Nexus One - The "Google Phone"

Ok, the horseshit has started "officially" now.

How about these sweet quotes:

The CEO of HTC says "it’s one of the best industrial designs from HTC"

Seriously? You're unveiling a phone and you say it's "one of?" This guy needs some PR lessons. You always say it's "THE BEST" when you're announcing something new. "The best phone we've ever produced" - "The most modern design we've ever launched" etc..

At 11.5mm thick and 130g they claim it's

"The thinness is thinner than a #2 pencil, and lighter than a Swiss Army keychain knife"

Bullshit. On both counts. A pencil is not even 10mm thick, let alone greater than 11.5. A "keychain" swiss army knife at 130g? No, not quite. They even showed a slide which clearly illustrates the phone is much thicker than a pencil. Someone was asleep here.

The specs sound nice, and this could finally be some decent Android hardware (everything else sucks completely, including all the "Droid" phones). Hopefully they don't burn it with their lack-lustre PR and marketing.

The only thing I'm not digging from a hardware POV is the track ball. Bad bad bad. WTF would you want a trackball on a multi-touch LCD phone? This is going to be an achilles heel in the long run. Well, that and the fact the phone isn't all black on the front side. I can't really tell whether it's brown or champagne, both of which would be somewhat lame. The shape also screams "HTC" and Google should really have made sure the phone wasn't going to use some old molds HTC had lying around.

If this thing was able to run iPhone apps it would probably do really well though.

You can buy yours here (if your'e in the US): http://www.google.com/phone

From the new images it looks like the colour is actually fake-titanium-like. Still too brown at least in the on-screen examples.

I've played with a Droid and it's quite nice. I like it better than the iPhone, not that I have a huge amount of experience with either. ("All the Droid phones"? How many do you know of?)

The fact that the screen has well over twice the resolution of an iPhone is really significant. It's really an incredible display. The hardware keyboard is mediocre, but I find its soft keyboard easier to type with than the iPhone's. As such, I'd prefer a thinner device without the hard keyboard, like the Nexus One.

The Nexus One's screen has the same specs as the Droid's. Its CPU is all but twice as fast. A 1GHz Snapdragon ARM? I've got computers I still use that are slower than that. And the Droid isn't poky by any means.

The trackball is a horrid idea, though. You're right about that. My PoS Blackberry has a trackball and it's awful. It gets jammed up with dust to the point of failure all the time, and it gets progressively harder to get it to register a click. Horrible physical UI. There is an advantage to having a relative motion UI, though, as the high-res screen can make it a little harder to click on small elements, which are usually web page links. A secondary capacitive touch sensor probably makes the most sense. Or multitouch gestures, maybe.

I was really hoping for the hinted-at cheap data-only service plan, which didn't materialize. I use my phone about five times a month. I use the data capabilities constantly. I don't want to pay $50 a month for a service that I basically don't use, just to get the ability to pay $20 a month for the service I do. I'd happily pay $20 a month for unlimited data service on top of a PAYGo plan.

I still don't care about your PR criticism, though, any more than I care about PR. Which is none.

As is typical, I agree with Bitt's comments.

I will argue on behalf of the trackball, though. I've had a G1 for about 13 months now, and I use the trackball all the time. It hasn't gotten gunked up even though I have no case on the phone and always keep it in my pants pocket. Frankly, I love that they put a trackball on there, as it gives me more control choices. Capacitive screens are great for fingertip control, but fingertip control is terrible at precision. The trackball helps with that immensely.

Bruno, I'm only guessing at why you don't like the trackball (since you didn't say), but is it a worry that developers with use it as a crutch? That's not the case at all, as I could use my G1 100% of the time without the trackball (I've never encountered a single app that requires it), but I find it very helpful when trying to do precision controlling.

Anyway, if I had the cash (it's just after Christmas, so that's not the case) I'd buy this phone in an instant. It's the best Android phone yet, and I feel it's finally a valid competitor to the iPhone. The App Market is getting better all the time, and finally the big-time developers are realizing that simultaneous development for iPhone and Android is important.

It's certainly possible that the trackball on my Blackberry is substandard. Everything else about it is.

That's possible, and I put my phone trackball-first into my pocket Though I was under the impression that they were using the same...balls.

No, I dislike the trackball because it's a mechanical interface prone to failure as bit mentioned. There are no physical "keys" so having a physical trackball just seems rather dumb-ass. I've never heard of a trackball that has not caused problems for the device it was used in. Recently, that includes the Blackberry and the Apple Mighty Mouse. Previously you've had larger scale full-size trackballs with few exceptions and of course balled mice. I have two balls already that provide tactile feedback, I don't need one on a phone.

How many Droids do I know of? Three. The US Moto Droid, the European Moto Milo (that's the name right?) and the HTC Droid Eris. The G1 is frankly a pile of hurt with its crooked design. Sorry Matt.

The new Nexus One is the best so far. And again, my amazement that HTC didn't just come out and say that - "It's the best."

Google still need to do a lot of work to maximize on the resolution and quality of the display. Some of the Android UI is really hurting. I'd also like to see them tighten up the reigns a little with regards to the platform to make sure that experience between phone models is more cohesive. One of the things that has always hindered Microsoft in the mobile marketplace is product segmentation. Good on Google for launching their own phone, but they need to do more than sell it from their own web page to really promote Android. None of the other (Android) handset makers have any hope in hell of ever coming close to Apple on their own. And the platform won't flourish unless it continues to get and maintain developer, and of course consumer, interest. The current way of selling the Nexus One seems acceptable for developers, but won't make a significant impact on the consumer space.

Oh, I don't think I've ever defended the G1's design. It's a bulky, pretty ugly phone.

The Moto Droid and the Moto Milestone are the same phone, just one is GSM and one is CDMA. So there are only two Droid phones, really.

I hate ball mice, but like I said, I've never seen a trackball on a phone that got messed up, so I think that's one of those YMMV things like "I never use X brand hard drives because I've had 10 that all failed." I've had experience with 4 trackball phones and they've all been fine over a total of 5 years. Maybe if I had one of those phones for more than 2 years I'd start seeing them get messed up.


As for the whole "why don't they call it the best" thing, well, the answer is pretty damn simple. HTC makes a lot of phones. They can't call it their best Android phone because it would piss off Sprint, and AT&T. If they call it their best phone period, well that pisses off the same companies plus Microsoft.

Of course you're right. HTC is just a commodity producer and they're not helping that position any with their recent actions. This despite wanting to become a preeminent mobile brand. This is something you'd think Google would have been able to control.

But then you get a gem like this from Andy Rubin (Google mobile chief):


They may not be taking the hardware that seriously as a commercial vehicle after all. Maybe just somewhat of a reference platform that people can actually use themselves.

Okay, I didn't realize that Verizon was marketing the Hero as the Droid Eris. As Matt already pointed out, the Milestone (not Milo) is just the GSM version of the Droid.

I guess "Droid" is going to be Verizon's marketing term for its Android-based phones. Seems an odd choice.

Had a good play for a couple of weeks with the leading phones before Christmas (excluding the Nexus obviously) and the Motorola Droid absolutely whupped the iPhone. But more importantly, the Nokia N900 was streets ahead of them both for everything!

I will be looking at the Nexus, but it still has the same problem:

Touchscreen!

What is it with people and touchscreens? Am I the only one who doesn't get it? Sure, there are some fun games which use it, but really... I even prefer my crappy Blackberry to the iPhone, as it has buttons and a nice trackball (just joking about the nice)

Why am I feeling so ranty? Stuck here, snowed in, working from home, snow every day for 2 weeks now. Bah!

It's ironic that your lambasting of the Nexus One is what has exposed me to the Nexus One. I don't keep up on these things, but I do read these forums every so often and when I see you complaining about a product or service, I know it must be the next big thing and my curiosity is piqued.

How can you possibly hate GMail's user interface?

The advantage to the touchscreen is that the screen becomes the input device, which means that the screen size can be maximized and/or the device can be ensmallened. Also, fewer moving parts means that there's less to break.

For some reason after seeing the ads, my first reaction was...

"This phone is aimed at Facebook users."

No no no, that's the Motorola CLIQ. There's nothing about the Nexus that's any more oriented to Facebook than the iPhone. They both have Facebook apps and that's all. Perhaps the marketing is trying to attract Facebook users, which you have to admit is a very large market.

Rory, I somewhat agree with you. I've long hated virtual keyboards. The larger screens on the Droid and the Nexus are changing that opinion for me. But ONLY when it comes to landscape virtual keyboards. Nobody can convince me that typing on a portrait virtual keyboard works. At least, not for people with thumbs like mine

I even don't mind the iPhone landscape virtual keyboard, but sadly, in my experience with the device, you seem to be rarely presented with the option, or you have to close the keyboard, then rotate, then get back into it. But in too many cases, it just looks like they don't let you have the landscape version.

I've grown to like the iPhone portrait keyboard and hate the landscape one, mainly because the landscape keyboard is too big, so it slows me down. The portrait keyboard works, totally with my thumb, at a reasonable speed. The trick, as always, is to "use the Force" and go back and correct errors later.

In my brief playing with a Googlephone, though, my now-hardwired finger motion of going back and correcting myself is not really optimal on Android. You really need to pay attention to the suggestion list and make your picks from the list if at all possible.

Everybody online is grumbling about the lack of multitouch. The thing that first snagged me is the lack of the loupe for fine cursor positioning. Presumably, given the open-source-ness of Android, there will eventually be patches to fix all of this. Patent infringement issues would get tricky, but that's a separate problem.

Actually, I lambasted the press event and what was being said about the product. The hardware itself sounds very nice, with the exceptions noted.

My personal punditry track record is actually pretty good, even though I sometimes "hope" against my own predictions. Some products just come before their time and you know they're going to get killed off and the concept put on a shelf for a few years before the next step is taken. Case in point, the Newton, the grand-daddy of the products we're discussing now.

After owning an iPhone for a year I can't understand why anyone wants a physical keyboard or pointing device on a phone/small mobile device.

I can type quicker on the iPhone keyboard than I ever have on any tiny phone sized keyboard. Tapping the screen is far faster than messing about with a track ball style device. I can tap on even the smallest links in zoomed out web pages (you just have to have faith that the iPhone will know what you wanted to tap on and 99% of the time it gets it right even when you are convinced it can't).

Add to that that not needing a keyboard and pointing device makes the device smaller and more reliable.

The only case that I can think were a trackball style device (or a stylus) would be better is when doing something like VNC/Remote desktop where the software can't be smart and know what you are clicking on.

Whenever I see a device with a pointing device I see it as a failure of the software, if they got the software as right as Apple have then they wouldn't need the pointing device.

I will admit though that some people really struggle when first using the iPhone. They just don't believe that gently stroking the screen is the way to go. They press too hard, hold the tap too long and just don't get on with it. I have a friend who was unable to get it to do anything and I really don't understand how he was getting it to behave so badly, I tried emulating how he was heavy handedly tapping, but every time I did it responded perfectly. All very odd.

I must have a play with a Droid or Nexus though, I haven't compared the iPhone to its recent competitors.

It really doesn't matter how large your thumbs/fingers are when you "get" how to type on the iPhone keyboard. With even the largest thumbs when typing using the edge of a thumb the actual contact patch (when taping with a gentle stroke) is still smaller than the keys on the iPhone portrait mode keyboard.

It helps when first using the iPhone keyboard to know about the rocking you can do to correct errors before they even occur. Most people assume that when the letter pops up that is the one selected and release the key even if they got the wrong letter. It makes it much easier to get the hang of if someone points out that if the wrong letter pops up you just hold the tap and rock your finger slightly in the direction of the right key (or slide) and then release when the popped up letter is correct.

I far prefer the portrait keyboard to the landscape one. The landscape one just takes up too much space and I understand completely why most app writers don't go to the trouble of supporting it.

One thing the iPhone really needs is a switch to disable screen rotation. It is a total pain when laying in bed reading/typing and the rotation keys kicking in.

I'll agree with that last point. I'm surprised that nobody has thought of a solution to that one yet. When I'm lying on the couch watching TV and want to check a new email, it's very annoying to turn on the phone and have it rotate.

But I can only meet you halfway on the previous point and concede that it's a matter of personal preference. To me, your description of how to get used to the portrait iPhone keyboard sounds maddening. Personally, I want to minimize the chances I'll hit the wrong key, and that's why I prefer the landscape keyboard on EITHER phone platform.

And by the way, I'm trying to compare apples to apples here. I'm a tad surprised at all the people who in one paragraph say "oh, you get used to the iPhone portrait keyboard," and in the next say "I only used the Android keyboard for a minute, but I really didn't like it." You can't get a good impression of either phone in a couple minutes or even a couple hours of use.

I'll admit that the Android method can seem a tad herky jerky. The idea is that instead of typing continuously and your mistakes are corrected (or you have to go back later and correct them), you're presented with suggestions. Granted, this does take one of your fingers off the keyboard, but I'd estimate that for about half of the words it really does a better job at speeding things along (and lets you use some longer words that you might not use otherwise ).

Are there any 'typing tutor' style apps for any of the smartphones?

(I could go looking myself, of course. Sorry)

m4715 834c0n 733t Typing Tutor?

Well, some quick googling for 'iphone typing tutor' and 'droid typing tutor' does yield some results.
Question answered.

AT&T has announced three Android phones, a Motorola, an HTC, and a Dell, with two more to come.

Personally, while I like Android, I was hoping for more change in service stemming from the OHA. I don't have a personal smartphone because I don't want that large a monthly fee. I'd really like to see more à la carte service pricing and trivial carrier changes.

I love my Droid so far. I rarely use the physical keyboard unless I'm sending a long text message or something. One thing I'd really like to see on it is multi-touch.

I think there's some multi-touch functionality in the browser.
http://phandroid.com/2010/01/04/motorola-droid-gets-multitouch-browser-from-milestone/

Here's a nice and quick little write-up (I can't call it a review really) by David Pogue at the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/technology/personaltech/06pogue.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

Choice quotes:





This next one is a little worrying... And it might just be the software apps tested didn't support the features.

It doesn't lack a multi-touch screen. It's a capacitive screen that does support multi-touch, Google just appears to be playing nicely with Apple and not competing directly on that front, for whatever reason. The hardware supports it, the software doesn't. Even the G1 had multi-touch capability (however, you couldn't cross axes from multiple fingers on it).

