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Nexus One Experience

I’ve been using a Nexus One for about the last month on Fido’s network. Overall it’s a good phone and quite a step up from my previous, semi-indestructible, smart-phone; I say “semi” as, though the Nokia E62 handled being dropped numerous times onto pavement, torrential Toronto rain eventually did it in.

Nexus One is the AndroidOS phone that Google sold themselves up until last month, though they’re now looking to sell it through carriers over here as they’ve already started with mobile companies in the U.K. and points east. I haven’t had any real problems running on Fido, so based on my experience, putting it officially on Rogers/Fido would be a natural move – plus it’s a higher-spec. phone than Telus’ current Android models.

Setting up on Fido
While the Nexus runs just fine as a phone on Fido as soon as you pop in the SIM card, it’s not a Rogers/Fido phone so you have to set some things up yourself. For getting G3-speed data running, Brill Bappin has a great page at: brill.pappin.ca on getting the Nexus working on Fido.

Impressions
Overall, the interface is not as polished as the iPhone, but it’s definitely got more stuff in it. A case in point is WiFi; I use the free WiFi that Second Cups offers with BoldStreet networks, the problem I kept getting though with my iPod Touch was it seemed to get them confused when visiting several different Second Cups over a week. This wasn’t a problem with Android, in the odd time it got confused, I just hit the “forget” button under the connection to make it forget the old connection. On the iPhone my best guess is the Forget must be buried somewhere under the settings. On the downside, a lot of websites that seem to be only checking for iPhone and sending up the regular web page.

The camera shoots photos/video quite well during daylight. It has a auto-focus and a LED-flash, but that still doesn’t do much for night photography. One interesting thing is that it records location using the phones build-in location sensors. Using WiFi and the camera will eat up battery life and I find it needs to be charged about every other day with normal usage, though you could probably extend this by turning off WiFi/Bluetooth and background data-sync – all easily done from settings.

Software-wise, you can download apps right onto your phone – in fact, this is one of the things you get used to: not having to plug your phone into a computer to update files. Both Twitter, Facebook and FourSquare have free apps now.

Finally, one problem I had early on was with the on-screen keyboard going wonky. Google recommends: 1) make sure you’re not touching more than one place (including your sleeves), 2) turn off Nexus completely (hold down power switch, select Turn Off).

Apple: Back to 1984

It’s been widely reported that last week Apple made some changes to what tools developers can use to create applications for the iPhone and iPad. Blogger John Gruber also did a pretty solid analysis of why Apple did this: namely to keep developers developing applications that run primarily on the iPhone. I agree in the short-term this makes sense for them, but it seems like they’re forgetting some lessons.

What Apple is fighting is the commodification of a type of product, namely mobile phones and soon web tablets. This happened before to them: in the mid-1980s the Macintosh was quite innovative in terms of a user-friendliness, compared to the many of the personal computers available at the time. By the mid-1990s this had changed: Microsoft had created a “good enough” copy of the Mac experience with Windows and prices on hardware had fallen so that Apple’s products where quite expensive by comparison. The Mac continued to be popular in some circles, but had essentually became the Porsche that people bought calendars of before buying a Honda.

While the Porsche example is not perfect — people buy a high-end sports car for different reasons than they choose a phone — the challenges are not. Like Porsche, Apple has to protect its brand by demonstrating that there is a reason you are spending several hundred dollars on a phone. One of the ways it can do this by having lots of applications that are unique to the iPhone. One way to do this is make sure developers invest the time and money creating an iPhone application, and not spend that on writing for competing phones. The contract changes made last week which seem to be primarily aimed at Adobe’s Flash software are designed to ban technologies that would make it easier for developers to write applications that would run on several platforms, essentially making the iPhone’s offerings less unique. While I don’t anybody is going to be throwing their iPad into Boston harbour over this, it’s not going to help Apple’s image with developers any more than the ongoing issues with the less-than-transparent App Store approval process is doing. Short-term the effect is pretty nil, medium-term though it’s going to make the alternatives more attractive.

While the iPhone had become ubiquitous and in 2010 arguably still provides the best user experience of any smart-phone, its probably only a matter of time before someone, maybe Google, maybe RIM, maybe even Nokia come up with something good enough. Apple lost the PC market because it tried to be Porsche; Apple risks this happening again, but this time it’s not going to take 15 years.

Why no Buzz for Google’s Twitter

Google launched Buzz last week to generally better press than Apple received seems to have received for it’s iPad, though I wonder if there are some similarities. For one thing, both of these are kind of re-imagines of already successful products. The iPad is basically the iPhone on a grander scale; if you watch Apple’s videos it’s clear they are thinking, “This is what we did with the iPhone- but what if we had a bigger screen?” Google’s Buzz of course is kind of reminiscent of Google Wave which was promoted famously as “What if we where inventing email today?” Buzz might well be asking “What if we invented Twitter today?”

