During the first week of 2010, Google began a “soft launch” of its new Android phone – the Nexus One. This light (130 gram) phone is the Internet search giant’s latest admission to the competitive smartphone market, which already has big hitters like Apple’s iPhone and the Blackberry series providing strong competition.

Android, Google’s mobile operating system, made its first well-known debut through the cell phone company T-Mobile and the phone model G1 last year in the United States. Since then, various other phone models with the Android operating system have appeared on the market, including the myTouch and also various Verizon models.

Like all the other Android models, the Nexus One boasts a fast reacting operating system that allows you to fully customize your home screen and multitask. Moreover, Android’s ability to automatically sync email, contacts, and calendar appointments from the phone with the phone user’s gmail account is a very unique feature. This feature keeps every important piece of data on the phone updated with changes in gmail and vice versa; this means that the phone user always has an accurate backup.

Android also has an application market on all of its phones that give users access to over 60,000 applications, many of which are free. There are applications from regular games to productivity applications like gas mileage calculators and even gps navigation applications. This market helps to make Android phones fully customizable because users can download as many applications as their phones can hold (which can be expanded with a micro SD card slot). Though this market contains nowhere near the amount of applications Apple’s iPhone offers its users, it is catching up quickly. This is especially due to Google offering application developing contests, which offer great incentives to professional and even weekend developers to start creating applications for the Android market.

Unlike previous Android phones, the Nexus One has a 3.5mm stereo jack, so users do not have to buy an adapter to convert the mini USB plug to a stereo jack. Moreover the new Nexus One has a 5-megapixel camera, where previous phones only had at most a little more than 3 megapixels. The camera also has an LED flash, which is a new edition as well and makes the camera much more useful.

Most notably, the Nexus One is being offered as an unlocked phone directly from Google. This means that you can buy this phone and use it with a sim card from nearly any mobile provider. The unlocked Nexus One retails for more than 500 dollars, but if you are a T-Mobile customer, or willing to become a T-Mobile customer, and extend your contract by two years, then you can purchase the phone for less than 180 dollars. Whether you choose to purchase the unlocked phone or the one for T-Mobile, the Nexus One offers some wonderful features that you will not get anywhere else – the phone is not only pretty but incredibly useful. You will not regret your investment.