I have one and I'm very amazed at how fast it is. I have never extensively used an iPhone, so I can't compare to that. However, it blows the G1 out of the water. Very very snappy.

AMA

Thanks for making that correction. I have a rooted G1, and I can do pinch-to-zoom. But you know what? I don't care! I really don't care about multi-touch. Not on my phone, not on a trackpad (I despise trackpads anyway), and certainly not on a mouse.

you've clearly never used two-finger scrolling on a macbook. It's like going back to the days of the wheel-less mouse when I use a PC.

When I'm using any PC, even one with a track-pad, it's like I'm using a 1980's joystick to control the cursor. The MacBook and MacBook Pro trackpads are just so much better than anything on your typical Dell that it's beyond night and day.

While I don't use pinch to zoom nor two-finger rotation, the two finger scroll, both vertical and horizontal, plus the two-finger right-click make multi-touch invaluable.

No, I've clearly abandoned all track pads period, because I simply cannot stand to control a mouse cursor that way. My mouse has a scroll wheel on it that works just fine.

Does anyone here have the magic mouse? It seems pretty unergonomic to me...

I'm not worried about the ergonomics as it seems fine in that department - a mouse isn't a hand rest and doesn't need to be bear-clawed to be held. What I'm worried about is the clicking and possibly having to lift a finger off the surface to click with another.

That mouse however is selling like hotcakes and was enough to move Apple into the number 3 spot of retail mouse sales believe it or not. This doesn't include mice bundled with computers, and they're behind only Logitech and Microsoft - and possibly selling only that one product at the moment.

I'll really need to check it out in person, but it did pique my curiosity when I first saw it, if for no other reason than its clean lines. I'm not generally a fan of BlueTooth for mice however as every one I've ever tested from Logitech or Microsoft has been shit to put it bluntly. When I sit at a desk with my notebook I normally like to use a mouse, but I haven't been for a few years.

I last used Microsoft's portable laser mouse 6000 and since then I've sworn off Microsoft mice permanently. They're all total and complete pieces of shit with the poorest materials selection and construction on the planet, even compared to products costing $5. Microsoft mice of the past 3 years will disintegrate even if you don't use them, I can guarantee this. The rubber deteriorates quickly from the sides and from the scroll wheel and once that goes, the mouse may still be somewhat "functional," but it's going to be a complete turd to use.

It's interesting to see Google's partners working their hardest to devalue the Google Phone and Android brands: HTC 'Smart' is a dumbphone - and to the average consumer will look just like the Nexus One

Google really needs to stop running with the knock-off crowd that release a new handset every 15 minutes. Though maybe they don't care and having a commodity OS with little to no brand value is what they're interested in.

Out of interest, what makes a phone a smartphone these days? Am I out-of-touch for still thinking that if it has email or a web browser then it's a smartphone?

Peter

I don't often find myself agreeing with you, but for once I agree completely. Microsoft used to make great mice but about 3 years ago they lost the plot.

I've tried a few MSFT mice since and they are all nasty and don't work very well. I've ended up with a Logitech one now, that is so much better than the MSFT ones I've tried recently.

To balance my agreement, I've still to find an Apple mouse or trackpad that I can get on with. Worse than that, even when I plug mice that I do like into my Macs I can't get on with the acceleration profile that the Mac uses, I never can find a setting that allows for decent movement at high speed and fine movements.

Maybe I should have added even more information about the Apple mouse. This is the first Apple mouse I'm remotely interested in. All other Apple mice have been great for longevity, but they've had terrible physical and feature design. I've never bought or used an Apple Mouse for my own personal computing. Only while at ATI did I use them on test systems, so I have experience with pretty much every model they've ever produced.

After tweaking the mouse prefs I've usually been ok with speed. Also, installing a nice tool like SteerMouse solves any further deficiencies. I usually find that Logitech mice in Mac OS need the most help. With trackpads I have always been able to set decent rates with only the built-in control panel, though I did also use a third-party tool to get two-finger scrolling on my old PowerBook. Now that I've been using the MacBook Pro (with the "glass" trackpad) I can't use the pad on the PowerBook very well - I find it too grippy.

I still have an original Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer which has seen a lot of use and still works well. However, again, because of shite material selections, the paint is rubbing off all over the place. It does have a lifetime warranty though (the first and last time MS did this?), so I should probably make Microsoft replace it for me.

Traditionally, running a multi-function and navigable OS with support for applications. Versus a feature-phone which might have a few built-in "apps" but can't generally be extended. That's likely a better name for it, though the press is calling it a "dumphone."

It features 256MB of shared RAM/ROM and some as-yet unknown processor - which is likely to be a fraction of the price and performance of one used in a smartphone. The problem with this whole thing is illustrated precisely by your question. This is not a traditional physical design for a feature-phone and it's only going to cause more confusion and dilution of the smart phone brands. HTC is using the same bloody UI skin for this phone as it is for its Android and WinMo phones. It's nice to have a consistent company UI, but pick a freaking OS already.

This is a problem RIM and Apple don't have and it's one of the reasons they're going to continue building their lead in this space. While RIM does have multiple models, they're all firmly (and successfully) wrapped in the BlackBerry brand. Apple has "iPhone" and "iPod" but most people just see it as the same thing, due in part to Apple's designs and their steadfast policy of calling the platform "iPhone" and forcing everyone to always use iPhone imagery in advertising and products. Palm by comparison, also now has a unified OS position, but is not going this route as far as model branding - it's another thing that will only continue to make them suffer. They're still holding on, but doing horribly in the market.

This reminds me of a discussion we had once or twice at Rio. We found, or possibly even did, some market research that said that people choose gadgets more often on their industrial design than on their software features. (This was for MP3 players, of course, but I can believe it's similar for phones.) So why, the devil's advocate in me said, do we have ten times as many people working on new software features as we do on new industrial designs, and not the other way round? If you look at Nokia, who before the Iphone came along were the "default" phone maker in the UK, their current range is literally dozens of phones, with probably only four or five different software builds (not platforms) among the lot of them, and in the past probably as few as one or two builds.

Peter

I'd go a step farther. Google appears to want to be the OS of choice for the knock-off crowd. Google is served when every cheap phone, everywhere, is running Android. That means that Google can ensure they have a non-stupid web browser, they play nicely with Gmail, they work with Google's App Store, and so forth.

The "market" seems to be starting to get better educated these days, at least when it comes to smartphones.

I doubt too many people are choosing the Droid based on its looks.

That sounds nice at first glance, but who is the not-knock-off crowd these days? Apple and RIM, obviously, but, equally obviously, they aren't going to get any traction there.

What are the other big-name brands? Motorola? They seem to be well on board; their CEO has said that Android is their future. Nokia? Yeah, they're definitely not. I figure Samsung is on the bubble between knock-off and not. They have a bunch of Android devices.

Beyond that, Dell and Lenovo are entering the phone game with Android devices. Huawei has at least one. (Not sure where they fall on the spectrum, either.)

But, as Dan points out, having every would-be crappy phone running a decent OS can only have positive effects. And it seems there's little reason for the crappy phone makers to develop their own OSes anymore.

With smartphones, yes, because they haven't yet all matured to feature parity. For non-smartphones, there's nothing "uneducated" about choosing among phones, all of which have all the features one wants, by looks alone. If my Nokia 8890 had broken down, and I didn't have an Iphone, I for one would have chosen the nicest-looking phone then available (probably Nokia 8600, though that too is a smartphone by the older definition).

Peter

Google's brand is stronger than Motorola's. Stronger than Dell's. HTC? Who is HTC? Google should be addressing their own brand and its image in the mobile space. We should see a real Google Phone. Not an HTC phone sold on Google.com. Damn, many of the hack Photoshop jobs of fake Google Phones looked better than what HTC just announced.

Android is quickly turning into a completely undefined non-brand which will not have any value except as an easy implementation to the myriad of handset makers that choose to compile and distribute it.

Google will of course continue to pull value from its investment in the form of advertising and other revenue streams, some of which probably have yet to be conceived or at least implemented. However, I don't think "Android" as it stands has any type of "pull" factor at all when it comes to the marketplace. People are going to buy the current crop of Andoird phones because of the way they look, the companies producing them if they know them and based on how strongly the service provider pushes them into their plans and advertising. Those sales however will not aid in building Google's own brand nor will they create significant mind-share for Android the same way Google could on their own. At least as the face, obviously delegating actual manufacturing to an OEM like Apple and RIM do.

Bottom line is that Android is heavily segmented and no one product or even product line is going to come close to matching RIM and Apple. We might even see the full sum of Android products showing lower numbers. Product segmentation helped put WinMo into the position it's in now. It was easy for RIM and Apple to come in and eat MS' lunch.

We got one with a new iMac at work, realising this was going to get stolen pretty quickly. I swapped it with an old wired Mighty mouse I had hanging around.

First impressions, nicer to hold and scroll with than the previous incarnation, but will I be using any of the gesture stuff? Unlikely, it seems to require a degree of hand dexterity I just don't seem to have.

However, I 'love' the new Mac keyboards now. When they first came out I panic bought new wired and bluetooth keyboards in case my existing Apple keyboards failed. But recently, I was given a new Bluetooth model by our Apple Business rep and I love using it, for some reason I think I actually type quicker on it!

I'll partly agree and partly disagree. Google is positioning Android in much the same way that Microsoft originally wanted to position Windows Mobile: a solution for hardware vendors who need a smartphone software platform on their device. So, just like with Windows on "real" computers, there is no one canonical hardware product that represents any sort of platonic ideal. However, just like with Windows, you'll have all the hardware vendors falling all over themselves to one-up each other on the aspects they can control (e.g., size, weight, battery life, screen quality, etc.).

What's notably different from Windows, in either the desktop or mobile space, is the open-source nature of Android. This means that users can ostensibly build their own image and install it on their phones. It also means that manufacturers can customize the software to the point that it's not really even Android any more, forking the codebase or whatever else.

To some extent, Android is fulfilling the wishes of the desktop Linux crowd: an open-source platform, widely available, with real support from tier-1 hardware vendors. It's going to be fascinating to see how it plays out.

Considerably aided by the fact that WinMo is total tripe.

Oh goodness, I'm the last person to defend bluetooth keyboards and mice. I can't stand them. Is it too bold a statement to claim that bluetooth, on the whole, has been a failure? Is that incorrect? A rough count in my head tells me that I've used about 15 different bluetooth devices over the years (phones, headsets, headphones, cars, and miscellaneous other products). I'd estimate that a total of 3 pairings have been reliable and usable. That's a failure in my opinion.

As RF keyboards and mice fell out of favor, I constantly defended RF as a technology.

Sorry to take this so far off topic again

On topic: I have no problems with Google's strategy, I like the Nexus

It sounds like your hunches were correct.

Yes. Bluetooth works fine for me and everybody else I know. I've never had any issues with my Bluetooth headset and I use it regularly. I used to have a Bluetooth mouse for my old laptop because I wanted wireless but didn't want a USB dongle. That also worked fine.


I guess you're just unlucky with Bluetooth.

Oh well, you know what they say, "unlucky in Bluetooh, lucky in love"

So you're telling me you never, ever, have to re-pair your bluetooth devices? They never flake out on you randomly? And I'm not talking like every time you use it, but say every 10 to 30 times you need it.

Sure, I can take two bluetooth devices, pair them, and use them on a call. Great. But it's the 8th time I need it, I'm in the car, I try answering a call on my bluetooth headset, and it just won't connect. Grr!

Fortunately I've had nothing but success with my G1 and my car. I'm not messing with that connection!

Oh well, I don't think I'm alone on this bluetooth thing

Nope. Works fine assuming the batteries aren't low in the various devices. The first generation Bluetooth devices I had were a bit flakey but since then I've never had any trouble.

I used to sync my phone every couple days using Bluetooth. My old old phone used to connect to my Mac mini to use Clicker. At one point I ran presence detection based on whether the Bluetooth adapter could see my phone. The mouse for my old laptop was a Microsoft Bluetooth one. The PCMCIA slot mouse for my current laptop is Bluetooth. I've got a Sony Ericsson headset and car kit. None of them I've had any problems with.


I could say exactly the reverse. I don't think I'm alone on this Bluetooth thing (working). I know plenty of people who use Bluetooth daily and they don't have any problems with it. Sure, you may get some hardware/firmware which is flakey but that isn't any fault of Bluetooth itself.

I'd say the RF link used for keyboards/mice has more inherent flaws/problems than Bluetooth.

RF keyboards and mice have horrendous non existant security even with the models which claim to have encryption and security features. Anybody nearby can see exactly what you're typing. If they put a little more effort into it, they can inject keystrokes and move the cursor.

There are very limited numbers of channels available for most keyboard/mouse RF links. If you have more than a handful of people using it in an office then you'll interfere with each other.

Most keyboard/mouse RF links don't have any form of error checking or recovery. You'll lose keystrokes or have erratic cursor movement because packets are being dropped.

802.11b/g/n doesn't have any coexistance mechanisms to reduce interference with the keyboard/mouse RF links. It does have some for Bluetooth.

Well, I "rooted" my Droid today. Browser is next as soon as I'm fairly confident they've got the bugs worked out.

I have virtually no problems with my Bluetooth devices. Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for the Mac Mini, a speakerphone for my phone in the car, and various things, including the controllers, for my PS3. The only trouble I ever have is with the speakerphone, and it is clearly a problem with my damned Blackberry, as every time it fails, there's a spinning hourglass on the Blackberry that will basically spin forever and I have to end up pulling the battery.

Apparently there's a browser called Dolphin that's got multi-touch zoom and has been out for a few weeks.

What benefits do you get from 'rooting' the Droid?

For me as well Bluetooth has only ever been an unmitigated disaster.

I have had three prolonged encounters with Bluetooth:

- pairing a BT GPS with my Dell PocketPC
- pairing a Sony phone with a Sony laptop running Sony's own BT stack on WinXP
- pairing a selection of Windows Mobile phones with MSFT's stack on WinXP

In all cases the experience was just awful. The PocketPC would regularly require a reboot to get it to see the GPS, after the two had been turned off for a couple of minutes.

The Sony laptop required over 50 mouse clicks (I counted them) to pair and setup the modem. That wouldn't have been so bad if it didn't then regularly (every day or so) lose its pairing and force you to start again from scratch.

The vanilla XP + WinMo was the most successful, but even then it would fail often enough that I gave up and went back to IRDA to connect to my phone's modem.

I haven't touched BT since, it cost me too many days of pain. My RF Logitech mouse in comparison works flawlessly.

