I’ve been using my old Nexus One (running Android 2.3) for the past week, while a replacement Nexus 5X has been in transit. Observations:
- I forgot how bad the screen was. Basically invisible in bright sunlight, even at full brightness and shaded.
- How do I communicate? Talk is dying, Allo and Hangouts aren't supported. Using an old enough apk of Hangouts that can be installed gives a modal "please upgrade" popup on start.
- The browser isn't horrible, but there's apparently some cross-site SSL feature it doesn't support, because I get warnings about buttflare certs being bad pretty much everywhere.
- Twitter works! Crazy!
- Maps works too!
- Signal supposedly supports 2.3 but I got strange errors every time I tried to install it.
- I forgot how slow HSPA was.
- Gmail works, but for some reason it doesn't seem to sync quite right. I very rarely can see the emails in my Inbox, even when Gmail says they're there. Inbox isn't supported, sadly. The browser-based Gmail is better, but no notifications obviously. Some HTML glitches too, but nothing horrible.
- It's seems like a bad thing that an OS released a little more than SIX years ago would be so unsupported. The Gmail/Hangouts/Signal/Allo situation is sad. To be fair, though, Ice Cream Sandwich (8 months newer) was a big departure and it seems like a lot of apps use that as their oldest supported version.
- The vibrate is INTENSE.
- The ringtones are horrible. The alarm tones are worse.
- The camera isn't actually so bad, but the 80db shutter sound is surprising every time.
- I miss the trackball (especially trackball notifications).
- Having to unlock to see/swipe notifications is surprisingly painful.
- The calendar widget only shows your next event, not your agenda for the day. How is that useful?
- I actually don't hate the small form factor as much as I thought I would