I have been carrying around a Nexus One for a couple of weeks (in addition to my somewhat nervous feeling Blackberry).  There is a ton to like about the Nexus.  It works fantastically well with all of Google’s services.  The setup is a cinch – just sign in with your Google account and let the phone and the cloud do the rest.  The screen looks great and transitions between apps are fast.  It can run multiple apps simultaneously.  The turn-by-turn directions are awesome.

Given all that, I find it surprising how complicated some of the default user experience is.  Here are just two of the things that struck me the most.  First, the four buttons at the bottom of the phone sometimes do different things if you keep them pressed longer.  For example, the home button, which clearly should take you to the home screen when you press it longer sometimes brings up a special overlay with additional features.  Shouldn’t a one time press of the menu button do that?  Is there really a need to have a button do two different things as the default configuration of the phone?

Second, the home screen is in the middle of a set of possible screens.  So you can have more app icons both to the left and to the right.  In addition, there are more icons that you get to by pressing an onscreen icon that looks like a bunch of tiny icons.  That’s for instance how you get to settings.  By default the settings icon does not appear on the home screen itself.  So this means when you are on the home screen and don’t see an icon, there are three (!) possible places it could be: to the left, to the right and on the “all icon” screen.

What strikes me about both of these is that they might be good for power users, but they make for a needlessly complicated first time experience.  I can’t help feel that it goes against the grain of some engineers to “dumb down” the experience, but I believe that it would help tremendously with adoption.

P.S. The four bottom buttons work much better when I use my thumb than any other finger (which is fine with me because I like single handed operation), just seems weird that when I try a different finger, I need to sometimes tap three or more times to make it work.