Originally Posted By: RobotCaleb
You should borrow someone's Nexus One for a week or two (No, you can't have mine.) You'll probably (I know, I'm reaching here) be pleasantly surprised to discover that it isn't a huge steaming pile of fæces. It's rather quite nice.


I realize I'm far from impartial, but I've tried living on a Nexus one several times since it was launched but despite being an avid google user (well, search, gmail and calendar), I just find it hugely frustrating to use.

I can't read the screen outside. Even though I know I have to press above the softkey legends to make them work, it bugs me that they didn't put the sensors in the right place. The speaker is simply awful. The fact that when I ask it to power off it gives me extra dialogs bugs me. I don't like the text rendering on the pentile OLED. The application launcher is clunky. The pinch zoom feels wrong and inaccurate, especially on web pages. Having my work and Google email in totally different applications is strange. Everything seems to take more steps than I'm used to. And so on...

Initially I wasn't so convinced by the iPhone (thought it was too big and heavy) and I expected to be continuing to use the candybar/numeric keypad type phones I knew and loved... but as soon as I was actually using the thing it became very clear that I wasn't going to be switching phones 5 times a year to the latest bleeding edge feature-stuffed gizmo from Nokia/HTC/SonyEricsson/etc. I thought that more features made a better device, but hadn't realized that I'd been overlooking how badly implemented and frustrating the basics were on, well, every phone I'd used previously (though I still have a soft-spot for my Nokia 6320... the original one).

It's the software. Android isn't it, at least not yet - and the direction they're heading isn't promising, looking at how they moved from 1.0 to 2.0 to 2.1. The basics aren't polished in the base distribution and then vendors are attempting to differentiate their products all over the place by piling yet more ill-conceived UI concepts into their phones. It's software by engineers, for engineers.

In my opinion, HTC get what phone software should be more than Google do. On Android they don't need to be limited to building a parallel universe of slickly implemented widgets like they have been doing on winmo. They understand how things need to "feel" right.

On the other hand, the fact that the HTC HD2 glitches the playback of its boot-up sound shows a spectacular lack of attention to detail, so maybe they're doomed after all wink