I can't even really blame it on MSFT, as in the Sony-Sony case it wasn't even their BT stack involved.

I can't speak to the Droid, but on other Android phones the primary benefit is speed increases from offloading the apps to the SD card, leaving more memory for application multitasking. The Cyanogen mod also includes some RAM and CPU tweaks to get a little more out of the phone that might not be there otherwise.

So with the decent speed of the Droid, I'd imagine that the biggest advantage is the apps2sd feature. It's definitely annoying how little space is devoted to apps on these phones, and it's easy to run out. After rooting, I don't run out any more.

Oh, and I forgot about the other nice feature of rooting (though I don't think it's possible on the Droid yet): wireless tethering! Basically I can turn my G1 into a MiFi wireless hotspot. Very handy when I'm on the road and want to use my netbook instead and there's no WiFi around. Too bad I can't get it to work with my ZuneHD

This restricted app storage on the Android phones really puzzles me. I have 800MB of apps on my iPhone and I'm not even a big games user.

I don't understand how Google didn't see that this was going to be a problem.

And before someone jumps and and infers that iPhone apps must therefore be bloated...



...my largest installed app is 58MB and all but 8 of my apps weigh in at under 10MB, it is just that I have a lot of them

Sony have their own stack? All the VAIOs I've used which have had Bluetooth came with a third party one like Widcomm or Toshiba. None of them used the built in Windows one for some reason. When I installed W7 on my VAIO, I changed it to use the built in Windows one and its been fine.

Personally, I really don't care for any wireless keyboard/remote technology, but I can say this: I have never had a problem with the PS3 controllers (or remote) which are the only devices I own.

Good question. I don't know, all I know is that all the UI for it was heavily Sony branded. It was a very, very odd UI, seemed to have been themed on those wacky Photoshop plugins from Bryce.

The main problems with Bluetooth, IMO have been the implementations, not the technology itself.

1. I don't think the technology was exploited or used as widely as it could have been given all the promised being bandied about before it was introduced.

2. Windows and WinCE and WinMo suck. Bluetooth on these systems is going to suck no matter who makes the device.

3. The Bluetooth problems I was alluding to when I first mentioned them were related to mouse usage. I've just not found that Bluetooth mice are as responsive as those using other (proprietary) wireless technologies. I've tried Logitech and MS BT mice on Mac OS and Windows (where, referring back to #1, I might expect it to suck).

4. BT keyboard usage on the Mac with Apple's BT keyboard has been great.

I was about to jump in and defend bluetooth, but I thought about it, and realized that I do occasionally get bluetooth flakiness and I simply tolerate it for the sake of the cordless convenience.

Bluetooth flakiness I have experienced:

- Mouse and keyboard for Mac Mini have range issues... My seat on the couch is just at the edge of their range.

- Mouse for Mac Mini, once in a blue moon, just doesn't register with the computer and then I have to re-pair it.

- Once in a blue moon, my Microsoft mouse occasionally drops its bluetooth connection to my laptop for about 15 seconds and then keeps working again as if nothing had happened. I think this is a materials/construction problem issue with the mouse itself and that what's actually happening is if I bump or jostle the mouse too hard its battery contacts get lost briefly.

Not exactly a limitation with Bluetooth though.

Well, technically, Bluetooth does have a range limit.

Still, that's like saying that it's a limitation that you can't fit your Cadillac up your nose.

Who says?

Mmm.. Bluetooth..

Well, the two AIR-Cable bluetooth-to-serial adapters here are still the best serial ports I have for empeg kernel restores and the like. Those "just work" for me, pretty much flawlessly and without fuss.

And the Holex BT GPS gizmo talks with my Zire72 (PalmOne) gadget when I want it to, again without any unnecessary drama.

Beyond that, I've got a "flea" (tiny BT handsfree ear-set dongle), and it pairs/works fine with my primitive Samsung mobile.

On the other hand, I've never managed to get the Zire72 to use BT for syncing with my notebook. Ditto for the phone.

Hit and miss, I suppose.

Cheers

Steve Martin.

Bluetooth is much like USB. It works well if implemented well, and works hair-tairingly poorly if implemented badly.

Windows has been the common denominator in the worst Bluetooth experiences I've had overall, most likely due to Microsoft not getting around to supporting an industry standard until well after all the third parties added it to the OS for them.

Oddly, Apple is going backwards with Bluetooth support. In 2002, I could sync my T68i via bluetooth, and respond to SMS messages on my computer. In 2007, I bought an iPhone that couldn't do either, and now OS X even won't let me respond to SMS messages when the phone is capable of it.

Ah, yes! heh- missed that one.

Support hell for Google. Looks like they're experiencing the fun of direct sales and the associated support required.

Well, I'm typing this on my Nexus One that just arrived. I don't have my SIM yet, but most everything besides the phone itself seems to be working fine regardless. Google Voice won't start without a SIM, either. There might be a way around that.

The trackball is actually pretty useful for cursoring back to correct mistakes in text entry, which generally works pretty well. One thing I didn't realize is that you don't have to tap the suggested word to accept it; if it's the default suggestion, you can just press the spacebar. And it does the one nice thing that my Blackberry does, which is insert a period and turn on caps for the next letter when you press the spacebar twice. In reality, I'm already typing much faster on this than I ever could on my Blackberry.

So far, the biggest problems I have are that if I go too fast, it will miss keystrokes, there's not apparently any shortcut to switch to caps, and entering commas requires a long-press of the punctuation button.

Choice quote from Palm's Rubenstein in a recent interview:



Yeah, it shows in the quality of the Pre. If you don't know your competition, you don't know jack.

And of course:



I'm sure the stock holders don't feel the same way - the stock is trading lower now that it did before the Pre was released. I'm sure they also don't like the quarter over quarter losses.

Maybe it's time to pick up a few iPhones and Android handsets to take a peek at.

Woah! I had no idea that you were going to actually get one! Very neat!

Have you tried pressing the shift key twice to get all-caps?

There's no comma button by default? Hmm, that's an annoyance for me. I rely on commas (perhaps a little too much ).

For the most part, it sounds very similar to the iPhone virtual keyboard including how to deal with corrections. Good to hear, since standards in behavior will make it easier to switch, or borrow someone else's phone. And as far as the speed, that helps reaffirm what I suspected, that I'd be much faster on a decent virtual keyboard then a physical one on a phone.

A bit, though what I prefer is that in addition to the most likely suggestion you get a long row of alternatives, and often you can save 3 to 4 keypresses by selecting a word further down the line. Not always, but often enough. I just like having the option.

But I agree with your statement. That's partly what makes it easier for me when I type something out on my wife's iPhone [landscape] keyboard, that there's at least some familiarity.

It was probably a bad decision on my part, but, dammit, anything to get rid of this Blackberry. The thing that made me finally pull the trigger was that T-Mobile has a $40 unlimited data plan with 0 voice minutes. The per-minute rate is something astronomical, like 50¢ or something, but I really don't use much air time at all.

Interestingly, even though the documentation clearly says that it won't work on AT&T's network, I swapped in my Blackberry SIM just to see, and both voice and data work just fine. I'm only getting EDGE-like data speeds, but that's all I was getting from the Blackberry anyway. I'm sure I'm roaming, but my T-Mobile SIM is supposed to show up on Tuesday.


Yeah, that works. Not that that was what I meant. On the Blackberry, if you hold down a key for a while, it changes to uppercase, which is faster than shift+key, at least for me.


If you have the voice input turned on, but replaces the comma key with a voice input key. Turn it off and the comma comes back. I think I'll leave it that way. The voice input works reasonably well, but I can't think of many situations where it would be that useful.

If anyone's interested, Nexus One unboxing pr0n.

Oh, also, the earbuds that came with the thing are fucking enormous. I usually find traditional earbuds very uncomfortable, but these actually won't fit in my ear at all.

It says that in the documentation? Strange. I think it was clear all along that it works on AT&T's network, but it doesn't use the 3G frequencies that T-Mobile uses. It's the same case with my G1, which I had on AT&T until I ran my contract out and switched to T-Mobile. I'm MUCH happier now.



I think I'm confused now. It sounds like you mean that you're holding the shift key down as you press the letters. I mean that you tap the shift key twice in a row, then start typing to get all caps. I would think that's faster than holding it down...


Ah, I see. Yeah, I never use the voice input. It just doesn't work well in any amount of noise (at least in my experience), and the accuracy just isn't reliable enough. I'd much rather have the comma

Yeah, I may have misinterpreted the documentation.


Guh. I'm clearly doing a bad job of explaining this.

I'm not talking about capslock at all, only incidental capital letters, mostly proper nouns. If I'm typing "I saw Matt", when I get to the capital-M, on the N1, I have to press shift, then M. On the Blackberry, I also have the option of just doing a long-press of the M to make it capital, which I find more efficient.

Android uses long-presses to get to alternate characters. There's none for M, but if I wanted to enter "ó" I'd long-press the O key, and a submenu would pop up. So doing a long-press isn't an option, but it'd be nice if there was some shortcut available. Regardless, I'll get used to it.


Me too.

Not sure it works that way; the apps are stored on the "system" flash. This isn't RAM and moving apps out of there is only going to change the speed they load/access their app data. The partition they live in is not usable for swap (by default at least. swapping is a very bad idea on media with limited write endurance).

I say change vs speed up or slow down because it depends on how fast the SD card you have inserted is vs the eMMC or raw NAND you have installed internally. You could win, you could lose.

Possibly there are some second order effects if, say, the phone vendor decreed that the internal NAND was "fast enough" and didn't require linux to cache that FS, but the SD card did require caching... that'd then mean the SD card would always be faster. That bit is just speculation though.

2x early termination fees

According to the contract you sign when you get the Nexus One, you'll be liable to Google and your carrier for an early termination fee if you cancel before 120 days. So if you don't like the Nexus One then send it back before 14 days has elapsed otherwise you may possibly be stung with a $550 fee if you do it before 4 months.

Yeah, that's a big fail. Hopefully this is merely a case of Google stumbling a bit at selling their first physical consumer product, because they clearly have not handled it well. I may be a Google fanboy, but clearly they've pretty much bungled ever step of this process. Lets look at it:

1) T-Mobile users can't get the subsidized rate on the phone

2) 3G doesn't work because of a bad bug that T-Mobile, Google, and HTC practically ignored for several days, and users couldn't get heard because there's no support from Google.

3) If you don't like your phone, you might end up paying more for sending it back than you paid for it unsubsidized to begin with.

That's pretty much a failure across the board. I don't have a clue what they're doing, and clearly neither do they!

Voice dialing doesn't work over Bluetooth. They're apparently working on it, but that's huge fail.

The same is true for the Motorola Droid.

At least the bugs in Android are consistent cross-platform

Video review of the Nexus One at Uncrate.

This is what I got from the review... The phone is typical HTC. Nice looking at first glance, but with the weaknesses I pointed out before, especially that track ball. Android is at a level I would call beta. Serious pre 1.0 quality here, not ready for market IMO.

That guy's a douche.

There are some problems I have with the phone, but, beyond the handsfree voice dialing, nothing major.

The trackball actually works fine as a secondary interface. I use it very occasionally and it's useful.

The fit and finish on the phone is fine, but I wish it was more metal. Regardless, it has a nice heft. It doesn't feel cheap. The wake-up button is in the wrong place, though.

This is a bit off topic, but Bitt, what I like least about the text input is the dictionary on the auto-correct. I don't know why I can't edit it, and it's driving me mad. It's probably the biggest issue I have with Android right now. This might not be a problem with the virtual keyboard, though:

When I'm typing on the physical keyboard of the G1, and I type "im" and the space button, it will change to "I'm" as you'd hope it would. But when I type "ill" and hit space, it doesn't change it. Fine, I can understand that one to some extent. I never use the word "ill," but some people do. But why can't I have a choice? Why can't I tell the phone that every single time I type "ill" I want it to change to "I'll." It's annoying because this essentially takes TWICE the number of keypresses it could (I have to hit shift-I-alt-apostrophe-l-l instead of just i-l-l).

But the one that kills me every time is "I'd." It boggles my mind that for the few people who talk about the "id," I have to constantly adjust the case and punctuation manually

But there are probably no cases of auto-correction where Android will make word substitutions for correct words, not just the ones you've mentioned.

The case of "im" is clear-cut because there's no such word. It's just doing a lookup in a dictionary, and while I've seen many instances of being able to add custom words, I don't know of any dictionary that allows you to remove existing words without hacking on the back end.

He just wants to manually prioritize the suggestions.

Matt: If you just type "il" and press space, it'll autocomplete to "I'll". Also, "id" autocompletes to "I'd" for me. Maybe it's a 2.1 difference?

I've also not seen a dictionary with that type of manual adjustment. From a modification/hacking perspective, it would be a lot easier to remove the words you don't want to use.

Are there implementations that will automatically prioritize based on manual corrections? That would be a neat feature.

The Blackberry certainly allows you to enter your own autocorrections. It doesn't have any suggestions, but it should be relatively trivial to combine the two systems.

Precisely, and that was exactly what I was thinking about. I meant to mention that when I had a Blackberry I was very happy that it had this capability.

I don't see any reason why you couldn't have this kind of functionality.

Thanks for the "il" tip, Bitt. I'll have to remember that. Unfortunately "id" doesn't correct for me. It's possible that it's a difference between the virtual and physical keyboards. There are other differences too.

Patents? That'd be my guess.

Not exactly what you describe, but my Moto Z6c will remember the last word used and offer that first.
For example, "of" and "me" use the same number keys.
It seems to always offer me the one that I don't want to use.

It would certainly be nice to have more manual control over the dictionary.

All this talk of predictive text reminds me of this Armstrong and Miller sketch.

We can't have that one without also throwing in their mobile phone naming sketch .

Every predictive text system I've ever used has preferred "can't" to "cant".

What if it were a Scottish dictionary?

You know what else is a big fail?

I ordered my Nexus One on 9th Jan. Instead of London UK, somehow DHL have managed to send it to Uganda.

My shipping address is exactly right on the Google Order (says UNITED KINGDOM on it). I sent them messages through Google Checkout straight after I got tracking information to the wrong country, before DHL had even picked up the package and still no reply. Sent messages to DHL Customer Service at the same time too, but they couldn't stop the package either.

Now its apparently going through customs clearance in Kampala when DHL are telling me that it will be turned around and redelivered to the correct address in the next week.

Don't need this hassle.

