Having 2 keyboard-less HTC Android phones wouldn't make much sense, especially since the Nexus One would need a CDMA version with different baseband firmware and FCC certification. Although who knows if Google is even involved with the lower level firmware on the Nexus One.

As for the choice between a Palm Pre or Droid Incredible, I'd lean more towards the Droid. Android is clearly here to stay and has a decent developer following. Palm? Who knows what will happen to them, but clearly the WebOS platform didn't take off like they had hoped it would. Modern smartphones are being defined more by the apps they can run.

I have a ProClip mount, but I didn't like the looks of any of their docks.

I have a ProClip/Brodit car mount and I don't have any problems with it. I think it looks quite OK. Hardly any wider than the phone and just a little bit visible under the phone where the plug is. In my opinion, lots better than any universal mount. I had some problems getting the charger plug to line up, so had to loosen the screws and tighten them again after the phone was properly inserted. It would probably have been better if they used the small contacts instead of the USB plug.

Stig

Google had better start shining up and loading their guns as they're going to need to face off against Microsoft, and make it bloody, very very soon.

Microsoft claims Android violates its pa...licensing deal.

If Microsoft is left unchecked to approach Android licensees directly, the OS is going to be in real trouble long-term. HTC is now paying Microsoft an unspecified sum to be able to ship Google's OS.

Google needs to force the issue right now and put it all to rest, allowing other current and future licensees to proceed unencumbered and without fear of being attacked once their products are established, and once the (potential) licensing requests build up to a business-crippling level.

Microsoft still wields some pretty big fists, but they've been struggling to move and maintain agility in many markets, including mobile. Preventing or crippling the release of their new mobile OS would be my first salvo if I were in Google's shoes. Maybe it's time to start firing up some additional IP acquisitions if necessary to strengthen the armory.

I can see why Microsoft is going this route, seeing many of its WinMO licensees moving to Android. In the end, MS wants these companies to pay them regardless of what platform they ship. It's also a way for them to try and twist the manufacturers into staying with or increasing their WinMo/WinPhone portfolio. It's easy pickings going after the relatively weak manufacturers, since most of them don't have the in-depth knowledge of the OS that Google obviously does. They also don't necessarily have the deep pockets nor their own large patent portfolio to be able to put up a fight. I guess Google doesn't offer an indemnity clause with their OS license. I can see this significantly hurting Android.

I also see Apple being completely safe with regards to this patent turmoil. MS would be opening up a serious can of worms if they chose to even stare sternly in Apple's direction. Something I don't think they can afford to do, as I believe the best they could hope for is a stale-mate. In fact, I strongly believe Apple would stand a good chance of dominating them in such a fight. Anyway, there are just too many "nukes" to make such a fight worthwhile for either of these two companies.

If they've removed the Nexus One from Verizon, that's because Verizon delayed it and wouldn't work with Google to get it approved on their network. How else would the Incredible get through before it? It's pretty annoying. I see this as a victory for the cell carriers' status quo, which isn't a good thing.

Anyway, I agree that it wouldn't make much sense to have the Incredible and the Nexus One on the same network, but I don't see how much they would have competed with each other, since the Nexus One wouldn't even be mentioned in stores.

Oh well, at least in this case the consumer doesn't lose out entirely. At least the Incredible is a really nice phone (some say nicer than the Nexus One).

Thats one big reason I went with TMobile way back when, then eventually Cingular. It's much harder for the carrier to pull this kind of crap when it's a GSM network and device. Right now, I have my AT&T iPhone 3GS SIM and account in an iPhone 2G running Android. I didn't have to call the carrier to change anything, or reprovision a device. It just works, and it's just like most of the rest of the world. Verizon and Sprint are two providers I will never use unless they move to a more widely adopted network standard.

Good points. However, it constantly irritates me that AT&T and TMobile use different 3G frequencies. It makes it more difficult to go back and forth between the companies. I did so just because I wanted the G1, but it was so nice to finally have 3G on my N1.

Of course, I doubt the G1 would have been fast enough to keep up with the 3G. I could barely keep up with the most mundane tasks

R.I.P. Nexus One - Google will no longer sell handsets online. It's likely their in-store/carrier products will be a follow-up to the Nexus one, IMO - along with other Android products they'll promote from their web site.

This dovetails amazingly well with a thought I had last night while watching Survivor. Most phones are disposable products wrapped in disposable brands. Apart from Apple, I don't really know anyone successfully retailing their own mobile products. Palm's Pre was repeatedly referred to as the "Sprint Phone" and "Sprint's Pre" and a few times as "Palm Pre by Sprint." It's clear this is the way the carriers like it, but it hasn't worked well for Palm at all. If you produce a boatload of irrelevant phone models like Motorola, Samsung, LG ad others, and your customer are the carriers, then you're still likely going to move enough units to make a decent showing.