There’s plenty of ways that kind of thinking can go right or wrong, but I’m wondering if what made Twitter what it is today was that it was kind of retro to begin with- and that’s what makes it fun. I’ve tried to explain Twitter to people for about 2 years now. The 140-character limit is kind of arbitrary- text messages can be up to 160 characters and computers-type limits would be multiples of 8, resulting in numbers like 128 or 256 characters.  So yes, it’s a bit of a toy, but it’s limitations are what make it a challenge, you can’t be sloppy with Twitter, it takes a bit of thinking to pack much meaning into 140 characters –spaces and punctuation included– and that in turn that appeals to certain people.

Google Buzz does away with that limit of course.  While  Buzz of course has no limits on text, it lets you add photos, links, probably video too. It’s certainly probably more practical, but it might not turn out to be as much fun.

Blogging with Twitter

I haven’t updated this blog in a while, but that’s not to say I haven’t been blogging pre-say. I realized a few months ago that most of my blogging had moved to Twitter.

Why? Well there’s a few reasons:

• via its gMail interface, blogging is as simple as sending a text message, making it very immediate
• the restrictions (160-odd characters, no images, short urls) make tight writing a necessity
• you don’t feel like you have to write 2-3 paragraphs (that’s me) when you can sum things up in a sentance
• the social aspects – it’s not Facebook, but that’s probably a good thing – really if i want post an album, I can use Flikr
• the 3rd-party apps – there’s a whole host of things built on Twitter’s api, from search engines like TweetScan to Twitbin there’s a lot of interesting things being built around it.
• it’s fun

Blogging certainly has its place, but if you’re looking for something less formal- and quite possibly the way things are going, give it a try.

SitePoint Blogs YYZtech.ca’s Web Design Book List

It looks like Sitepoint noted YYZtech’s list of best books for web designers 2007 a few weeks back – thanks guys! Seriously, SitePoint seems to be one of those publishers that is really improving, I remember their one of their early checklist books, good information, but very functional layout, flip forward to something like their CSS Anthology and you see how far they have come.

Stats down

Just checking the stats for YYZtech.ca, oddly they’ve been down this weekend. Since most of the site’s visitors are Canadian, I’m thinking, “What? is this everybody getting ready for the Grey Cup or something?” So much for Hockey Nation – or does that I should be looking for another downturn in the spring, about the time the Leafs start falling (apart)?

New section: WeirdPro

Somewhere doing the day the name came to me: WeirdPro, kind of sounds like WordPro – ok, seriously dating myself here, but I swear I was about 9 when this was sota (State Of The Art). What it references is much older, the phrase “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” which is, of course, from the late Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing?… Johnny Dep?)

Anyways, this is going to be an occasional entry of lists of the weirdest, you can’t make this up stuff – kind of like what you can say about HotDocs - documentaries about these characters that if someone wrote them, no-one would say they’re beleavable.

So, now it’s 10:40pm, the Second Cup is closing and I’ve run out of time – so no list for today.

Saved by the book

The last few weeks I’ve been selling off a bunch of older titles I had laying around (instead of working on this blog), one of them that almost went off to the local BMV was PHP 5 In Practise; Fortunately, I passed on that one and tonight, while trying to finish off a tag-generator for Halifax-Restaurants.com, it saved my tail at least once. When I originally reviewed it, I was impressed with the amount of material in it- it’s still one of the best books out there when you’re looking for something like- “how do I remove white-spaces from a string” and such basic but necessary things.

Digital Bedouin of the North?

I’m sitting in a local Second Cup dashing (ok, bit faster than crawling) through my TTD (Things To Do) list, fueled by cold coffee (yes, more caffee – same price) and I’m thinking about the “Digital Bedouin” (so termed by a U.S. writer Dan Fost in his article WHERE NEO-NOMADS’ IDEAS PERCOLATE, written a few months back) and I’m wondering what it means- kind of like the team cybercrime or auto-crime (yes, apparently when cars where new, criminals who used cars where refered by their tool, much like there is crime and there is cybercrime – I give it another 10-15 years before it’s just called “crime” except for the old folks at CTV – yes, they still show temperatures in Fahrenheit, what 20 years on?).

Anyways, I’m thinking that it’s one of those things that people will just start doing without really thinking of it as anything special- go to a university campus and you’ll see students working on laptops far from the classroom – in a few years some of them will be working far from the boardroom- hopefully with newer laptops. Doubt most of them will describe themselves as Digital Bedouins as much as anyone called themselves a “computer user” past 1990.

In the mean-time, there’s a few good links over at Slashdot, ShannonClark, or Going Bedouin at Web Worker Dail if you’re looking to get into it anyways.