That's strange. Mine was on my doorstep about 24 hours after I ordered it. I guess DHL is retarded.

Not bad for customer relations

Though it still doesn't address the current T-Mobile customers who have no way to get the subsidized phone.

What are you talking about? That is the subsidized cost. They subsidize it more if you're a new customer, but it's still like $300 off the unlocked price.

If you are a customer and have no existing contract, why aren't you eligible for the fully subsidized price by signing a new contract? In my experience, such a customer is eligible for the same perks as a new customer since they're pretty much in the same boat, except for the existing phone number. There's nothing holding you back from canceling and porting your number elsewhere.

Some people have been doing an end-run around this issue by joining with a new customer account and then canceling the new phone number while porting/transferring the old one. It's a little more time on the phone, but you get the phone at the price it should be for new contracts.

I wasn't aware that was the case. I was under the impression that this was in reference to T-Mobile customers with current contracts or ones who didn't want to sign a new contract.

I'm not positive either, it's just what I've gleaned from all the stories. If the reporters/bloggers weren't being clear enough to indicate that people want the low price without a contract, then that's definitely a communication issue. I've understood that this was a big deal precisely because of what I mentioned though.

IMO, if you don't have and don't want a contract then you shouldn't be able to get the phone at the lower contract price. Sure, you're an existing customer so perhaps you may be entitled to some other loyalty discount, but you shouldn't be able to get the phone without a contract, thereby making it a much better deal than for new customers.

From everything I've heard, if you are a T-Mobile customer who has become out of contract (say, had your phone for two years), you still have no way to get the subsidized price by signing up for a new contract, like you would with any other phone on the network.

I thought this sounded highly unlikely, but I have been contradicted by several people on some Android forums.

Thanks for setting it straight. It's as I've heard as well. Kind of bullshit policy that can obviously be gotten around, but it doesn't make sense to me why you'd put customers through that PITA.

Anyway, after reading the reviews on the Nexus One and seeing how its sales are being handled, I don't think the phone is going anywhere anyway. Not likely a good buy for someone that wants future support as I think this one is going to be abandonware sooner rather than later. A stepping stone for Google and just another weekly release for HTC. And that's actually the problem I have with HTC. They've yet to make anything of long-term quality. The more nameless and indentity-stripped phones they release, the weaker I see them as a brand. They should get their retail shit together or just fall into the background and get back into solely dong OEM and ODM work devoid of the HTC name.

That's just the thing though. You order the phone through Google, and T-Mobile apparently has little to do with the sales process. It seems there's not really anything that users in this position can do.

I explained above how you can get around it.

Except every Nokia I have ever owned...I wish they would put the apostrophe in for me, rather than me have to type 'can' then an apostrophe, and then a 't'

Surprise, the Nexus One Camera sucks - comparison against iPhone 3GS with Nikon D200 serving as benchmark. To be fair, Google may be able to fix or at least improve some of the issues in software.

Some? The only problems with the phone were white balance problems and poor ISO selection. Both of those things are completely software controlled, unless the hardware in the N1 only has one ISO setting available, which seems unlikely.

I said "some" because it's possible Google has already tried to address these issues in the current software releases. I don't think Google saw the phone for the first time at their press release.

They really need to get their act together as far as software strategy and advertising goes. Throwing money at a problem blindly isn't going to cut it in this industry, so they very much need to make sure they hone/polish their wares a lot more than they're used to. I'm not sure if the company ethos can change quickly enough to make a difference in the next year though.

The camera comparison I'd really like to see is up-close stuff. With my iPhone, I've often wanted to take a quick picture of a receipt to send somebody for reimbursement or something, but the iPhone's camera (at least in my 3G) cannot take a legible picture of a standard restaurant receipt. Given that the Android phones have support for reading QR codes and barcodes, I have to assume they've gotten this right, or at least significantly better than my iPhone.

As to high-ISO, color balance, and other things from this test, Bitt's right. Those are totally under software control, and it's quite often that consumer digital cameras (which do nothing other than take photos) get these things wrong. It's unsurprising that the Nexus One does no better.

Now, what would be really interesting would be hacking up a Nexus One uber-photo app that writes out DNG raw files. That's probably not even all that hard to do. Hmm....

UPDATE: but the performance looks pretty poor

receipt taken with N1

To get decent close-up pictures with an iPhone you'll need a 3gs model or a hack-ish attachment lens for the older models.

I don't recall a consumer digicam that produces results as bad as those from the camera on the N1.

Whether the issues can be fixed in software or not, which I did say they likely could, it's a testament to the fundamental development and release philosophies of Google versus Apple and others.

The deficiencies in the camera and photo app are obvious and more could have been done to remedy the issue prior to release.

I'm still waiting to see a real Google phone, because frankly, the Nexus 1 is really just an HTC. A decently spec'd phone, but it's just not a tight and well integrated software/hardware package like people were speculating long ago.

Android to me, just currently seems very half-assed. I really want to see some stronger competition for the iPhone because unless Apple feels itself being squeezed it's not going to do as much as it possibly can to improve the iPhone. Which in turn means we can end up in the same state the industry was in a little while ago, with a boat-load of half-assed products.

The initial iPhone and 3G had the same camera, with a fixed focus lens. The G1, Nexus One, iPhone 3GS, Droid and Pre all have auto focus and macro capable lenses, allowing for shots like a closeup of a receipt.

Based on Bitt's photo, it looks like the N1 is certainly much better than my iPhone, yet still has a way to go. Of course, doing macro properly requires moving the lens farther away from the sensor (cool example shots), and that requires space, which is in short supply in these cameraphones...

FWIW, I didn't try really hard to get a great shot. Here's one where I steadied my hand.

FYI: http://googlenexusoneboard.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-software-update-for-nexus-one.html


Very nice update for all Nexus one users. Google has finally added multi-touch actions (namely pinch zooming) to a number of its apps people were complaining regularly about.

Hopefully it fixes some other random bugs, too.

Nuts. It won't let me do a manual update yet.

I've given this phone some random thought over the past little while and I keep coming back to the same place. I think Google really need to release something tied more closely to their existing brand. They really need to release the definitive Google phone to put Android on the map. The general public can be confused if the branding message is mixed and that's happening with these products. Lots of device brands, including now the Nexus One, plus the OS brand. This needs to be solidified, at least with the portions Google has control over. Their "Google" brand isn't doing nearly as much as it could to help this product along.

I agree. They need to have a little stronger control over the OS, too. There's some impetus to not fracture it too much so that the App Market will still work, but Android on one phone should be nearly identical to Android on another phone. Right now, it's not too far off, but I can certainly envision a fracturing.

If this were MY OS, I know one change I would make. If someone wants to deviate significantly in their OS distribution and handset capabilities they'd be prevented from using the Android name in any way shape or form, as well as anything to tie the product to Google or the Android OS in any other way. In other words, feel free to use the OS as a basis for your "Feature Phone" but make sure the general public doesn't know it's Android under the hood.

Now if you want to make a real Android-branded handset, a real GOOGLE branded handset, now here's what you have to do. It's spelled out in concrete. No deviation whatsoever. Google innovates here and as the handset manufacturer you follow blindly or fuck off.

Google has the money and brand where they could have done this without any other handset manufacturers at all. Maybe they would even have been more successful at this point, forgetting the whole multi-brand thing and just keeping "Android" for both the OS and phone hardware. Or some other brand, which I'm sure they could have hired someone to come up with. Just keeping it singular is the main point.

http://androidforums.com/nexus-one/41504-how-force-2-2-2010-ota-update.html

Thanks, Caleb. I was going to wait for the OTA just to be safe, but I got tired of waiting. I also started to be unsure about how I would get it, since I'm not on T-Mobile and Google was coordinating with them on the updates.

The manual update was pretty easy. And it fixed my number one bug, the launcher crashes. Yay!

And maybe it's just me, but I find the pinch gesture incredibly awkward.

I agree, though I still think it's a good zoom method. I never felt it was essential, though. Still, it's nice that they're starting to put it into their phones. It's funny, because with my rooted G1, I actually have pinch to zoom. It was funny to have it before Nexus One and Droid owners.

Also, I don't think you need to worry about not getting the updates, Bitt. I had my G1 on AT&T for a year, but before I rooted it I did get OTA updates. I have no idea how they're pushing them out and how they knew that my phone was theirs. IMEI?

I assume that the phone goes and checks occasionally to see if there's an update available. I also assume that the source they check determines if an upgrade is available based on some UID.

I don't know who controls the source, though. I would assume Google, but I could be wrong. I also don't know their algorithm for the order of the phones. It's possible that it's random. It's possible that they just allow the first x phones every y minutes, or some other timed first-come-first-served method. It's possible that they're picking specific UIDs. Since T-Mobile doesn't know my UID, and I didn't get it first, I kinda assumed I'd be last, or at least random. I waited a day or so, checking occasionally, and it still didn't offer it. So I just bit the bullet and did it manually.

I'm sure the reason they stage it is to not kill T-Mobile's network with all the phones getting the update all at once. (Though it's like 11MB, so it's not like a huge amount of data.) As such, they should check the source, and if it's not a T-Mobile IP, allow the upgrade. What do they care if it kills AT&T's network?

Can you update these things over USB? THen they could put up a download link on an appropriate page before the OTA update goes live.

Probably. The manual procedure was to download a zip file onto the root of the SD card, then reboot while holding the trackball in, which puts it in a recovery mode, then select some options to get it to install the upgrade. No reason you couldn't download the file and put it on the phone via USB. I'm sure there's a magic incantation to get the phone to automatically do all the recovery mode stuff, too.

But there's no desktop firmware loader for use with a USB connection? The manual update sounds easy, but definitely what I call geek oriented. Not something a typical consumer will ever do.

The OTA automatic update is probably the easiest for someone who doesn't want to get their hands involved in any of it.

I don't think I received any desktop software at all, though it did come with a USB cable. I haven't actually hooked it up to a computer, so I don't know what it does. (To be fair, I have seldom ever hooked a smartphone or PDA up to a computer. I'd far rather it be standalone and sync over the network in the background. So there might be desktop software that I just don't know about.)

What I was implying about the magic incantation was that there's no reason that there's no reason there couldn't be an Android application that did it for you.

Of course, the problem is that there's then no reason for people to not just download it directly using the phone, which is what I did.

I was just looking to find out if there was an alternative to waiting for your turn in the queue to download the update. Offering a download online makes it a free-for-all with generally enough bandwidth to serve all your customers at once. There are probably the in-between geeks who will do a manual install but may not necessarily want to bother with the magic bits.

For the average customer, the OTA is the best idea because it will just happen on its own sweet time without them having to make a conscious decision to go download, then update/sync.

Question for Nexus One owners here. I'm looking for someone who bought theirs unlocked (for the $529 price).

First, do you have it on T-Mobile? Second, were you able to keep your current plan and not be forced into their plan?

I'm looking into getting the Nexus One, because lately I simply can't bear the abysmal performance of the G1. It's truly awful. However, it will be extremely difficult to justify the price of the unlocked phone to myself (and more importantly, my wife). The problem with the subsidized phone, though, is that the plan sucks. Well, it's decent, but isn't the plan for me. I'm one of the few people on the planet, it seems, who despises text messaging, for example, but I run a business that puts me on my phone a lot. I switched to T-Mobile from AT&T entirely because I could get a plan with unlimited voice and text (and no texts) for a decent price ($80, which I think is pretty good).

I've heard that you're pretty much stuck with the plan that comes with the subsidized phone, which sucks. I need more than 500 minutes (this is my only phone, after all). I'm going to try to justify the more expensive phone, which I'm sure I could just order and stick my SIM card into, but it'll be difficult.

So yeah, my question was: if you bought your phone without the contract, were you able to just keep on like nothing changed?

Yes, although it wanted me to switch from the G1 data plan to the Android data plan, which was an extra 4 or 5 bucks. However, I was paying 4 or 5 bucks for like 25 text messages (or whatever the smallest was); I just disallowed T-Mobile to forward SMS to me, canceled the text plan and ended up owing an extra 4 cents per month.

I was able to order a bare SIM from T-Mobile without telling them what I was putting it in and have it work, if that mens anything to you.

Another big nail in the Nexus' coffin?

The screen sucks

At this point, is there any Android product that isn't, at best, a beta (or pre-production-class) product?

The screen most definitely does not suck. It's just not perfect.

Also, I pulled up the Sunset on Mars NASA photograph (http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/117989main_image_feature_347_ys_full.jpg) in the browser and it had zero banding. When I saved it and opened it in the gallery app it had banding when displayed. Not sure what's up with that.

And just to round you out so that you hate everything, here's a cute puppy picture.

Oh noes!!1!!1!!!111

I know that what I'm looking for in a smartphone is perfect color rendition.

I'll take the 2.5x higher resolution (over the iPhone) any day of the week.

Hm. I'm seeing the same thing with a quick colorbars image I created. In the Gallery app, it's got clear banding. In the image viewer built into the ASTRO file manager, it does not.

Must be a bug in the Gallery application.

Am I retarded or is there really no way to zoom with Astro?

No idea. I just created a 480x800 image.

I emailed Dr. Raymond M. Soneira (article author) to inquire about how the images were displayed on the device.

One commenter on the article says that he thinks the Gallery app is doing some odd compression to make the images load faster, resulting in these issues. I'm hoping Gizmodo will read these responses and correct their article, because if this is the case, then it's simply not a true story. They're comparing apps, not screens.

I like Gizmodo for their variety of tech tid-bits, but I'm finding their 'reporting' to be alarmist and misinformed a lot of the time.

I sent an email to the author of the original article asking him to retract his conclusion.

That said, even if it were true: seriously, who gives a crap? Is someone out there doing color calibration with his smartphone?

I find that, or that same sort of pervasive negative attitude, to be common amongst most of the Gawker Media sites.

I haven't read many Gawker sites. I started on Engadget because it was a FAR better blog when it first started than Gizmodo (Gizmodo then essentially started trying to be like Engadget). But one of my absolute favorite blogs out there is Lifehacker. You don't include that blog in your statement, do you?

Well, maybe I should say "many" instead of "most".

Lifehacker definitely doesn't have that attitude. IO9 definitely does.

Weird. What is that one about? I can't really tell.

Gawker is basically a pay-per-click blogging sweatshop, and negativity sells, so...

SciFi, Comics, etc. Geek pop culture, basically.

