I ordered the Nexus One on Thursday around noon and it was engraved and shipped out that day and in Birmingham by Friday. I would have even had it before 7:00 p.m. if Fedex hadn’t screwed stuff up and thought that the address was incorrect. Which it wasn’t. But whatever. I got my phone the next day just like Google promised.

I wanted to spend some time with the Nexus One before I blogged about it so I wouldn’t be all, NEW! PHONE! SO! IN! LOVE! And I also wanted to set it up and put everything I use on it as well as just test it out. So let’s just pretend that this box has never been opened and I have not been playing with my shiny new Nexus One for the last day and having a big ol’ hard on for it.

Even the box is cool! Very streamlined and minimalistic. And contains a super awesome phone inside. See?

The bottom edges of the box are the 4 colors that make up the Nexus X when the phone starts up. Oh! Hello, brand new shiny phone.

Here’s a close up of the back of the phone.

Engraved with Property of Miss Pants (except my real name) because I paid a pretty penny for this and god forbid I should lose it. You better show ID to prove this is your phone if I find you with it. Also, you’ll note at the top that there is a camera lens for the 5MP camera. Next to that camera? LED flash that is ridiculously bright, but takes pretty fine pictures. See?

The nice thing about Android and Google phones is that if you have purchased any apps and then switch to a new phone? All your paid apps are immediately available in your downloads on the Market. Pretty awesome, right? No buying an app multiple times. Sure you have to go and find all the free ones, but that’s not always a bad thing because sometimes you find better stuff.

So here it is, all up and running. This is the screen you get when you go from sleep to wake. If you’ve watched any of the videos, then you’ll know that you just swipe the unlock icon to unlock the phone. I like this built in feature because it means less of a chance of unintentionally starting an app or butt dialing someone.

Here’s my home screen. With my G1, I used Open Home, but I am completely enamored right now with the live background of the regular screen as well as the little square down in the bottom center of the screen. See it? You tap that to pull up the app list. Like so.

Sorry about the crappy video. You can only do so much with crappy lighting and a Flip Video. I really wish my Flip had a macro setting.

Anyway, here’s a little comparison for you of the Nexus One next to the G1. I think you can figure out for yourself which is which. Click to embiggen.

So the Nexus One is slightly longer and wider, but about half as thick. And seems about half as light. But it still feels good in my hand. The apps definitely run faster and smoother than they did on my G1. There’s definitely a big difference between 1.6 and 2.1. For the most part, all the apps I used on my G1 work just fine on my Nexus One. I downloaded shapewriter for the keyboard. I really like it even though the normal keyboard is not difficult to use. But shapewriter really satisfies the lazy factor when it comes to typing. Though, a word to the wise, check to see what word it picks or you will send some really weird ass messages.

There is a native sync for MS Exchange e-mail. Calendar, not so much, but I can live with that. And the battery lasts way longer than my G1. However, you definitely want to have a task killer app as a lot of apps seem to really like to run in the background.

Final verdict? The Nexus One was worth every single red cent. I’m really glad I upgraded.