Day 13 with Nexus One

Ok, so I missed a few days. I was busy this weekend and at this point, I'm not sure I could write about an entire day with a phone that is increasingly less new.

So what's new? Not really a ton, I'm using it like I would use a smart phone. It has its ups, its somewhat downs here and there, and it does what I'd hope it would most of the time.

Some ups:

• It's so nice to download something at work, copy it to the phone, and have it for the ride home
  
• I added an app called "Listen" from Google which lets me subscribe to podcasts, download them, and play them right in the app.
  
• Due to apps like Listen, I'm becoming happier and happier that I don't have to rely on my PC all the time to make the phone useful. With the iPhone, the thing is useless unless you sync. As far as media goes, you have to sync up again to add anything new. Sure you can stream a podcast or two without syncing, but I can download them now. Much better. And since I'm not tied to a single machine, I can get files from anywhere and have them on there in seconds
• I played around with the iPhone again last night. Holy crap is the resolution bad compared to the Nexus One. It was a strain to focus on the words, they were just so blurry in comparison to the crisp beautiful screen of the Nexus.
• The browser on Android is much better than mobile Safari. Not only can you pinch and zoom just like on the iP, you can double tap to reframe it. I'm in love with this. On the iPhone you can double tap to resize it, but it basically zooms in to the current table you're on. On Android, it actually reformats the text completely to fit in the screen. So before where the forum you're reading had 50 words across and the iPhone would show them very tiny, the Android will reformat the text to a readable 15 or whatever fits, make as many rows as it needs, and it's pretty much the same sized text everywhere I go. It is a much better experience.
• The Amazon mp3 store works fine. Amazon >>>> iTunes
• Uploaded some videos I shot with the phone to YouTube. Unlike the iPhone, they didn't fail most of the way through. It doesn't matter if I was on 3G or Wifi, the iPhone always wanted to have an error uploading videos. Not the Nexus. I went 2 for 2 and I'm sure I won't have any issues in the future, and these were much bigger than some I tried to do on the iP.

Some downs

• The keyboard on the iPhone is still quite a bit better than the Android. I don't know why, to be honest. It just works better. Even if it works better though it still is a worse experience because word recommendations are horrible, non-learning frustrations, and the lack of symbols on keys makes it take more time to do things.
• The screen really is rough outside. This can be remedied by setting the % higher, but if you're already there and need to do it, it's not going to happen very easily. Luckily I know where the setting is without actually being able to see the screen, and since it's not buried in 20 layers of settings, it's easy to go back and forth. I'm sure it'd kill the battery more, but I don't have this out in the sun that much or anything.
• Running out of app space. I think I have everything I need at this point, but that whole space limit was a pisser back when I had my Handspring visor, I didn't expect to have to deal with it 11 years later.

Other than that, still a damn positive experience. I've replaced any iPhone apps I've used (minus Plants Vs Zombies :( ) with Android equivalents. In the case of Touiteur, they're actually better than any iPhone variety. I feel like this is MY phone. I set it up, I use it, I configure it. With the iPhone, I felt like I was borrowing Steve's phone, and god forbid I do something that suited me - he'd have none of it.

Tomorrow makes my 14th day with the phone, and I suppose I could return it if I wanted to, but I certainly wouldn't like that. I'm in, baby, I couldn't bear to use the iPhone again. 30 minutes with it yesterday was painful enough and I almost forgot how watered down an experience it really is. When it came out in 2007 it was fresh and innovative compared to the competition. Making the same iteration with minor tweaks 2 or 3 years in a row afterwords is not going to do anyone any good. And as of right now, Android makes up more mobile traffic than the iPhone according to AdMob - and on our sites iPhone loses a few % while Android gains a few. It's happening. 4 big carriers, many handset varieties based on your needs (keyboard, small, big, powerful), openness, and better features just means more and more people will have a newer, better phone while Apple just sits and I guess is happy on their single carrier and outdated OS.

Day 8 with the Nexus One

Yesterday was my 8th day with the Nexus One.