Gizmodo is a POS, agreed. But yes, I'd be looking for at least "good" or even just "acceptable" color reproduction on a smart phone like the Nexus One. And that means it shouldn't be saddled with a 16 bit display.

Thankfully, this is starting to seem more like a software bug rather than a hardware limitation though.

Well, it looks like they have a couple extremely weak updates to the article. I find it odd that our N1 owners don't see the problem in their browsers, but the Gizmodo author says he sees it in his. Seems fishy to me.

But speaking to what Bitt said earlier, just look at the first screenshot. I don't care what your complaint is, Bruno, even if this story is true, you're taking one aspect of the screen that's worse and declaring the entire screen AND phone worse because of it. Please hear me out here, because using that exact same twisted logic, I can look at that same screenshot and say "wow, look how washed out the iPhone display looks in comparison to the Nexus One screen. I can't believe Apple would ship a product in this state, and it's clearly inferior to the Google device."

How is that any different than what you were saying?

I asked if this reported "fact" was another nail in the coffin. That's not declaring the product bad because of the one aspect.

Did you read the part about the screen being 16bit? Did you read the part about it being useless in sunlight? I don't have to look any of the images because the text explained what was happening well enough that I knew what the images would look like. If those "facts" were misreported, then clearly they are not another nail. Matt, don't be offended because you own an N1. And don't blame me for the content of someone else's report.

Seriously, I knock the iPhone all the time, but it's still by far the hottest handset around and there's no denying that. But again, this has nothing to do with the iPhone.

I don't own one.

You're assuming that there even is a coffin. This is far from confirmed.

Ah, whatever man. The OLED screen was definitely one of the reasons to go for the Nexus rather than a Milestone and comparing the two (my friend has a Milestone) mine is more contrasty, easier on the eyes and seems to be a bit clearer. Its a really big step up from my G1/Dream and the Magic. This is all with text and icons - really I couldn't care less with images really. The colours may be all off, and there might be banding (of which I don't notice either) but for a phone its great.

As with sunlight, luckily we don't seem to have any sunlight here in the UK

That's pretty disingenuous, come on. I can't remember a phone released recently with as many reported, and widely at that, problems. From the software to the hardware to the way the company is dealing with the issues.

TN TFT panels are six-bits-per-subpixel, which means that it's an 18-bit display at best. Virtually all LCD panels are TN, including, I'm sure, the ones in the iPhones. Does that mean that the iPhone's display also sucks?


Yep. I did. My experience, however, tells me that while it's somewhat more difficult to see in sunlight, it's far from useless.


They were misreported; the text completely overstates the issue. It only shows up in the Gallery application. It appears to simply be a bug there (or maybe in the OpenGL implementation), not a bug in the OS. This rendering problem does not happen anywhere else. At all.

There are this many reports because it's popular. Over on GDGT, the like/dislike ratio is at 177:5. The iPhone 3GS is at 143:9. And these are people who are likely to be more technically oriented than the average person. Given, far more people have the 3GS, but's it's been out quite a bit longer.

IMO, the issue-dealing is a side-effect of the fact that it's being sold by the manufacturer rather than the phone company. Should they have had a better system in place? Yeah, but basically no one in the US has done this before. In order to get a phone that is not tied down, I'm happy to deal with it. That said, I have not had any particular problems, and many people may not have the same ideological bent about it that I do. That said, I'm not aware of Apple being wildly active about fixing software bugs in the iPhone. Maybe I'm wrong.

It's actually very hard to tell properly-dithered 16bpp images from 24bpp, especially on such high-resolution (high DPI) screens. But bad dithering, or no dithering, and yes you get visible banding. Apple conspicuously don't actually say what the hardware bit-depth is on the Iphone (or, for that matter, Ipad).

Peter

Back to tech-news sites for a moment-

I like to read slashdot and I've posted links to their summaries here occasionally.
Another that I'm fond of is Gizmag.
Still another is Science Daily.

I got a reply from the good Doctor someone else at DisplayMate.

I don't understand why they don't write their own image display app so that they can be in 100% control of what it's doing. He does say that Gizmodo's screenshot provide definitive proof of whatever they're complaining about. I don't see how a "news" blog's screenshots count as anything but anecdotal evidence, but I'm no academic.

I got the same form letter. These guys are apparently idiots.


By the same reasoning, if I had my Nexus One display an image that showed only 16 colors, they would conclude that it only had a 4-bit "display interface".

Then they go on to say:


Yep, that additional 1 bit per subpixel is going to make all the difference. It's going to be so much easier to emulate 256 shades of green when limited to 64 shades of green than 32 shades of green. ?!?

Regardless, they refuse to simply try loading the image in a different application themselves. Ridiculous. They're just playing CYA now.

"Flash" on Nexus 1

http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2010/02/24/battery-performance-with-flash-player-10-1-on-nexus-one/

This video is only Nexus related as far as the demo running on that phone. It's more to show what an asshat Adobe's Flash evangelist is.

He claims they can run this Flash video for up to 3 hours on the phone. And he proclaims that proves that Flash isn't a factor with regards to battery power. Hmmm... The Nexus specs claim it can do 7 hours of video playback. Seems like going the Flash route may ding you after all....

The demo is also playing H.264 video.... Why would you want to wrap H.264 in Flash? If you're serving H.264 you can use the video tag which is natively supported by the webkit browser on the Nexus - and iPhone for that matter.

What happens to the battery when you're playing Sorenson Flash video? How about animated vector flash?

If Adobe is serious about Flash and even close to truthful about their roll as a company, which is to provide content creation tools, then they'd release the source to the runtime with a CC, BSD, GPL or whatever license. They could then try to push it as an open standard and maybe get some W3C action behind it, which may take 10 to 20 years. In the meantime however they may get browser vendors to write their own implementations if they feel it's important enough to support that type of content.

Yeah, it seems to kill the battery.

The previous "test" going by the android usage app statistics is likely a very very bad way to measure power. The android usage app is kinda strange, it gives users reassuring bars that indicate battery usage by app and subsystem even though there's no actual current measurement hardware in the system to enable this level of detail.

Charge it up, then run the test until it's out of power. It's the only way that actually means squat

Are people surprised Flash drains the battery? Flash drains my desktop's battery, and I have it plugged in to the mains!

I don't see any reason that they can't make a reasonable guess on battery consumption based on a variety of factors. The CPU is likely to consume a given amount of power based on usage, and it's easy enough to find out which applications used which amount of CPU time. The display probably consumes a known amount of power depending on the number of pixels lit. Same notions with the GPS receiver, GSM radio, etc.

I doubt it's incredibly accurate, but there's no reason it's not a great rule of thumb.

I just had a thought. You're not assuming that it consumed 6% of the entire battery, are you? The Battery Use display is telling you the relative levels of battery use between the applications (and hardware, etc.) that have been running since the phone was unplugged. What they're saying is that the Browser application used relatively little of the battery compared to the GSM radio and the display. I can confirm that if you leave a CPU-hungry application running, it does show up with a significantly higher percentage of battery use in that display.

There's no getting around that Adobe themselves admitted that running video through flash, even H.264 encoded video, kills the battery more than twice as fast as it would otherwise be consumed playing video.

Not everything you want to know is necessarily instrumented, though. For instance, 1 CPU second of work on a dataset that fits in on-chip cache is going to use a lot less power than 1 CPU second of work that misses the cache and spends all its time waggling external pins that head off to the DRAM. And that's exactly the sort of thing that a large codebase ported from desktop CPUs, which is presumably what Flash is, won't have been optimised for.

Peter

Um. Okay. I don't think that anyone is arguing that Flash isn't power hungry. Anyone who did would be an idiot. They do claim that Flash 10 is better. I'll believe it when I see it, personally.

Regardless, having the ability to use Flash is a positive, except for those people who will use it constantly and kill their batteries. One would assume that they have some way for it to not load on ads and whatnot. A builtin Flashblock would make sense.

We disagree on that point. I believe that having a large base of installed browsers that explicitly do not support Flash is a good thing. It will contribute to the demise of Flash and the adoption of better web standards.

If Adobe wants to tie their ship to that anchor, that's their business. But they're playing a dirty little war that I'm quite confident they are all but assured of losing.

Well, I was going to say "That's all well and good for video, but what about the other stuff Flash can do?", but it seems that HTML5 might have that covered, too.

That said, I don't have the same religious war against Flash that you do. Adobe's interpreter implementation is awful, but the specification is open now, so there's no reason it can't be improved by others.

I will point out that it wasn't very long ago at all that you were laughing at Palm for basing their OS on HTML5, yet now you're touting HTML5 as a replacement for what is undoubtedly a full-featured (if poorly implemented) environment.

I feel dirty posting this here. Here's another email I got from DM guys.

It's just not worth paying attention to those idiots. Is there a bug in (what's likely to be) their OpenGL texture renderer? Yeah. Does it really make any difference? Eh. I suppose there are some people out there to whom it's relevant. Certainly not I. I would far rather Google spend their time on other things than fix this.

I find it laughable that they claim that only fanboys would be interested in whether other applications can display images in full color (despite the fact that this would seem to disprove their notion that the hardware is incapable of doing so) and then also fawn over the (apparently huge) difference between 16-bit and 18-bit color. Which is more fanboyish: pointing out that if you're unhappy with the rendering in one application that you can use another one, available for free on the Android Market, or obsessing about a 1-bit-per-subpixel difference?

Open in what way? Open like GPL? Open like any company can suggest changes to the spec? Or just open enough that others can implement something just to have Adobe pull the rug out from underneath them? I'm sure if it was properly open, Mozilla or someone similar would jump at the chance to fix things, since the majority of Firefox crashes are due to Flash.

I liken Flash to the situation of a number of years back on the web when many sites required Internet Explorer. Other browsers were free to implement the broken and horrible behavior IE had in rendering the web, and I'm sure they could have supported ActiveX somehow. Thankfully that wasn't the way things went, and we now have a better web experience due to browsers shifting to proper open standards. Sure, back then it sucked to be forced into IE or just not see content, but eventually things changed and people got over it. The more non Flash platforms out there, the quicker the same thing will happen again, allowing people on mobile devices to finally see when a restaurant is open without some 5MB SWF download.

I continue to laugh at Palm. Using HTML for what lives in a browser makes sense. Using a video tag to mark the spot for a video within a web page makes sense. But basing an operating system on serving up web pages? Hardly the same thing. And it doesn't make much sense at all for a full-featured platform. It's certainly doable for some applications, but developers can always have that choice on a platform like iPhone or Android which also allow native development.

Look, Adobe lost the browser battle with SVG. But they were winning the desktop content battle and made some nice coin. They used that coin to pick up their long-time rival and the technology that helped kick their ass. Suddenly it's the greatest thing ever because it continues to help line their pockets with cash.

I'm not a fan of much of what Flash offers on the web, even if it were completely open.

Well:



I infer that that means that they don't want other people changing it without their permission. But it's currently freely available. And I don't see any reason people couldn't distribute addenda separately from the Adobe spec. The only hole left is if Adobe stops distributing the specs. Since the license disallows redistribution, that would mean that only the people that had already downloaded it would have access to it.

They also say:


That doesn't inherently mean anything, but they didn't have to say it at all.

SWF and FLV/F4V are only the containers. How open is the content inside? Like Actionscript and all the bits that come together to actually make Flash work? And how about the compilers? I found some info that their goal is to make the next Actionscript compatible with ECMAScript, but thats no good for current content, only some theoretical future version.

Yeah, Flash sounds really promising for Android: http://gizmodo.com/5480985/why-most-current-android-phones-will-never-get-flash-101

Adobe hasn't put out an official comment yet, but it seems likely the person referred to in the article is an Adobe employee. 528MHz processors aren't suitable for running Flash 10.1? Sounds like a gem of a plugin.

You know what else sounds wonderful? There are Android devices out there relegated to version 1.5 of the OS. I'm sorry, this platform is on a slippery slope. Google needs to break out the spikes and get some traction fast.

Frankly, every "iPhone Killer" announced in the past three years only makes the iPhone look better and better in the end. I still can't believe that the most promising competition I've heard of so far is going to be coming from Microsoft. There's still plenty of time to completely screw that up of course.

I blame temporary morning dyslexia. Did anyone else see it this way?

I know that's not what I wrote, but I'll be damned if I didn't flip up to my post and see exactly that for a split second.

Anyway, none of the porn sites I visit use Flash.

As I understand it, everything is open (not open source, necessarily) from the SVG spec to the RTMP except for some patented codecs (like Sorenson Spark), and companies other than Adobe hold those patents. I'm not an expert, though. Go check out Adobe's Open Screen Project's FAQ.

ActionScript has actually been open source for a while.

The FLA format is not open. I think most everything else is, aside from the player.

Interesting read from an iPhone developer who bought a Nexus One.

http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2010/02/nexus-one-from-iphone-developer.html

Basic summary, the Nexus One is the best smartphone out there when excluding the iPhone. But when compared to the design, user experience decisions, and a few other factors on the iPhone, the Nexus One misses that last 10%. Mostly due to decisions like placing a touch sensitive home button right below the spacebar when in portrait mode leading to the occasional accidental application closure. He's also puzzled about certain performance issues at times, considering the hardware.

Definitely a little biased, but it's probably a good viewpoint for any iPhone owner looking at the competition for a potential phone replacement.

I mostly agree with the hardware section, with a few exceptions. I don't have the problem in sunlight that most people seem to. The notion that "Menu" and "Back" are not universal functions is ridiculous. I can agree with "search". I almost never use that button. The trackball is good for moving your text cursor around, but otherwise I totally agree with his point there. (It does also double as an indicator light, though, which he doesn't mention.) He mentions that rebooting the N1 takes a "long, long time." He's clearly never used a Blackberry. I don't think I've ever heard anyone else say that Android's text looks bad. I think it looks quite good.

I will add one additional complaint. Since the touch sensitivity of the screen goes right to the edge and the screen goes right to the edge of the phone, you have to hold the edges of the phone while you're using it, which can be awkward and not exactly secure.

I think he's way off base on the software section, though. I didn't miss the multitouch at all, and now that it's there, I barely use it. I find it an awkward UI at best. I won't argue that scroll bounce isn't a reasonable UI feature, but it's just barely a step above eye candy. I can understand how if you're used to it that the lack of it would be misleading, but simply not having it at all is totally unconcerning.