But you can't set up to be a premium product like the iPhone AND straddle that same-old carrier model. It won't work. It hasn't worked. The closest I've ever seen outside of the iPhone was the RAZR from Motorola.

The best you can probably hope for is a variation and what RIM is doing, a ton of products, but all wrapped tightly in the Blackberry brand. It works for them. I'm amazed every day that other mobile phone producers don't get this.

Nuts. The thing that had me most excited about the N1 was the notion that they wanted to change how phones were sold in the US. My interpretation of that was that they wanted to discourage the whole notion of tying phone and service together. That never came to fruition. Maybe I misinterpreted their intent, or maybe they just couldn't ever make it work.

You weren't alone in that. It's one of my top cell peeves in fact. Even with the iPhone, while it's available retail, it's locked in nearly every country and can't be legitimately unlocked. When you buy a device from one country, the warranty is invalid in another (unlike other Apple products).

I thought Google would have made a better go of this, getting the phone into retail channels other than its web site. I also thought the N1 was to serve as a sort of benchmark product so they'd always have a platform available to push the latest and greatest Android releases to. IMO, Google's biggest mistake with this product was going anywhere near HTC. They have the money to contract out their own benchmark phone. And with the price of admission for Android, it's not like other manufacturers would go away simply because Google has their own showcase product.

I don't mind paying $400 for a killer mobile phone. But I want it to be free and clear of ties to any particular carrier (unlocked and of course branded only by the manufacturer). I won't hold my breath for Apple to release such a product, nor for Google to do so with longevity in mind.

I think it's that whole sticker shock issue. $500 for a phone? Thats just a non starter for most people in the US, because they are so used to paying next to nothing for the device. Very few people actually think it through to realize their service for the phone is going to cost way more over two years then the hardware. And it doesn't help that even if you do bring your own phone, you still pay the same monthly bill that Joe did when he got his "free" phone. At least my cable company lets me shave a few dollars off my monthly bill because I brought my own cable modem with me.

The other big issue is the inability to just make one phone that works on all the providers. It is technically possible to have some hybrid device that works on AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon, but then a lot of extra cost is being built in. Google instead brought out the Nexus One for T-Mobile. Then eventually AT&T. Plans for the Sprint and Verizon ones fell apart, 5-6 months after the device was new, and people were eyeing other phones in the same android space.

I think Google was just too early with this experiment. Once LTE comes into play, and assuming all the carriers pick similar frequencies, then people will be able to just buy a phone then go to a carrier.

I don't even have a problem with subsidies for phones. I think it's perfectly reasonable for AT&T to give a discount on the iPhone as long as you sign up for a 3 year contract.

What I find absurd is that they have any interest in what phone you're using once you have the service, or what you do with the phone once you've gotten it. I don't see why it should be any different than if they were running a promotion giving away toasters if you signed up for a 3 year contract.

Man, that's sad. I was rooting for them on this experiment.

One of the things I love about the Nexus One that hasn't been mentioned here is that the carrier doesn't have their fingers in the phone. Presumably us N1 owners will get 2.2 when Google wants, and not when the carriers want. I'm also hopeful that the rumors about tethering support in Froyo are true, and I'll be able to use it on my phone because T-Mobile can't block it from me.

Ugh, that stinks.

Holy bejeebers!

Yeah, I was wary of posting about that here, because it sounds too good to be true. I think I'm going to have to wait until I see this first-hand before I rave about it.

JIT vs interpreter :P

Are they saying that the corpse is 450% more alive than it was before.

Specifically, 450% was running linpack. Kinda a specialist benchmark... plenty of people started saying "oooo this is gonna be good for flash" not realizing that flash is pretty much certainly running as native code anyway hence is unaffected by dalvik optimizations....

I've noticed that there are quite a few apps on the market that are just an extremely thin Dalvik shell around a massive JNI "library" which was directly ported over from some other platform.

Does the Nexus suffer from the same BS updating restrictions as the HTC HERO (I had previously written "EVO")?



Wow, that's a super intuitive and friendly upgrade policy. I'd just like to know if this half-baked procedure is specific to the EVO, all/only HTC products or if it's a feature of Android?

HTC is below third-rate in my books...

Am I missing the context here? What software update? What was the cause of this? Give a little more background info, Bruno.