Still not thrilled about the sucky bluetooth with Nissans, but eh, I'll live. I used the headphones that came with the phone, which have a built-in mic, to do some hands-free talkin' and jivin' while on the way home. It's a pisser, but not as big a pisser as clicking through 8 menus to disable wi-fi for the day on an iPhone.

I need to remember to turn up the brightness before I go outside, though. While 0% is perfectly fine for me indoors, AMOLED doesn't do well outside with it. 75% AMOLED is still brighter outside than the brightness I used on my iPhone (around 30), so it's ok. Again, it's the quickness I can change it that makes it viable.

A pretty normal day for the phone though. Copied over some pictures from my PC to have with me and put on a few more podcasts. Still loving how easy it is to get music on this thing, I don't miss the time it takes to sync. The organization is still nicer, I guess, and I liked setting things to resume playback position, but I'm not sure I could go back to dealing with iTunes again.

I updated my home screen to have a big HTC-Sense-ish clock and weather, which looks great. Thank you Beautiful Widgets. I also bought my first app, Touiteur, which is probably the best Twitter client I have ever used. I've used Tweetie 2 (which is beyond overrated), Twitbird, Twitbird Pro (my iPhone client of choice, even paid for Push), Tweetdeck (good but buggy, loses tweets), Twitteriffic (just.. ok), and maybe a couple others.. None have been as purely awesome as Touiteur is. Having the ability to set colors for individuals is incredibly useful. I have some friends as a dark purple, others as a dark green, my chick as pink and friends at work as dark orange. It's like lists but within your own timeline. Very cool. Other than that, the interface is just smooth and works great.

Any problems? Not really. My battery was about 35-40% when I left the office and that's fine, I have a charger in my car. It's also about the same as I had with my iPhone.

Nexus One - Day 6-7

So, I don't remember what happened Monday much with the phone. It was fine, I think I played some Robo Defense, which is a decent Tower Defense game, which is one of the few games I think works well on a touch screen. I couldn't care less about actiony, twitchy games because I think they're abysmal on the iPhone/Android devices. On screen digital movement pad? You've got to be kidding me. Maybe I'll play those games if I feel the need to hate myself. They don't work. If I want to game, I have a DS and PSP that can play games better than the iPhone ever could. Even nicer, those devices don't die after an hour.

One thing I did do Monday night though was install a new keyboard. I guess it's the HTC Sense implementation of the keyboard, which is supposed to be better. To get it, I did something so magical and revolutionary that not even the iPad can do it: I downloaded a file. Even better, a .zip file. Even better, I was able to extract it into a directory on my phone, run it, and install an application right there. Take that, iTunes.

What makes this amazing is that even though I thought the keyboard was just ok, I was able to research additional keyboards and installed one. You're kidding yourself if your Apple-red kool-aid stained lips say such nonsense as "Well the stock Apple keyboard is so good, they don't need to improve it" or some other BS. Lies, all of them. It gets the job done, but it could be better. But it's Apple, so they make it a point to not make it better than their initial implementation. But hey, that's why the iPhone has been the same since inception. Unless you count their aggravation module. Some of you will know this as Voice Control. If anyone has actually used Voice Control to do anything but raise your blood pressure, please let me know. I found it worthless, slow, and just a jarring experience that should be hidden away as an embarrassment, not a feature. Trying to play songs using voice control is ridiculous. Voice on the Android is still better, and the results you get back actually could be used to do more than one thing. But I'm sure OS4 will not improve on it because you can't sell the same turd twice, I guess.

Anyway, I'm still figuring out how to do music better on this thing. Rhythmbox isn't playing very nicely. Banshee is ok, but the playlists don't seem to stick very well and it's not that easy to add a playlist to the device and put songs in it from a playlist on the machine.

One thing that does work well is when you're in a song you can add it to a playlist. Existing, new, whichever you want. That's certainly an improvement and I wished the iPhone did that over and over again. What good is an on-the-go playlist if you can't just keep adding songs you're already listening to?

Bad news on the Bluetooth front. Seems that Nissans especially have an issue with Bluetooth from the Android systems. It's something jacked up in their bluetooths I guess. It can't be TOO crazy, since every other phone seems to have figured it out, but come on guys, get with the friggin program. Luckily I rarely talk on the phone, so this isn't as big a deal as it could have been. All the other positives of this phone outweigh this significant negative, thankfully. I still couldn't go back to the iphone. But I really would like it fixed. Please. This mars an otherwise great product.