My biggest problem with his post, though, is his complete dismissal of multitasking, and it highlights an Apple thought process that annoys the crap out of me: the "most people don't" notion. It's pervasive in Apple's software design, and it's the biggest reason that a large portion of people eschew Apple software, even under MacOS. They've already decided what you want to do, and if you don't fit their notion, there's no poking or prodding that will resolve it. It's not off by default; it's just not there. There are at least seven instances where he thinks something is bad because "most" don't have any use for it (one of those being, admittedly, in the iPhone's favor), and several other instances where features are labelled extraneous because of his lack of need.

Anyway: multitasking. I'll fall back on my most noted problem with lack of multitasking on devices of this sort. If I can't background my SSH application, I can't effectively use it, assuming that I might need to reference an email, or some notes, or a web page, or anything. He seems to have something of a misunderstanding of process management under Android, too. Applications that are still running certainly do continue to consume resources, but the application developers can mark their applications as to the level of background support needed. Some can request to never be closed, as with services, some can request higher priority, etc. And Android will kill programs as needed. That is, if you leave your browser open in the background and you need more memory, it will kill the browser process to provide it to you. By and large, you don't need to worry about process management at all. The one time that it's caused me a problem is when I was running Google Sky and I left it in the foreground with the phone "off". Since it was the foreground app, Android wouldn't kill it and it drained my battery very quickly.

The software problem he didn't note is that all apps are stored in built-in flash, and you can't use the SD card to store apps. I think I understand why: you don't want your apps, especially your preferred apps, to go away because you removed your SD card. That said, it's annoying.

His points clearly illustrate some reasons why the iPhone will continue to dominate Android in the market however. Every day I just see Android becoming more irrelevant. It's actually scary looking at how much promise this platform had and how quickly Google and partners have completely fucked it up. They have perfectly followed MS treatment of CE/Mobile.

Remember that the person who wrote that article is a developer. A geek, just as much as many of us here. Average consumers are going to like Android even less compared to the iPhone.

UPDATE: Someone may be trying to get Android out of the woods. I just read a news blurb claiming all US Android phones will be eligible for a 2.1 upgrade - one day. That's a start, but they have to roll this out world-wide and it needs to become mandatory that anyone that uses a branded Android install on a mobile phone must do day-and-date updates - in other words, match Google's update/release schedule to the day. They also need to kill all default custom skinning on anything branded Android and mentioning "Google" at all.

I don't give a flip about market share, as long as Android continues to sell enough to let it continue. Given that it's a quality free OS for developers and a significant number of people are interested in it, I don't see that happening.

I mean, Apple doesn't exactly have market share in PCs, yet you still like them in that space. I'm guessing.

Apple has as much market share for personal computers as most other PC makers though.

The lucky thing about Android is it's funded by Google, who at this time have practically endlessly deep pockets.

Not really.

Your stats, even as far as unit sales go, aren't for "personal computers" though. They include servers, which I'm sure really helps out HP and Dell a lot. Acer s up there thanks to cheap-ass PCs.

I was basing my comment on Apple being around 6% in units btw, which I was pretty sure put them around #5. I see that they're significantly bigger in the US at 7.5% where they are in fact #5, but globally they fall off the top 5 in units. Still respectable to be in the top 10 I suppose.

Let's look at this with the metric that matters most now... Dollars.

Has anyone seen problems with multi-touch on the Nexus One, especially compared to other handsets, such as Moto's Droid? Things like the phone not actually recognizing whee you're touching the screen.

Interesting article and even more interesting comment from Google:

http://androidandme.com/2010/03/news/is-multitouch-broken-on-the-nexus-one/



This amazes me on a few fronts. One, that a Google employee would make such a comment that puts their product and partner products in such a bad light. Two that they didn't offer some hope at least of being able to resolve this in software (it seems possible after viewing what's happening in the video). That Google is aware of this and still thought it was a god idea to use this touch sensor. I really get the feeling this is really just an HTC phone. That is, instead of HTC being the OEM producing a Google phone, w're just seeing an ODM relationship here with some re-branding. Basically this is just an HTC product running the Google OS.

This is just more evidence of the problems Google faces by maintaining these types of relationships and basically "phoning it in" when it comes to product design. No pun intended.

I do agree, it's an issue.

But frankly, I really don't care. This multi-touch controversy has been going on for a while, and the whole time I've just not seen why it was such a huge deal. I hadn't had it on my G1 for a year now, and it's never bothered me.

The video attached to that article is rather damning. That's a serious bug!

Well, once multi-touch is enabled, I think the issue shown in the video should bother anyone with the phone. It completely mis-tracks where the input is coming from and in what direction it's being moved.

Well, that's neat.

Yeah, that one's irritating, but, again, I haven't had much if any use for multitouch, so I don't really care that much in practice, but it's certainly annoying for a bug that significant to exist.

It's the same behavior the G1 had with its screen.

Why? If I'm not using multi-touch, why would it bother me?

By the way, is there anyone with a Nexus One within driving distance of DC? I'd love to drive out and check the phone out in person before I buy one, which is the major downside (IMO) to the way this phone is being sold.

BTW, I can confirm the problem by using the app "Simply Draw".

My inference from that is that you're saying that it just completely wigs out. If you're not saying that, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. Either way, it's worth a clarification of what's actually going on.

When both your fingers cross over the same line parallel to one of the axes, it tends to swap the x coordinates of the fingers, but not the y coordinates. (Or the other way around.) It seems to be fairly consistent behavior.

It also has the same symptoms if you put both fingers on the screen at the same time.

I'll bet that the sensor is sending the set of x coordinates that are being touched and the set of y coordinates that are being touched, rather than tuples of each distinct finger. When one finger is put down, there is one x and one y coordinate, which is pretty straightforward to interpret. When a second finger is put down, another x and another y coordinate show up, which is, again, pretty easy to interpret. But then the axes cross and the sensor is reporting two x coordinates, but only one y coordinate. At this point, the system still knows where the fingers are. But as soon as it sees a second y coordinate show up, it doesn't know which x coordinate to associate it with. Sometimes it gets lucky and sometimes it doesn't.

You summarized the problem and my thoughts accurately. Now, how/why on earth would a sensor manufacturer develop a product with such a hair-brained interface? Next, why would any company in their right mind select this component for inclusion in their product design? This seems like a monumental gaff. Do you think Microsoft would have done this with the Zune? Do you think Apple would have done this with the iPod or iPhone?

IMO, it's just more fodder indicating that Google, despite intentions, is just very half-assed. I can see it in all their software and the larger they grow the scarier it's getting. I'm sorry if I'm getting too hyperbolic.

If the reporting interface of the sensor can't be addressed in software, this is likely never to have a fix. This puts a lot of multi-touch abilities out of consideration for developers. And without developers, the platform isn't going to thrive. Android needs a better foundation of hardware as everything that's out there now needs to be replaced with something more unified and better specified.

I think the proper solution may be to simply drop multitouch. Of course, this is just my bias since I find multitouch to be an awkward interface anyway. I do use the de-pinch gesture, but only because it allows me to choose the zoom level easily. I still have no idea how it chooses the point to zoom in on, so I always have to pan after the fact, whereas double-tapping doesn't require me to do that, but it zooms in some predetermined amount.

And one other thing... Had this happened to be a problem with the iPhone, you'd see people screaming about it from the rooftops, a number of law suits and likely Apple recalling or replacing the product. That's part of the amazement I have with the Google comment on the matter.

Multitouch is useful outside gestures. Take for example typing. I don't have to slow down my typing on my iPhone to make sure only one finger is actually on the device. Without proper multitouch, it's possible for letters to be dropped due to the second finger either being ignored, or other just as bad situations that would slow me down.

The iPhone has a very distinct feel to it when used, hinted at in the article I posted earlier about an iPhone developer trying out a Nexus One. It's sometimes hard to quantify, but tends to be a combination of lots of little things that are highly polished that come together to form the complete experience. The multitouch ability of the device is definitely part of that. If Google wants to release a device/OS on par with the iPhone experience, they need to fix these issues and polish other rough edges. Otherwise, anyone trying to switch from an iPhone to an Android device is just going to be frustrated and not likely give the platform a second chance later.

Yes, well, that was a well-touted feature of the iPhone. This is an unannounced new feature for Android.

Yes, I mean that a potential solution is to drop gestures.

I was going to mention the typing thing, but decided to ignore it for simplicity's sake. It can still detect multiple simultaneous taps accurately, even if they're on the same axis. It's only crossover movement that's affected. (Assuming my supposition about the mechanism of failure is correct.)

Another solution is to disallow gestures that cross axes. If it was good enough for the Ghostbusters, it should be good enough for Google.

For the record, I don't think that the iPhone is bad or that Android is an iPhone killer. I don't think the iPhone should be killed. Android is merely an alternative, and one I happen to prefer for a variety of reasons. Are there drawbacks? Sure. But the reasons I chose this over the iPhone more than make up for them, for me.

I don't think that Android should be killed. On the contrary. As mentioned, I think it should continue to be improved. And it should make some improvements sooner rather than later. But, some of the existing hardware needs to be fixed one way or another. I'm sure most customers won't want to invest in buying another product just to get a fix many might consider to be a software-like issue. That's going to lead a lot of people away from Android. Not something the platform needs at this critical time.

I just use Swype and have zero issues outside of words it doesn't know, which I just type manually (and which are few and far between for normal conversation).

Swype is neat. There are still a number of problems, though. It seems that it doesn't work in landscape mode, where it would actually be most useful to me. (Just because of a particular landscape-only app I have.)

There's a fixed apk on the xda-developers forums that fixes landscape mode.

CPU power is incredibly hard to predict unless you're analyzing the stream of instructions, monitoring the DDR bus usage, times ram is in self refresh and so on. Needless to say, this amount of instrumentation is not going on here... Ditto for the radios: GPS power consumption varies easily by 3x depending on number of correlators running, sampling rate and so on whereas this number is just going to be "how many seconds is it on for multiplied by constant". GSM PA power will vary dependent on network conditions *and antenna match* - eg whether something like your hand is close to the antenna.

As for checking the display content for lit pixels... 60 times a second? That's a lot of math unless it's being done by the display itself. I know, I did this at Rio for the OLED product that almost shipped



I'm just saying that the usage page is largely a work of fiction. Yes, you can see gross CPU usage (likely seconds of CPU time multiplied by a constant, not taking into account NEON use, memory bandwidth, storage bandwidth, etc)... it's a first-level approximation for generic applications but not conclusive in any way for determining how an unknown CPU load - flash - is behaving on the system.

Okay, I'll beat Bruno to the punch on this one:

HTC says the Nexus One doesn't 'go in pockets'

I saw that but decided not to mention it. It's a reasonable expectation that you shouldn't manhandle the phone to cause the screen to crack, even if HTC's comment was utterly senseless. They also mentioned "tight jeans" and that's exactly the type of situation in which you're going to damage any piece of glass - slip into tight back pocket and sit down.

I don't have any reason to believe the Nexus One isn't as robust as most other phones.

The most troubling aspect of this whole situation isn't even the comment that was made. It's who made the comment. This is clearly an HTC retail product, not necessarily any more a Google product than any other Android phone. Google hosts a sales page for the product and I suppose that's the fresh/new/different aspect here.

At this point I'm just hoping to check out a Nexus One in person and decide on whether or not I want to buy it before HTC is barred from selling Android devices...

I wouldn't buy one, no matter how much promise the software shows.

Since I'm not Bruno, I plan to buy one, unless Bitt would recommend that I don't.

So Bitt, since you're the only one here I know own one, would you recommend this phone or would you recommend I don't buy one. I'll be using it mainly for phone calls, SMS and the occasional surfing. I'd probably install various programs too, but I haven't owned a smartphone yet so I don't know which programs I would install.

Thanks,
Stig

I have had zero problems of any significant nature. In pictures, it looks kinda cheaply made somehow, but that's definitely not the case. It's got a nice heft to it, and I carry it in my (front jeans) pocket all the time. That said, if I have something else in that pocket, I use the little neoprene-like pouch that it comes with. (I don't really like the brown and champagne color scheme, though.)

The only real issue with it that I have is that if you install a lot of applications, the interface can slow down, and sometimes the Launcher (that is, the GUI shell) will crash. Not a problem for you, at least initially, as you don't have anything you're dying to download.

The browser works quite well, and phone calls and SMS seem to work just fine. I don't have enough experience with an iPhone (or any other recent vintage smartphone) to make a great comparison from that front, though. And, honestly, I don't really talk on the phone all that much.

I paid full price for mine (and swapped in a SIM card for a contract I already had) and I am not disappointed in the least. I have experienced both buyer's remorse and post-purchase rationalization/selection bias in the past, and I feel neither of these about the Nexus One.

I'd be happy to show you mine, Matt (if you show me yours — sorry; I couldn't resist), but Raleigh to DC, or even halfway, is pretty far.

Thanks, Bitt.

Better to hear from somene who actually own one, since most of what you read is only from the people with problems. Or Apple fanboys...

Are you still running the stock image, or have you flashed to an alternate image?

Stig

BTW, the current iPhone isn't good enough for me either. But I'd certainly take one for free on contract. Problem is that I'm not interested in a contract for cell service and the pricing without one is far too high for my taste. So I make due with an iPod touch.

Yeah, I appreciate that, but I knew you lived there so I thought one of the other couple N1 owners might be closer. I've driven DC to Raleigh twice now, and you're right, it's pretty darn far. I have in-laws in Cary (or, as I've heard, Containment Area for Relocated Yankees).

Washington DC to Raleigh NC? Google Maps says that's only 277 miles. I drove from Manchester to Newquay and back in a day to attend a funeral last week, that was only 700 miles. I freely admit, it was a long day, but definitely do-able.

I thought you guys in the US drove thousands of miles without batting an eyelid?

Someone should really invent some kind of MP3-playing car stereo to pass the time on such journeys...

Peter

Some might argue that even this might be a tad long just to check out a mobile phone...

Stig

They do, it's called an iPod, and it's a lot easier to install in a hire car than an empeg. Hertz seem to get a little sniffy when you start running power cables through the firewall.

Precisely. I have no problem driving that way to attend my wife's cousin's wedding, but to check out a phone is a little crazy. By the time I paid for gas, I'd be halfway to paying for the subsidized phone!

I'll try to find someone in the DC area with the phone. I'm just not sure how to go about that. Any ideas? There is a Google building in the area. I wonder how they'd feel about me running around inside asking to see someone's Nexus One...

I manually upgraded to 2.1, instead of waiting for it to show up (as it was indicated to help the Launcher crashing, which it did). Otherwise, I've done nothing special with the OS.