But no, I don't suspect this is an Android thing. If I had to guess (and I do, because I don't have much info here), I'd say it probably has something to do with the Sense UI. Are we talking about an Android OS update? Like from 2.0 to 2.1?

Come to think of it, how are we talking about any software update at all for the Evo? It hasn't been released yet!

Oops, crap. I had been reading some reviews and you know that all HTC phones look pretty much the same. I meant to write "Hero," which I've now fixed in the previous post.

This is a 2.1 software update, just now coming out for the Hero.

I believe that's also a phone with Sense. Maybe that's the problem. Sense is pretty deep into the OS, which is why you can't just install it on another Android phone without some major work. I could see the process of upgrading the phone being a problem.

So yeah, I agree, it kind of stinks. Doesn't sound like the end of the world to me, but that's probably just because I can't stand SMS and MMS, and because I've just recently gone through the process of reinstalling all my apps when I went to my Nexus One.

But you know what's great about Android in this case? There's certain things that make the process less frustrating. For instance, when I moved to the N1, I had to write down which free apps I wanted to re-download, but all the apps I've purchased automatically show up in the downloads section, so I don't have to go hunting for them. Another nice thing is that I was able to simply copy and paste the data from my micro SD card onto my new, bigger card for the N1, and when I reinstalled apps that used that data, it was all already there.

There's definitely annoyances when upgrading or migrating on Android, but as a matter of fact one of the items at Google IO addressed this, and will make migrating to a new phone far easier on future versions of the OS.

Now, I don't want to get too negative on the competition here, because I know that never in a million years would you agree with this, but the iPhone has the opposite problem. If you migrate to a new phone, it's all hunky dory, but if you get a new computer, the process of migrating all your data over and keeping your iPhone from getting messed up is nearly impossible for the average user. Heck, I attempted it and there were still big problems. So yeah, I think that Apple's main fault when it comes to upgrades is that the phone is still so tied to the computer, whereas for Google the problem is that their OS is not as tied to the cloud as they claim it is, but that's changing soon.

I have a feeling Tom is going to chime in with regards to migrating computers. But I'll say that I've never had a problem with with my wife's regular iPod nor my iPod touch with multiple computers. Not with migrating from one computer to another and not when using the device on multiple computers.

The highest level comment I can make is that when you migrate from one machine to another, all your data and settings, including your iPhone or iPod stuff, moves to the new machine pretty seamlessly.

In any case, I was curious if this wipe-everything was an Android design or just something else that HTC has screwed up themselves.

I wish that matched my experience of moving from one iTunes install to another. In every case when I've plugged an iPhone into a new iTunes install it has been very keen to delete all my music and my apps. It is one area where the whole thing really falls down.

This has been my experience as well. There is no clear way to fix this.

I know Tony is talking about Windows, how about you Andy?

My iPod Touch is set up for manual management and I have accessed it from multiple iTunes databases on multiple computers for about 2 years now. When migrating from one computer to another you get all your iTunes settings moved as well.

Migrating your iTunes settings and library is also the best way to move between two computers if you're doing it all manually. Downloaded Apps live in your iTunes library in addition to your iPod/iPhone.

There are a lot of hiccups with the iTunes environment, but IMO, they're a lot easier to get around and the one we're talking about now is a once in a while thing for most people, unlike a software update which can be multiple times per year.

I'm not a heavy SMS/MMS user by any means (I'm not even sure I'd notice if all the ones I have got deleted), but I'm reasonably sure that I didn't lose any messages when I upgraded from 2.01 to 2.1.

My guess would be that HTC changed the Messaging app and was too lazy to write a data converter.

It's never been a problem for me. But I am the perfect Apple customer here, who has been using Macs as their main computer well before anyone at Apple even spoke the name "iPhone", so my experiences are very different then anyone in Windows land. I have no idea what needs to be done there, but it may just be a matter of migrating the right key folders.

When I get a new machine, I do one of two things. I either use the migration assistant that pops up during setup to suck all my data across, or I pull what I need by hand later. For migrating stuff for the phone by hand, all it takes is dragging and dropping three folders. One being the iTunes folder in ~/Music (for all music, videos, and apps), ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library (for all my photos) and the last one is ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync (iPhone backups, IE SMS history, application data, etc). I did this just two weeks ago, moving these folders to my laptop for a weekend trip, then back to the desktop Mac when I got home. Address book, calendars, and bookmarks all sync over the air via MobileMe.

So far, my iPhone data has now seamlessly moved between 3 phones, and many software updates, including many restores done to run new beta versions. I've got SMS history going back to the first messages I received after buying the iPhone in 2007. Probably should clean some of it up soon, but it's never been a big deal.