The Nexus One has a slew of new features (like the new Android 2.1 OS, phone wide voice search, incredible multitasking support, and a full multitouch display) that a lot of other Android devices on the market don’t have and, in terms of speed and capability, really stands up against the iPhone’s (the 3GS and iPhone 3G included) on the market today.

Now, I’ve only had the device for a few days, but I can definitely say that my mobile productivity has increased greatly since switching from the iPhone already! The Nexus One is one of (if not) the fastest mobile phones available for purchase, with 512 MB of RAM and ROM and a 1 Ghz processor powering it, and because of this, and the Google Android OS’s ability to run multiple applications at at time, I’ve been able to scream through emails while surfing the web, listening to music, staying up to date on Facebook and Twitter, and taking notes in class, all at the same time, whereas on the iPhone I would have to jump from one app to the next individually, thus slowing down my work pace greatly (especially only on an iPhone 3G).

Another thing I will say is that the Google ecosystem just really seems to open up once you connect an Android device to your Google Account – suddenly things like Picasa, Google Voice and Maps, and so many other apps have new functionality and plug right into apps you’d already be using anyways. Its just a really easy and fun experience overall, and the way Android automatically backs up everything you do on the web for you, without any action on your behalf at all, is really convenient and great for when your always on the go.

I’ll leave you with a quick video of the Nexus One, and once I’ve spent a good amount of time with the phone I’ll definitely let you know if this device could truly be the toe-to-toe competitor of the iPhone we’ve all been waiting for!

The Google Nexus One – Unboxing And Quick Hands On Video

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It all depends on your needs and if and how you utilize any servers you may have. The NAS box I brought was cheap and not power hungry. However it can act as a dhcp server, ftp server, itunes library (has bonjour) and a print server…. but I just wanted to use it for basic network storage. It runs a cut down version of linux for it’s operating system and you need to allow up to three minutes for boot up.

In the poor quality picture below you can see the network and usb connector. I have tried this box with a usb printer before and it worked well. Then the attached printer is seen on the network and easy to install.

The install….

I have used this NAS box before with raid and it worked well, but I only wanted to install one old hard drive (a 60gig ide) this time I had spare. If you are considering a NAS box purely for part of a backup procedure, then buying two indentical hard drives and using raid is a good idea.

As you will notice from the picture, space is tight and I choose to connect the ide cable to the hard drive before I screwed the hard drive rack into place. This gave me a bit more room to work with.

Now this isn’t a quiet hard drive I used and in this NAS box it truly sounds like I am in a server room. Loud enough that it won’t be sitting in the main area, instead in another room out of the way.

I had previously upgraded the firmware to the latest version. Before I used the nas box again I reset the device by using a unfolded paperclip in the reset switch on power up and leaving it for ten seconds or so. I had also plugged in a network cable linking it directly to the router acting as a dhcp server. On boot up it was given a dhcp address which I then I worked out which is easy enough (I could of just connected it solely to a laptop / desktop computer and it would of then used a default ip address after the reset).

You access the configuration via your browser (chrome, firefox, IE  etc) and once logged in, straight away I changed the password for the device and gave it a static ip address. Then I formatted the hard drive. I could chose partition types ext2, ext3 and fat32. I left the default ext2. There is also a scandisk option and encryption, which I didn’t want to use.

Next step was to configure the users, which is very easy. You can assign users their own directories, allowed spaced, password etc or just share a specific area to a defined group of users.

Once setup it was then just a case of browsing to the network device via windows explorer.

From here I can access and map a directory to a drive letter on the computer if wanted. Plus if a printer had been connected I could of installed a printer also to be used on this computer.

So the conclusion? It’s noisy, but it’s very good. It’s feature rich, cheap, low powered, small, easy to configure and use. However if you want an external hard drive, but no need for network sharing a cheaper usb hard drive enclosure might be a better alternative for you. I will write a blog post regarding those soon.

For further reading material regarding the device I used and similar models you can visit: http://mrt.nas-central.org/wiki/Main_Page

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