In other bad news, I'm starting to regret my decision to go AT&T. Yes I know that I did it enough reasons to make it very reasonable to stick with AT&T, but dear god their network in downtown Columbus is utter shite. My phone got severely drained in the hockey rink because it could barely hold on to a signal. With the iPhone, sometimes I wouldn't even get one in the building, so I suppose it's on par there. If I did get bars, at one point I even was on GPRS or something (since it had a G, not 3G). I haven't had that since my old old blackberry. And it's not even just 3G chugging along sometimes at a whopping 70 kbps. (yes, little b - bits), it's EDGE as well. If I switch to edge, hello 7kbps. I'm not exaggerating, that's how slow it can go downtown.

This is Columbus. Downtown. Not NYC, NY. Not San Francisco, CA. Not Central City, NE but a smallish city with not a ton of people living in it. Even the more populous suburbs cruise at 1500-2000kbps. Downtown is just a disaster. What do they have, a single router for all of us to go through? Usually I have full bars, so it's not a tower issue as far as distance is concerned, it's just that the bandwidth is shot.

I know Verizon is more expensive, but maybe next year I'll try that or Sprint unless AT&T actually upgrades their network. I don't like destroying my battery and taking 6 minutes to download 1MB. I'm downloading a wallpaper skin right now and I know it's not very large, but minutes later it's still going.

Other than all that, I'm doing great with this thing. Just have to get the iPhone 3GS up onto ebay so I can recoup my purchase price. The Nexus is still a beautiful phone and it's nice to have something with 2010 sensibilities instead of an OS that's holding on to what it innovated back in 2006.

Day 5

Ok battery, now we're talking Mr. Nexus One. It's as if you actually tried to not die today.

So, when you have a decent connection going, even using it for a couple hours will ensure your battery stays ok. That and maybe running it to 0 a couple times and fully charging it again helped calibrate the settings a bit more. Nice, I was worried I'd have to return it because the battery sucked so bad. As of now it's not that great, but that puts it about equal with the iPhone. I'm guessing that as I work downtown, I'll just have to have a charging cable with me to keep it from going belly up by the afternoon. Thank you monoprice.com for having cables at a reasonable price, even for iPhone/iPod cables (I had purchased some in the past for about 70 cents apiece).

A lot of the Apps in Android are equivalent to ones in the iTunes store, so this is good. I know there's about a 140,000 app gap to Android Market's 40K, but to be honest, think about that for a second and let me know if that even makes sense. I had 100 apps on my iPhone. That means I found about 179,900 apps weren't worth my time. More is not better, especially after you dig through some of the crap that they allow on the App Store.

Some are better than others, some aren't so good. Fictionwise's eReader app is pretty good on the iPhone but definitely seems like a hacked port on Android. Compare that to Aldiko, which is about as brilliant as an ereader as Stanza. Only problem is, like Stanza, Aldiko won't let you read protected content. Thankfully, any eBook I buy is a python script away from being stripped of its DRM. It's another couple clicks away from being turned into a fully functional ePub thanks to Calibre. And then it's a copy and paste away from being in a directory that Aldiko can pick up. If I had a website, I could've put the file there and downloaded it.

That reminds me: Last night I downloaded a file. ON MY PHONE. I haven't done this in years. Again, Apple, you have taken away functionality and caused me to be amazed by it yet again. I forgot that real browsers on real phones let you do shit like download files.

The eBook stuff looks great by the way. Still not as good as my Nook but my Nook was easily 2 feet away from me and I was comfy in bed.

Day 4 - I get a new phone!

Today is a wonderful day, for I am getting a brand new iPhone.

"What, an iPhone" you say? Yes, I say, an iPhone. Although the reasons for this are very calculated: I cannot possibly sell my iPhone in its current state, so I need to get another one. You see, since IMO the iPhone has questionable build deficiencies, I, quite like many others, have had my dock port crack. It's not major, and it wouldn't have rendered the phone useless (maybe in time it would have) but it shouldn't have happened. I have a case, I coddle it, but it's just built wrong with stress points like that.

