Beezly's Blog

Now, I should preface this with an apology. I’m no journalist. I don’t normally write reviews of things, so please forgive me if it seems like I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t. Given that my previous phone was an iPhone, I’ll draw a lot of comparisons between the iPhone and the Nexus One and lastly, I’m a techie person and I expect that most of the people reading this will be reasonably techie sorts too, so if I lose you, tough.

With that said, let’s crack on.

So, about 20 minutes after the Google Nexus One announcement last Tuesday, I placed my order. I’ve been thinking about replacing my iPhone 3GS for a while but was waiting for the right device to win me over. I was pretty sure it was going to be an Android handset, mainly because of the availability of Apps, wanting to get away from the crack-habit that is iPhone and my hatred of all things Blackberry. The Nexus One looked like the right phone. 44 hours later and it arrives at home. An impressive performance by DHL as it shipped from the US.

The phone comes supplied in a presentation box, much as the iPhone does and came with the usual accessories – headset, 4GB memory card, charger, USB cable and a little sock to keep the phone clean and scratch free whilst it’s in your pocket (why Apple can’t include one of those instead of the stupid screen cleaning cloth I’ll never know).

The metal and glass design give it a robust build feel and it looks pretty good too. It is roughly the same dimensions as the iPhone 3G and 3GS and weighs a fraction less than the 3GS at 130g. It has a replaceable battery, which apparently lots of people consider to be a major failing of the iPhone. I’ve never had a need for a spare battery, although I do tend to keep a USB cable on me just in case. Data Storage is via a 4GB MicroSD card which was supplied with the phone. It’s not as big as the 32GB my 3GS had, but I can buy a bigger card, and when 64GB cards come out, I’ll probably get one of those.

Upon powering on, the first thing of note that the phone asked me to do was to sync up to a Google account. I use Google Apps for all my e-mail, calendaring and contacts information, so in this respect everything was ready to go. I just put in my login details and all my contacts, calendars and e-mail appeared seconds later. Easy. It also supports the usual Exchange and IMAP protocols too although I haven’t tested those out.

Call quality is fantastic, both for me and for the person at the other end. I used it in a noisy environment and the other person could here me fine. This is probably due to the active-noise cancellation that is a fairly unique feature on the Nexus One.

Likewise, the Display is fantastic. It’s an AMOLED device, which has been used in some phones before. I’ve heard reports of it being difficult to see in sunlight although I’ve not experienced this myself, possibly because I haven’t seen much sunlight for 3 weeks due to the weather here.

The first gripe I have is that the UI just isn’t as responsive as the iPhone. It’s by no means slow and is perfectly usable, but when you perform some actions, like a swipe between panes in the Home screen, it doesn’t feel as slick. One of the things I loved about the really old Nokia Series 30 phones of 10 years ago was their responsiveness. When you pressed a button, the phone appeared to be doing something instantly. The fact it took 10 seconds to send an SMS was a secondary concern… at least it felt quick.

The selection of apps available for Android OS that the Nexus One uses is good. Apple restrict what app developers are allowed to do with their applications for the iPhone, even down to preventing them from doing mundane things like changing the screen brightness. Android has a more liberal philosophy where app developers are essentially allowed to do what they like. This really demonstrates itself through the way apps are able to integrate with each other. There are a few nice touches in applications, such as the Facebook app, which integrates with your contacts to provides profile photos and contact information where it is available. Apps can also run in the background, meaning that my twitter app can automatically notify me when someone @replies to me.

Google Maps works really well and I like the Latitude feature. The GPS reception is incredible. It worked on a bus and indoors. It didn’t work inside a data centre i was in, but there were two floors of metal and concrete above me, so that doesn’t really surprise me. Sadly, it seems that Google haven’t enabled the Navigation feature for the UK yet, so I haven’t been able to test that out. Hopefully it’s just a matter of time.

Battery life seems OK. I tend to keep my phone plugged into power whilst I am at work and always charge it at night, so it rarely gets empty (unless I forget). It’s certainly no worse than my 3GS. One superb feature is the Battery Usage display. There is also a really nice paid app called Power Manager which can automatically turn on and off features like WiFi, 3G and GPS when your battery runs low to conserve power.

The built in camera is pretty standard stuff. A 5MP with LED flash and a real focusing mechanism. It’s fine for taking snaps, seems to work OK in low light, but it’s no comparison to a real camera. I took a photo in fairly terrible conditions (very bright light and snow) and it came out fairly well and other people have taken nice pictures. A little pink maybe, but as good as any camera phone I’ve used before. It’s not going to have me selling my Canon 5D mk II yet, although it does fit in my pocket a lot better!

I’ll confess I haven’t used the music app much. It seems to work although it’s not as well developed as the iPod interface on the iPhone. I’ve got a Spotify account which I use for music and that works brilliantly. The supplied headset has the usual mediocre sound quality you would expect from a free headset bundled with a phone. It’s similar to the iPhone headset, except with a more useful remote control on the cord with controls to skip tracks and pause.