I've never driven on a UK M highway, so it may be the same, but driving on US interstates, while generally very efficient, is incredibly boring, even with an empeg to pass the time. Sadly, the wife gets irritated if I try to take an alternate route.

Actually, I wouldn't so much mind driving up to Williamsburg or somewhere, avoiding the major highways.

Ok, thanks.

Stig

I was in the states for work a few years ago and I met a guy who drove a 150 mile round trip commute every day and didn't think anything of it. Mind you, I drove to London for a curry once.... so maybe I'm the mad one.

Oh my goodness no, I wouldn't want to make you drive the majority, even if I was crazy enough to initiate a meetup just to check out a phone! Of course, I quite enjoy Williamsburg, having lived there for five years. The College has also changed quite a bit, with a ton of new buildings. The town its self is also getting a huge new residential area a little bit away from the historic parts.

But no, don't worry about it Bitt. I'm going to try to check it out up here.

Alternatively, I could just go ahead and order the darn phone. I think it's a 14 day return policy.

I think it depends on where you are. Out here, I've driven 270 miles round trip to get a burger for lunch. Up north, we've driven 300 miles one way to watch a hockey game. There isn't much else to do in North Dakota but then again, it was the Jets.

We do have a couple people at work that commute about 115 miles one way. The town they commute from is amazing though, and I can easily see why they'd do it. I'm really fond of my 1 mile commute though

Somebody does a 8 hour/1060 mile commute every week. Not quite the same as 150 miles every day but an 8 hour car trip at the start and end of the week would just be horrendous.

I've been to Paris for dinner before on the Eurostar which is about 300 miles or so.

It's not quite as far, but a guy who once worked for my dad did this commute for over 32 years. In this case it's not the distance, it's the traffic. The end of that commute hits an area that is often rated as one of the top 3 bad traffic spots in the US.

I couldn't stand to do 4 hours of commuting a day for 32 years. Just think of how much of your life is spent doing that. And it clearly took a visible toll. He had bags under the bags under his eyes.

My current commute is 2.2 miles; it takes me about 35-40 minutes by foot. My new commute (in a month or so) will take me just over an hour on the tube, with no changes. I much prefer short commutes.

My commute is roughly 15 feet.

For 9 years my commute was 15-20 minutes of easy country roads each way, then I was in Sydney and it was a 5 minute walk, then I moved back here and it was 1hr out, 45 mins back on dual carriageway and twisty A-roads.

Thankfully I bought a place closer (Farnborough) before the winter, I have driven back to my parents after work a few times and I think commuting that route this winter would have got seriously frustrating and tiring, not to mention hazardous.

Well, Google has sold only around 150,000 Nexus Ones so far. I'm fully aware of how bad those numbers are compared to the last iPhone or the Droid (which sold a little more than the iPhone in the first 74 days, BTW ). However, as the Google fanboy I am, I'll point out that this is without the giant advertising campaigns of those two phones, without the ability for consumers to even touch the phone before purchase, and without any in-store promotion. Considering all those challenges, and that I believe the majority of the phones sold are the $530 unlocked version, it's not an awful number of phones to sell. It's not great, but it's pretty good.

Besides, Google isn't banking their success on the Nexus One. This isn't like Palm. Pretty soon Google will have a Nexus One that works with all four major US carriers, and that's a big deal. I wouldn't be surprised to see the sales rate increase from here.

Anyway, the main reason I wanted to write a quick post about the "state of the Nexus One" is that in the next couple days, you can add me to that 150,000-plus count. I am super excited to get my phone.

Having an ad on (what used to be) the #1 website doesn't count as giant advertising?

I knew that would be brought up, and no, I don't think it is. Not when you compare it to the competition. Just look at the Droid campaign. It's absurd!

Besides, that ad faded in with the rest of the page. I wonder how many of those people even saw it

Plenty of people do know about it, at least in the smartphone market. They just aren't buying it.

To me, it launched too soon after the Droid. People considering Android probably jumped on it when it came out, and some probably even switched to Verizon to do so. Then 2 months later, Google announces the Nexus One. People who wanted the best in class Android phone already locked themselves into a new contract.

In time releasing it for all 4 carriers will help, but I'm not sure it will help much. I think the best thing Google can do right now is start drawing up plans to try and pull in iPhone users this summer, when the people who came in on the 3G release will start having contracts free up. Touting the fact that you could pull your SIM out of the iPhone and put it into a Nexus One would help.

As far as the ad power of google.com, It's pretty up there. I bet most of the Chrome marketshare came from Google ads about it.

Time to burst some bubble Matt... (remember this smiley)



Motorola has only Apple to thank for their numbers. If it wasn't for the iPhone, that product would not exist. If it wasn't for the iPhone, the public would not be interested in that type of product to the same degree. If it weren't for the iPhone, people wouldn't have picked up the Droid thinking it was just "the next best thing." Apple had to tread into a completely new market and establish a new standard. That's the reason new products can come around and do better "first X days" sales - but they can't catch up.




This reminds me of another product. Yes, the iPad. Have you seen the estimates on how many have been pre-ordered? iPad numbers are going to blow away Android numbers very quickly. I won't be surprised to find out that the iPad has at some point in the future overtaken the iPhone. Oh, the iPad starts at $500.



That's a given. It's not like it's even their phone. It's just another generic HTC handset. And that's the problem. Google should be treating the product like they were banking their future on it. Unfortunately Google's apparent apathy toward their own product and the platform by some accounts, doesn't do much to inspire developers nor consumers for the products/platform.



True, but Palm has a better product in some ways, certainly more attractive. But it was too little too late.



They will? I've never seen a phone support GSM *and* CDMA. Maybe you mean multiple hardware versions of a branded "handset."



The iPhone weekly sales will still outpace Google's quarterly sales.

Everyone that pumps up these other products, and continues to bad-mouth Apple, always fails to realize (or simply ignore) that the iPhone is a platform and it's not standing still.

Apple called out the "competition" when they launched, which put a huge target on their back. Basically saying everyone else's faces, "YOU SUCK." They went so far as to show images of other products. And the best the competition could do is try to copy the look of the handset. They still pretty much keep making the same mistakes they always have though. I have yet to see an "iPhone killer" that even deserves to be called an "iPhone alternative."

Now MS is trying to toe the line (as well), but as usual they've missed the (entire) boat.



Let us know how it turns out long-term for you. That's the biggest measure of the platform or any given product. Right now, most people with an Android phone can't even get a semi-current OS for their handset.

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.

But back to the above point, let me start by saying I don't consider a different radio in the same phone makes it a different phone. So with that in mind, then you clearly haven't been paying attention, because right from the very first announcement (you know, the one that made you start this thread), they announced that the phone would be coming to Verizon eventually. It hasn't yet, but it will. Last week it was announced that Sprint was expecting to support it as well. And lastly, as of last week you could purchase a Nexus One with AT&T bands. You can get one right now.


I'm sorry, but I don't find your first several points as relevant. They mostly dismiss the Droid simply because another product came before it. My point was that a single Android phone was getting better numbers in one area than the iPhone (something you'd do as well, given the chance), and this doesn't count the other Android devices out there.


First off, there's already no possible way it will be anything but a step up from my current phone. I already love the operating system, I just need better hardware.

And to address the second part of that statement, as it's a different idea altogether, you're right, fragmentation has become a big issue. I might eat my words later, but I suspect it'll be a long time before the Nexus One gets left behind like this. In nearly all of those other situations, the reason the phones haven't been updated has been the carriers. Google wants to update the Droid, Motorola wants to, but Verizon is the only thing in their way. The Nexus One isn't tied to a carrier like that. There's nothing stopping Google from giving it the latest updates. But believe me, I'll be pissed if they don't.

The Nexus one isn't a steaming pile. But it's also not an iPhone killer by any stretch of the imagination - as so many like to believe it is. So far, IMO, Android has been very lack-lustre. We'll see how things shake out. I still think it stands a good chance against anything Palm does and against Windows Phone (MS is hell-bent on fucking that one up, seemingly not learning nearly enough lessons from the success of others).

Anyway, bottom line is credit where credit is due. The iPhone revolutionized the cell industry and handset design. Everything since is, for the most part, riding on Apple's coat tails.

Dude, no one bad-mouthed Apple. Take your weird victimization complex somewhere else.

People compare other smartphones to the iPhone because it is the archetype for the current generation of smartphones. Take it as a compliment. There are a variety of reasons I prefer Android to iPhoneOS, but that doesn't make one better or worse.

Plenty of people are bad-mouhting Apple and the iPhone elsewhere, if not on this forum. If you don't see it, I don't know what to say.

Other than outright bad-mouthing, or trash-talking, there's also a significant amount of indifference or lack of recognition for its significance. It comes up each and every time anyone talks about other handsets in pretty much every blog and forum. You'll see more times than not, people comparing what may be in store for one platform 6 months to a year down the road, to the current or past iPhone. The platform has been moving pretty slowly, but only because the rest of the industry is still a few years behind.

It is the archetype and it deserves to be recognized as such - that's not what happens much of the time.

Oh, crap! I knew I forgot something this morning... I didn't pay my homage to the iPhone! I'll have to build a little makeshift altar on my desk at work, now. Do you think it will be okay raised up and sitting on a cube wall, or does it need an iPedestal for proper worship?

Not the kind of recognition I had in mind. :P

Nexus One users: I'm curious, when you ordered yours, what were your shipping options? I had three available to me, including the already-selected overnight FedEx. All were $0. I found this odd...

My receipt claims free overnight, but I don't recall if there were any other options, much less what they might have been.

Did you ever get a chance to see one in person?

Nope! I'm going on faith here (and on the 14-day return period).

And naturally, as expected, right after I ordered the best Android phone on the market, Sprint announced that HTC EVO, their 4G WiMAX phone with an 8MP camera that shoots 720p video and has HDMI out. But I'm not too upset. I wouldn't have wanted to change to Sprint. I have a much better plan than they can offer.

Well FedEx delivered the package early this morning! I've been getting it set up all this morning, and I couldn't be happier. Particularly with the speed. I don't know if anyone else here upgraded to the Nexus One from the G1, but the difference in speed is simply unbelievable.

I'll say more once I've calmed down a little, but so far I can't express how excited I am to have a fully-functional and capable phone.

Oh, and I bought the dock along with it along with a spare battery. Question: how long do you think a fully charged cell phone battery will retain any sort of charge if kept out of the phone? Oh, and if you own a G1, I highly recommend this dock. Instead of plugging in, it uses the three little copper contacts on the bottom of the phone. Apparently those also include audio out...

It plays audio via Bluetooth somehow. I haven't set it up, so I'm not totally sure how that works. But, yeah, I love the contacts for charging instead of a plug. Soooo much easier, and likely significantly reduces wear-and-tear on the USB port.

I expect that the car dock will be similar, if and when it comes out.

Words cannot express how much I am loving this phone, and how superior it is to the G1. I am over the moon with this thing and couldn't be happier. Before, I was severely limited in what I could do on a mobile device, and now it feels like my shackles have been removed.

I am very happy for all you iPhone users out there, but there's no getting around the fact that this is the phone for me.

Interesting article about the screen on the Nexus One, probably accounts for some of the quirks people are seeing:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010...-and-hacks.ars/

Oh, for fuck's sake. I have yet to hear anyone with a Nexus One complain about the screen. It's amazing. It, without a doubt, looks better than any other handheld screen I've ever seen. I also can't imagine what sort of lack of text crispness they're talking about, and I have really good eyesight. (Used to be 20/15. Not as good now, but still very good up close.)

There are occasionally some rendering issues, but they're clearly software related.

There are occasionally some brightness issues, but this seems more to do with the automatic brightness not doing the right thing. That is, if I force it to max brightness in the daylight, I have no trouble reading it.

Those are certainly irritating issues that should be fixed, but they have nothing to do with the display hardware.

Wow. I wasn't posting that to say anything bad about the phone, I just found it interesting. Shows the difference between LCD and AMOLED.

Not entirely. It doesn't show what you yourself would perceive.

At this point I'm mostly done criticizing phones or saying one is better than the other for such and such reason. So all I'm going to say is that the screen on my phone is gorgeous, and I've never seen one better (I've seen one on par, though, which is the Zune HD - another OLED screen).

Also:

I know he said "at least to me," but I just don't see what he's seeing at all. Just this afternoon I was reading the empeg board in zoomed-out mode, and had no problems reading all the new posts. And that's with slightly-gray text on dark blue, which I would think would be tougher for the phone to display. So far I haven't had problems reading text on any site in any zoom level.

You guys didn't read the (whole) article Tom linked to. I read the whole thing and it was quite enlightening. They're not damning of the screen at all, they're only interested in pointing out the fact and clearing up some possible reasons why other testers found what was previously reported.

The author owns a Nexus and quite likes it. He doesn't appear to have an inclination to switch to a different handset and in conclusion he's only disappointed that the screen's design/technical details weren't communicated at all in any spec sheet prior to purchasing.

I'm not sure this is an indication of what all OLED or AMOLED panels are or will be like, but the PenTile element arrangement is important to know about, especially for developers.

Okay, good to know. I guess I didn't find it interesting enough to read all the way through. I only made it through about half of it and got bored. I still disagree with him, though. Did he not say that text was hard to read on his screen?

His summary was this:

The main reason I was interested in the article is that it exposes a lot of the low level engineering going on in todays displays, both on the hardware and software side. The work on this reminds me a lot of the work Microsoft put into Cleartype. It is also a tech that factors in how a display is made to take advantage of it and produce a certain effect, by doing sub pixel rendering. In the game graphics space, there is a lot of sub pixel tricks being done these days to render special effects and other components.

Anything OLED interests me quite a bit, since it's likely to be the new display standard in the future for many devices. I'll just have to make sure my interests apparently don't push Bitt off the edge though.

Sorry. I had been aware of the subpixel thing for many weeks now. It just seems like everyone's trying to come up with a reason the N1's screen sucks, when it simply doesn't.

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

I'm not saying you're wrong about any of that, I'm sure it's all true for you, but I just haven't had the same experience you did.

The one thing you said that I do wonder about is when you said "The fact that when I ask it to power off it gives me extra dialogs..." Do you mean when it asks if you want to go into airplane mode or power off? That only happens when you hold down the power button. You're supposed to be able to just tap it to put it into standby. I will admit, however, that occasionally when I tap that, the phone doesn't go off like I asked. Another tap usually takes care of it.