The real pisser though was one day, out of nowhere, I got a massive injection of dust under the screen. Not sure how that happened, but we're talking about 25 reasonable sized particles. Super annoying and it would have made the phone a bit more difficult to sell, that's for sure. Soo, I went to the store and replaced it for the crack, got a new one that didn't have any dust issues either.

Apple, you suck with how closed you are and your refusal to catch up with the rest of the mobile world that has been passing you by for the last 2 years, but your support is top notch.

Other than that things went well. I downloaded a new podcast (Shout out to Android Central) and had it on my phone in literally 10 seconds. Ahh I love it. Oh and this was on my new 16GB micro SD card I picked up for about 50 bucks. Not a bad price given the size, and I like that I got to decide how much space I wanted, and not pay $100 between the differences. This also means I'm probably going to keep the phone :)

Edited later:

Had a problem with the bluetooth though. I didn't get any audio in my car when I made or received a call. Turned it on and off a few times during a call and it seems to have done the trick. That's just not going to fly in this day and age, and it looks like others have had similar issues with their car after one of the more recent updates. Come on guys, fix this.

Day 3

Day 3. Still mostly the same.

I can't type on this damn thing though. And I'm used to the iPhone, so I know how touch screen typing can be, but I think this is worse. Maybe it's that multitouch bug they talked about, maybe it's just the keyboard layout is slightly different, but I'm not doing too hot.

Thankfully though the Android OS has 2 things going for it over the iPhone with the keyboard:

• It learns from you. Now, some of you may say the iPhone does this too. No, it doesn't. It says it does, but it never does. It never knows that, despite how many times I hit the stupid x, I really do want to say hell and not he'll. It doesn't ever seem to remember other words too. I've never once been surprised by a word that was already in there
• It has choices. This is a theme with Android, and it shows with the word selection. Start fat fingering letters and you don't get a single word like in iPhone, you get many. Like 2, 4, even 10 I think I counted one time. Like I said in the first point, when you change it from what it was going with, it REMEMBERS. I shouldn't be astounded by this, since my blackberry from 2005 did this, but I am since the iPhone has dumbed me down a few pegs.

The problem I have is what makes me optimistic about Android and pessimistic about Apple. When I ran into something on the iPhone that I didn't like, I had the thought "I don't like this, but I know Apple will never change it, and I know I won't have a choice." With Android, however, I can say "I don't like this, but Google will probably change it. Or if they don't, some other developer will, and I can just install that instead."

Different way of looking at things, different company beliefs, a different experience. I don't like thinking that just because I'm not some 85 year old Grandma who is perfectly fine with the iPhone, no one's ever going to look out for me.

Ok, a realist moment: My battery blows today. My iPhone was never spectacular in my building at work either (slow ass 3G, reception struggles), my first few days had it dying by 2pm, so so far this doesn't seem much different.

Day 2

So far so good again.

I don't love that I can't use a single device in the car to hook up to my stereo, but I guess I'll survive. I used to have the Griffin Autopilot, which connected to the iPhone dock and would do both power charging and take care of the audio out. Now I need 2 separate cords to do the same thing. Boo, that's a definite downgrade.

Also, this thing's tough to see with the sun out (I knew this going in), but at a higher brightness setting it makes up for it. I'd say it's maybe a tie with the iPhone. Yes, the Nexus is a lot tougher to see in the sun than the iPhone, however, since I kept my iPhone pretty dim, it's about the same. Sure, I can increase the brightness of the iPhone, but I can't be bothered to go into the damn settings menu everytime I go outside and then again when I come inside. No, I will not use auto-dimming/brightness because all that does is crank it up inside and dim it to 0 when it's darker. Both are annoying. I don't think the nexus is any better with Auto Brightness, but who knows, it's hard to get worse than the iPhone there.

Other than that, a pretty normal day so far with the new phone. I still like it, I don't miss the iPhone. Then again, I didn't expect to since I haven't used an iPhone exclusive app for over a month, if not longer.

My Nexus One Android experience, Day by day

Ok, my phone has arrived! It is awesome and beautiful! Not as beautiful as my wife and daughter, but enough to keep the both of them on their toes and best behavior.

