it's fine. It's hard to accidentally answer the phone, thus minimising the possibility of someone ringing you up and talking to the inside of your arse pocket. Voice quality is great and earpiece volume more than adequate. Texting is a joy.

I'd read a lot about this thing called Swype, and if you'd believe the Internet, you'd think that the standard Android keyboard was some horror from the depths of Pigeon's chicken tin. You know what? fcuk the Internet. There's nothing wrong with the stock Android keyboard. It's accurate, it's got sensible autocorrect, you can turn it sideways to make the keys bigger if you've got sausage fingers, you can type symbols on it easily. It just bloody works. If you're that hamfisted, buy a phone with a hardware keyboard.

There's a lot of software installed. Lots of Google software - Gmail, Maps, Navigation, Latitude, a calendar, a search thing, and so on - but there're a couple of weird omissions and shortcomings. The calculator is absolutely spasticated (seriously - it doesn't even do percentages), there's no notes app, not even the simplest game of Klondike solitaire, no digital clock widget (although there is a full-screen clock program). All of these things can be fixed by installing things from the Market (of which more later), but I'd rather see these basic things in the default setup.

Email is not very exciting, but it works. For some reason, Google have chosen to supply a Gmail application and an Email application. This is retarded. The two applications look the same (except the Gmail app doesn't respect the system theme; I've got a dark theme which is nicer to look at and saves battery (seriously; AMOLED pixels don't use leccy when they're not on), and Gmail (and other Google applications) cheerfully disregards this), feel the same and work the same. Pointless differentiation.

Navigation and maps work great when you've got a decent data connection, and are a sack of cack when you haven't. To be expected.

The web browser is great. Pisses from a great height on anything Opera or RIM bring to the mobile browsing table, and is very nearly as good as Safari on iOS. Multiple windows, good bookmarking, great navigation, beautiful page rendering - this is a first class mobile web browser. Also, the pages smoothly scroll up and down when you flick through, which makes it a very tactile and rewarding experience. There's one fly in the ointment - there are no Microsoft Web Fonts installed, so some pages look a little odd. The Android fonts are, without question, beautifully designed and rendered, but a little variety would be nice.

The Android Market is a big part of the Android experience. Navigating it on the phone is not so great, so it's good that there's a website too. It's divided into sections, and into free/paid, and there's a search-o-matic, but good god, if you thought there were a lot of shit apps in the iOS App Store, then the Android Market takes it to a whole new level. There are entire applications which are spam, blatant ripoffs and all the fart apps for which iOS's App Store is derided. There are some brilliant applications, though. I've installed a fancy-pants clock'n'weather thing, an Amazon thing, the Facebook app, a barcode scanner that actually works, Adobe Reader (although I've not tried it, I'm confident that it's just as good as their desktop software, i.e. a bit shit), some other stuff I forget, and a decent calculator and notes app.

I'm very interested in sync. I don't do SIM contacts, and I like to have my phone in a state where I can simply drop it in a pint, get a new one, plug it in, and after a while, have it all back the way it was. The iPhone is fcuking brilliant at this. I've set up Address Book on my Mac to sync with Google, and I'm pondering how to get my iCal stuff across, so this bit isn't flawless. Music is handled by a thing called iSyncr, which can work over wifi if you like. Works well. See playlist, tick playlist, wait a bit, music done.

I would have preferred some more integrated-with-OSX sync either via Sync Services (i.e. add a device to iSync) or with a dedicated desktop application, like RIM do with the BlackBerry Desktop Software. Perhaps this will come one day.

In summary, Android on the Nexus One is both better and worse than I expected. I'd played with Android before, but it was 1.6 on my son's Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, and it was shit and slow and ugly. The Nexus One is very fast, and the interface (at least on applications that aren't shit and weren't written by student spammers) is very nice, but I've had a couple of instability problems, not least of which was when I couldn't make the camera work without rebooting the phone. Take a picture, camera locks up when you try to take another.

Oh, and the music player is fine and the headphones are OK. I like that there's a printed android on the right earbud and it has a slightly raised texture; this means I can get my left/right sorted in the dark (for 3AM insomnia curage) without putting the light on. Handy.