There's been a lot of talk on the net recently about the new Nexus One phone by Google and quite a few reviewers have been underwhelmed by the launch of the handset. The point that has been missed though, I feel, is that it is an evolution of the smartphone, not a revolution.

The really important thing about the Nexus One is that it seems to be a smartphone that has finally got everything right in one package. Convergence has been coming for a while now, with phones taking over the role of MP3 players, sat navs, cameras and more, but there is always a catch, always a reason that a dedicated device is better than a smartphone: batteries that can't be replaced, lack of camera flash, etc. The Nexus One, on the face of it, looks like it has smoothed the edges and finally delivered a real convergent phone. Here are some reasons why:

• Speed. The 1GHz Snapdragon processor in the Nexus One makes it the fastest smartphone on the market and fully capable of running multiple complex applications.

• 5 megapixels camera with flash. 3 megapixels with no flash has been the standard for many smartphones for too long: iPhone, HTC Magic, etc.

• 3.5mm audio jack. All smartphones should have one, but not all do.

• Replaceable battery. Still not possible with an iPhone.

• Operating system. The Nexus One runs Android 2.1, the latest multitasking open source operating system from Google. It has its critics, but it is steadily becoming the de faco number one smartphone OS.

• Networks. From spring 2010 the handset will be available on Vodafone in the UK. A good thing in my opinion.

• Voice recognition. Speech to text software has been around for a while and now the Nexus One features fully integrated voice recognition, so you can enter text anywhere just by talking to your phone.

• Free sat nav software. The latest version of Android includes Google Maps Navigation, with full turn by turn spoken directions. Unfortunately, this is only available in the USA at the moment.

For more information and demos check out the Google Nexus One channel on YouTube.