One feature I have found really nice is Voice Input. Every text input field on the Nexus One is voice enabled. You can use this to speak an SMS or e-mail in to your phone and send it. It works quite well too although my colleague did say something mildly offensive into it and it suggested “Your mom”. Maybe it is so advanced that it understands “Your mom” jokes. Either way, it made us laugh a lot. The voice recognition is handled server side, so performance depends on your signal. It works fine on 3G or wi-fi connections, but can be slow to respond on older GPRS or EDGE networks. However, it does mean that as Google make improvements to the voice recognition technology, the Nexus One will be able to take advantage of it automatically.

The development platform from Android is nice. I was able to download the whole lot, including the Eclipse IDE and all the Android SDKs then write my first “Hello World” app and have it running on my phone within about 90 minutes, and all without paying anyone anything for the pleasure (apart from the cost of the phone of course!) – you can see the product of my endeavors here.

So, in summary. The iPhone still has a slight edge in terms of slickness of presentation, but in terms of what you can do with the phone, the Nexus One is way ahead. The hardware is fantastic. The software has a few little niggles, but there’s nothing where I think it’s particularly bad and I’m sure some of them will be sorted out with software updates (similar to the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS).

If there is anything that anyone wants to ask me about the phone, then please feel free to comment.

Update: Flash support

For those asking if it has Adobe Flash support, it doesn’t yet but Adobe have announced that they will support it soon.

Update: Multi touch

There’s no multi touch on this device. However, the hardware is capable of it and applications are able to take advantage of this if they want. Dolphin Browser is one example of an app that does this.

From a personal point of view, I’m not that keen on multitouch. It requires two hands to make it work properly and it just seems awkward. I prefer double-click to zoom or zoom buttons as used on the Nexus One. However, I know that some people like it, so wouldn’t it be great if it supported both? If only Apple and Google can sort out their Patent problems.

Created by Train Horns

Smashie and Nicey

Ok, prompted by Leo and Owen, the girls in rank order:

In reverse order, Smashie and Nicey/Alan Freeman style…

5. Annie – she felt nauseous when we stopped.
4. Laura Q – reasonable, but too much faffing about!
3. Edie – Plenty of experience, but not the best… maybe it was the flip-flops.
2. Caroline FH – very good, she’s had lots of experience!
1. Eleanor – a natural, with a vice-like grip between her thighs that inspires confidence.

If only you can work out what it’s a rank order of

Today I started to try and get autofs and sshfs to play nicely with each other. Sadly, because of the way both autofs and ssh works, it’s not easy to do.

Then along came afuse, which solved the exact problem I had. Now I can do;

cd ssh/some.other.host

and I get to the root directory of another machine. Magic!

Mainly for the focus of the BBC and Londoners, but here’s how the UK and Ireland are REALLY split up…

NOTE

Birmingham is NOT in the North, it’s Midlands.
Likewise, Watford, is NOT the North.
Cambridge ISN’T in the North either.
“The South” is a relatively small area compared to the rest of the UK, or even just compared to the rest of England, so it’s really nice of us to hear so much about it when you have a few flakes of snow and manage this (courtesy of The Register).

Can’t compete? Why not blame the foreigners?

Grr.

From the SMH article:

“If I were to be the CEO of Google or the founders of Google I would be very [displeased] that the best search engine in the world continues to provide as a first link, Wikipedia,” he said.”Is this the best they can do? Is this the best that [their] algorithm can do?”

I can’t think of an occasion where Google has returned a Wikipedia entry for a query and that Wikipedia entry hasn’t been totally relevant and detailed.

Besides, the contest for detail, freshness, accessibility and usability Wikipedia wins hands down; compare the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia articles on Alcohol. EB weighs in at roughly 500 words, WP at roughly 3500. Another interesting comparison: the EB article about Wikipedia weighs in at roughly 900 words, the WP article about Encyclopaedia Britannica, 7600 words.

How many people aware of the “state of the art” can readily contribute to EB? Not many. Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia. Not that Wikipedia doesn’t have it’s faults, of course. On the other hand EB isn’t always correct either.

Oh yeah – and to get proper access to Encyclopaedia Britannica, you have to pay fifty quid a year. No thanks.

OK. Another new theme. Mainly because I am running the Subversion release of WordPress and it looks my old theme doesn’t work yet.

I found this great grammatical double-whammy whilst finding an air filter.

I’ll be sure to look for the Witch under my driver’s chair when I get home tonight

I like snow. It snowed a little yesterday (see here, here, here and here) which made getting to work very slow. A journey that normally takes me 1 hour took 3, mainly because of traffic and poor driving (high power, rear wheel drive cars with sports tyres don’t like the snow). However, tomorrows forecast is for significant snowfall, so I’ve spent some time at work helping the business to prepare for the bad weather. Those who need remote access to systems have it and we have put in place plans to deal with answering telephone systems and calls.