So, Google gives you 14 days to try out the phone (30 if you live in California) and if you don't like it, you can return it for nothing more than the restocking fee of $45. Not too bad. I figure I've spent more than that seeing horrible bands playing while drinking awful beer, 2 weeks with a cool device is a reasonable $45 spend. My task is to see what happens in those 14 days. Will I keep it? Will I get rid of it? We shall see

I'm not going to post pics of unboxing it because I made a mess and it's really not something unique to the internet, so I'll just link you to someone else who has done that part for me.

This should do, thanks Ars Technica, much better than I would have done (not could have done):

Ars Technica - Nexus One Photo Gallery

My first impressions: Ooooh. Sleek. Sexy. This thing is nice, doesn't weight too much, and I love the way it feels. Conversely, the iPhone, while also sleek, is a fingerprint and grease magnet. I'm Italian, so the chances of my holding on to the iPhone without a case when I remove it from my pocket has been proven by scientists to be somewhere around the 18% mark. For such a pricey phone, I don't like my odds.

With the Nexus? It's somewhere around 96%. Big difference.

Turning it on was fun, I got a nice little multicolored X on the screen and then it started going all crazy like it was being torn apart molecule by molecule. Neat effect. Boot screens have come a long way since the 9 minute hourglass flips of the ol' Blackberries. Speaking of, have those changed? Do you still have to reboot Blackberries to do any damn thing worthwhile?

I hate Blackberry, btw, the Pearl should have been shot and killed before it ever left the warehouse. Ugh. Worst phone I've ever owned. It was like someone said "here, I'm going to give you this jar filled with hope." But when you finally opened up the jar after getting home, it was just a picture of hope and boy do you feel stupid. And since the picture was taken with the Pearl, it was grainy as hell and mostly green tinged.

After playing around with the phone for a few hours here's my initial usage impressions:

• Oh notifications how I've missed you. I forgot how a real phone handles them. For those of you who have only used an iPhone, I assure you that really lame popups that interrupt what you're doing, aren't stored, and are seen in reverse chronological order (you see the most recent ones first) is NOT a good way to do things. Other phones have been doing them better since probably 1991 when phones were carried around in briefcases. For some reason the iPhone wants you to have an empty task bar at the top. Android doesn't - it's used to show you the message and have an icon showing you how many you have. Smart. This reason alone will make going back to the iPhone difficult
• The media player is so-so, but it has the one feature I've been missing from iPods since forever: Current artist song choices. Meaning, if I'm listening to Mr Bungle and I want to hear more songs from Mr Bungle, I can touch and hold on Mr Bungle and an option to either buy songs or search my device for songs by that artist are the options. Pick the search and I can see all the songs from them. Awesome! This also works for the album and probably the song, though I'm not sure why you'd search a song you already have.
  
• Also, unlike the iPhone, when my phone is rotated on its "side" (meaning, barely tilted) like it often is in the car, playback options are not rendered useless. The iPhone gives you their "Magical, awesome, innovative" cover flow. What this really means that instead of being able to actually do anything, you have to see covers of albums. Skip a song? No, you have to rotate to portrait view first, wait for the lame animation to catch up, then skip your song. Yeah Apple, that's certainly easier than sticking a skip button in the 40% of the screen that has nothing on it.
• Oooh, live wallpapers are mesmerizing. And probably draining the battery. Who cares.
  
• I created a playlist in Linux and moved it over to my phone in seconds. No more 2 hour syncs! Yeah I had to build a new playlist, but who cares, I'm finally Linux native and it was quick as any media transfer could be.
• Editing text is awesome. You can tap to where you want to edit, or there's the trackball. I know people have been dogging the trackball, but it's hardly used, so I don't think it's going to die as quickly as someone who has to use it 2700 times a day like a Blackberry. But you can use the trackball to scroll over to the letters and edit them. Compare this to the iPhone where you had to tap and hold, get that stupid magnifying glass, then move over to what you wanted to edit. God forbid you had something near the edge of the screen, you might as well just leave it misspelled. You're not changing it. Now you can, all thanks to the wonderful, magical power of the trackball (See Jobs, other 10-year old features can be magical too).
• Apps. They're there, and they're not all over the place with no possible way to organize them. The Android has some "Home Screens" or some junk where you can put the app icons you want to use. Kind of like how Apple has app pages, but in this one you only drag over the ones you want. The long list is also available, which would be similar to accessing your 11 pages of iPhone apps, but it scrolls without breaking up (unlike page swipes) AND they're simply in alphabetical order. The iPhone has them inserted in order of download.. unless you've deleted an app and there's a space left like somewhere on page 4 in the middle, then your app would be downloaded there. Good luck finding it. So this home screen is nice. I have about 5 apps there that I've been using, I can add more later. Other screens have a couple other ones like Gmail or Phone
• Widgets! Such a dumb word, but they work. On my second page from home I had, by default, a widget that shows the current weather and some news. If I go one page the other way I have a widget that was there that lets you turn the following on or off: Wifi, Bluetooth, Location, Syncing, and then there's 3 brightness levels (0, 50, 100). Wow, wanna take a clue from this, Apple? I mean, as fun as it is to do 8 taps just to turn off wi-fi, and another 8 to turn it back on at home, 1 swipe and 1 tap IS quite preferable ya know.
• Voice recognition. I think it's still in beta or something but I did do a few texts with only my voice. This may come in handy so I can get something across while driving but not type it in and crash head-on into school buses again.

So far so good. After one day with it we'll see if this holds up. Already there's features I would sadly miss if I went back to the land of iPhone.

My phone is on the way

Title says it all. AT&T says that I don't have to do anything special to use my SIM from my iPhone, I just drop it in and call them to tell them that I switched my phone to something else so they can have it in their machine and reference that whenever I call back in for support.

Ok, so I'll just be changing the SIM then.

Why order One Nexus One when you can order TWO Nexus Ones?

I have been informed by my lovely wife that perhaps I should not have so quickly ordered a new phone on a different network without talking to her first. Even though it would be my phone and that wouldn't necessarily affect her day to day life, it might affect our family plan and her contract since she'd have to change it, so I did what any caring, loving husband would do: I bought another Nexus One, this time the AT&T version.

Problem solved! As long as I don't open the T-mobile box. Not like it would be tempting to open up the phone and see what it's all about, right?

Goodbye Apple, your hours of syncing are over!

It is now 12:30 AM. Not PM. The one when the sun is out. Unless you live in Ohio and probably Seattle that is. Or Alaska, in which case, it's the 12:30 where you see all the awesome infomercials.

I started syncing up my iPhone roughly 2 hours ago. It had been a few weeks, and I actually used the phone, so I suppose it was doing something when it said "Backing up iPhone" but I'm just not sure what that something was. Was it scouring every bit of the phone to see what had changed since I last did a sync? Who the hell knows. I'm sure a machine of mine's caliber has cracked 128 bit encryption keys in less time. It was a LONG time.

And since you have to use iTunes to sync, you're guaranteed that it's going to make the processor run higher than normal. And, since this is my laptop, that means I get to watch my laptop melt the arm of the leather couch as it's pegged at max CPU for that 2 hours.

But TWO HOURS. What the hell Apple? What the hell are you doing? If I canceled the backup it would have taken about 3 minutes to copy over whatever the hell new song or two I had. That's it.

Before my sync I was contemplating trying out a Nexus One. Now? Guaranteed. I'm going to order one right this minute actually.

***

Ok I ordered it. T-Mobile version. 180 bucks + tax shipped overnight. Doubt that'll be now since it's already the night part, so maybe by Tuesday. Let's see how this goes.

Good, bad, I just state what I see

Optimism. Pessimism. These words are thrown around quite a bit. Like somehow, people know how you view things. Is the glass half empty? It all depends. It could be half empty because I know for a fact I drank halfway to the bottom. It could be half full because I know that I poured it halfway to the top.

I can definitely say though that my glass is half full of air. Yes it's also half full or half empty of the desired item, but there is definitely half of something we would rather not have in there. Good, bad, let's just say it like it is and if you could top me off I would appreciate if we save the coming or going argument.