So yeah, I think Android has a ways to go. It's only been about 15 months since the first product, after all. But I think it will improve, and I don't know how you can project where the OS is headed.

Don't get me wrong, I have small complaints about the Android experience. For example, I have two GMail complaints. The small one is that I can't seem to tell what time a message was sent. That's annoying. The big issue is that I can't choose different addresses for the "from" field like I can in GMail. I'd like it to be able to pull down my other accounts.

But neither of these are deal breakers. The phone didn't appeal to you, and that's fine. For me, it's a perfect fit, and there is simply no way for the iPhone to fit my use case better. And that's primarily because no other phone out there can do GMail better. That's not the only reason I like Android, but it's the one thing that makes it impossible for me to switch to another platform.

The extra dialog is the "the phone will power off" after I press and hold the power button, then say yes I wanted to power off. Why the extra dialog? Why not just, well, power off? That's just a small detail that bugged me.

Projecting where it's headed is obviously impossible unless I was directing Android development, my comment was that in terms of a clean and consistent UI, it didn't start well and has only got worse with 2.0/2.1. iPhoneOS and WebOS started clean and elegant - underfeatured yes, but clean and elegant. For Android to get this elegance now requires a lot of stuff to get thrown out and re-done; in my experience that doesn't ever happen after 1.0 because of an ever-pressing release schedule and new feature demands.

Still, we'll see what happens. My guess as I said before is that HTC and others will re-do significant parts of the UI and extend the appeal of Android further - it won't help consistency or 3rd party apps, but individual phones will get nicer.

I do understand that a good gmail client can be critical, though. For any heavy lifting on the iPhone I end up using the mobile gmail web interface which is better than trying to do it all through IMAP...

Okay, that's fine, though I don't know why it's annoying. I guess they thought it was a good place to put the options for airplane mode and rebooting. I guess it's also so that you don't accidentally completely turn off the phone. Personally I don't see why it's such an annoyance, as I never completely power off my phone anyway. A single tap of the power button to go to standby is fine for me.

The rest of your points make sense, though. I guess it's a little like Windows, though, I put up with the rest of the stuff because I like what the rest of the platform gives me. In this case, GMail. I can't function without my lables, stars, and conversation view. If I had to use IMAP I think I'd go crazy.

I just read an interesting article on Google intending to separate applications from the OS, so that even if the carrier doesn't upgrade the OS itself, the basic applications will still be upgradable via the Market. Obviously, there are still some possible compatibility issues, but I think that gets the fracturing mostly in line.

The news is interesting and it demonstrates that Google is aware of and believes the issue is important.

But it's not likely to help customers of (other) existing handsets. The carrier branded phones aren't likely to see updates to the current OS version, let alone the next couple that will bring this separation of apps/features. Nexus One users are still about the only Android users sitting pretty. Most other handset owners are unfortunately going to need to upgrade to new handsets (which aren't yet available - with the exception of the Nexus One of course).

Hey Bitt and other N1 owners, it looks like this page leaked recently. Look for a car dock soon. [EDIT]Looks like soon is NOW![/EDIT]

Personally? This wouldn't be all that great for me. I don't want my phone there. I have handsfree bluetooth in my car already, and a nice 7" navigation screen, so I wouldn't be using the phone for that. Frankly, I just want the phone out of the way but near an outlet, charging. I recently gave up on those Belkin adapters and bought one of these. It's not a slick looking, and it feels like it could break at any moment, but it keeps the chord out of the way when not in use, and I like that. Even when it is in use, I like that I can only take as much slack as I need.

I found a dock a couple of weeks ago, but this is more like a regular car holder with charger. The holder I found, is made by Brodit.

Just ordered one today, so I can't say anything about the quality, and my phone should show up in a couple of days too. Yay!

Stig

Yeah, Brodit is sold in the US (and elsewhere?) as ProClip. I ordered one of their mount points for my car and it actually showed up just yesterday. I didn't get their holder, though. It looked kinda generic, so I got this N1 holder from Amzer, in hopes that I can modify it to fit on the ProClip/Brodit mount. No built-in charging; I'll wait for the official dock for that, and use a USB cable until then, when needed.

You don't have to wait for the official one, though. It's on sale now.

Typical.

I knew that they'd finally get around to releasing it when I relented and ordered something else.

Well, I got my car dock in today.

…

Sigh.

I'm considering returning it. If it weren't for the spring contact charging and the automatic car mode, I'd definitely be returning it.

First, the good stuff:

• The spring contact charging is still the way to go, and no third party dock, car or desktop, offers it.
• The dock actually has a speaker built into it that's a good bit louder than the one built into the phone, which is handy.
• The power input to the dock is on the base, which keeps cord from floating away from the dash too badly.
• It has a reasonably sized volume control on the dock itself.
• It's quite sturdy.

Now, the bad:

• It's suction-cup mount only. It is, given, a good suction cup, with an interesting mounting mechanism, but I had bought a mount for my car that I could screw into. Now I've just had to adhere the stupid suction cup disk to that mount.
• The retention mechanism is just a plastic clip that functions merely by the fact that plastic is bendy. Also, since there is a seam on the phone that the clip passes over, it does not insert easily, at least not while feeling you're not going to scratch the bejeezus out of it. I end up having to use two hands.
• The power jack on the dock is USB, which means that the 12V to 5V adapter is in the cigarette lighter adapter, which means that:
  1. The adapter is one of those 5 inch long monstrosities, and
  2. It makes it that much more difficult to wire permanently
• When making a phone call while the phone is in the dock, it doesn't automatically default to using the dock as a speakerphone. WTF, Google? At least that's a fixable issue.
• There is no visual feedback for the dock's volume control. I had assumed that it was controlling the phone's volume, but I guess it's really just controlling its own internal amplifier. (Actually, this might not be true; it might just be that it keeps forgetting to use the dock's speaker altogether.)
• There's no audio output or line to connect to the empeg's muting input

Now, the absolutely miserable:

• You cannot make the dock point in any arbitrary direction.
  
  The base of the dock is a shallow cone with a ball and socket joint at the tip. The ball is connected to a rod about two inches long, with a ball and socket joint into the phone holder itself. Seems reasonable, right?
  • The rod that comes out of the base can only be angled between about 20° and about 45° off of the cone's axis. Yeah, you read that right. The rod cannot protrude directly out of the base; it has to be at an angle, and a very limited span of angles at that.
  • The rod is able to point in different directions, obviously. Not 360°, though; what are you, nuts? In fact, it's not even close. It's more like 240°. That's not a big deal, though, right? You can just turn the whole base itself. Yep, unless you have an interest in the power cord protruding in a particular direction. The jack is on the base itself, remember?
  • The ball-and-socket joint on the phone holder angles between about 45° and -10°, which is reasonable, except that the angling is controlled by a slot in a rotating ring that the angling is only directly towards or away rom the dock. You can angle it from side to side slightly, but no more than maybe 5° in either direction. (I really need terminology for a conic coordinate system.)
  • And the holder can rotate, but again, limitedly. Its rotation is controlled by a ring, and it only rotates about 300°.
• All of this adds up to the fact that I basically can't get the phone to point at my face when mounted in the car. I can get it really close, but the cord is pointing off in a weird direction, and there's no play left at all.
  
  I recognize that if you're going to run power lines through the base itself, there have to be limitations on movement; you can't allow it to spin around a hundred times until the internal contacts snap off. But this seems beyond overly limited.

Again, sigh.

Honestly, I really want to disassemble it, throw away the mount and the rod, and just hang onto the holder itself, which I could then mount to my car mount with a much shallower and more useful tilt/rotation device. But I can't figure out how to do that yet.

And what was Apple's response to complaints about the iPhone 3G's poor 3G reception?

Do you mean the US-specific ATT issues?

I'm posting the news that's currently upsetting a lot of N1 owners. First that Google is not planning another OTA update as many were speculating (and some reporting). And that there appears to be a hardware issue with this and a number of other HTC handsets, including the new "Incredible" according to people in the Google group for the N1.

Would this be the case if this wasn't an HTC phone? Don't know for sure, but some others agree that Google needs their own handset, not some random HTC phone of the month.

Not sure why this is relevant in a Nexus One thread, anyhow... They fixed the power issue discovered in the initial firmware with 2.0.2, roughly a month after the 3G went on sale.


Outside of that, most of the 3G issues with the iPhone are due to AT&T overloading their network in cities like New York and San Francisco where high numbers of users are concentrated in small areas. 3G performance on the iPhone has generally been at the same levels as other phones on networks around the world.

I haven't dug too deeply into the Nexus One 3G issues to compare though, nor do I know if they are isolated to just the T-Mobile 3G units.

For me, the most important part is that it works fine. And it does.

My point is that Google has released a firmware update to deal with the 3G issues. People still complain about it. Google has said that they've done all they're doing.

If you replace "Google" with "Apple", that pretty much describes how the iPhone 3G saga fell out. Except Apple never said word one. Google is at least saying that the level of service, whatever the level and whatever the cause of that level, is in no way guaranteed to get any better, so return the phone if you're unhappy.

Notably, it doesn't say "we confirmed that there's a hardware issue that we're ignoring". Nor does it say "it's T-Mobile's fault". What it does seem to imply is: "There was a problem and we fixed it. We do not currently believe that there are still problems with the phone."

I have mine running on a network other than the one it's designed for, so I don't get 3G anyway. I have no way to confirm or deny any part of the story.

There is an endemic problem in corporate America today where companies feel that they have no reason to communicate with their customers. Both Apple and Google, among many, many others, are guilty of it. Google at least put out something.

I don't think a quote given to a single journalist that contained less information than the firmware release notes really constitutes communicating with your customers.

It's more then "Apple never said word one", and also was likely read by far more people then Google burying their response in one thread in a support forum somewhere.

Fine.

I was able to disassemble the car dock. It was all removable connectors (screws, etc.) except for one sticker that covered some screws, one rubber ring attached just above the suction cup, which obscured some screws, and the wire attached to the tiny PCB that held the microUSB port was soldered directly on. Oh, and standard plastic retention clips you see in everything. I had a spudger that made the disassembly of that much easier.

I was able to remove the stalk and suction-cup mount completely. Now I just have to figure out how to fabricate a more basic mount, and probably construct a small 12V to 5V DC/DC regulator circuit.

Bitt, what Google has said is that they know there are still problems (the reply is in the middle of giant mess of problem reports) but that they are not going to work any further on remedying the situation. They attempted a fix that doesn't seem to have worked for a large number of people globally on many different networks. Maybe HTC needs to step in here to work on the issue from their end. After all it's their phone. This is no more a Google phone than any other HTC handset, is it? Is it not HTC that controls the baseband code?

Google's comment is the equivalent of "3G problems? Too bad, buy a different handset."

What Apple did was fix the problem and then tell people it was fixed. Then people tested and continued using the problem and verified it was fixed.

Anyway, this is a Google thread and a Google/HTC issue. Not at all comparable to any existing or previous Apple issue I'm afraid. Not that I mentioned the news to try and make any comparison to Apple in the first place.

So all problem reports are valid and accurate? Apple had no problem reports after they fixed their issue?

You know what? Fuck it. I just don't care.

What are you on about, seriously? I'm not making this stuff up. I'm not passing judgement. Google wrote that message. Google obviously believes the problems to be real otherwise they wouldn't have spent any time working on them initially.

Why do you keep bringing up Apple? Actually, why am I writing a reply... I don't even own the phone but I seem to care more about Android than most of the people that do. Sheesh.

In closing... Bitt, not everything needs to be a debate.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=2010

If I'm being honest, it sounds like the most boring software update I've ever heard of. It even puts some of Apple's snore-fests to shame. Are people shipping scripts as apps? WTF.

Personally (from a completely subjective and personal (business) use case), I want to see more power management updates. Otherwise the OS alrready looks like a decent platform to build off (on top) of. I have some ideas that have been sitting on the back-burner for at least 5 years that should fit nicely with Android, so as a platform, I'm really glad it's moving along. 5 years ago I couldn't imagine that someone would create something like this and license it freely.

For handset owners, this update seems totally passable compared to previous and it's just another milestone to mark how out-dated so many devices will be - or become.

Anyway, overjoyed Android exists and that Google is sinking energy into it. I just don't think handset makers are really exploiting what they're basically being given for free, but that's not really much of a concern for me since I doubt I'd ever buy into the platform for use on a mobile phone. At least not one I wasn't designing myself.

Any non-native app on android is executed by the Dalvik VM. JIT for this is huge in terms of app performance of anything not running natively (= pretty much every android app that exists).

Sounds splendid. *cough*

Anyone else notice Google are now recommending the HTC Incredible to customers of Verizon? Also announced no Nexus One for Verizon, which isn't terribly surprising. The Incredible does spec out better, including with regards to multi-touch screen.

Meh, kind of boring, but who cares? It's a .1 update.

Bitt: you'd mentioned the Nav on your Nexus One before. Well, I'm in Phoenix this week, I have no idea where anything is, and the rental car doesn't have GPS in it. Every time we go somewhere, I simply look it up on Google Maps (which is way easier do than with any GPS system I've ever used), and tell it to navigate me there. Then I put it behind the wheel (in a way that it doesn't cover the speedometer).

Holy cow! It's so freaking good! First off, the refresh rate is at least 3 times faster than the best I've seen, which was on a Lexus. It's easily 5 times faster than my Toyota or Honda systems. I also love how, when driving on highways, when you get close to the exit you're supposed to take, it smoothly zooms in to the perfect level.

Just today, we were going to a local Phoenix dive restaurant for lunch. When we got to the place, there was a sign on the road, but it was between two buildings. Neither building had any signs indicating what they were. Helpfully, when we reached our destination, the Google Streetview showed us which building we wanted. Very neat.

Garmin is now making Android phones. That's the only way I can conceive that they'll survive.

Perhaps Google's removal of the Nexus One on Verizon is them finally admitting that they can't handle end-user retail. Letting Verizon stores handle sales will benefit the spread of Android.

I'll be at my local Verizon Thursday evening to check out the Droid Incredible and most likely buy one for my sister (for whom the Motorola Droid was unacceptable due to its terrible ear-piece proximity sensor). I may even upgrade my ancient Treo 650 for an Incredible. That or a Palm Pre Plus.

Bitt, I haven't read this thread, but when I see "car dock", I recommend ProClip. They have a few Nexus One docks that look pretty solid. The wired one looks crappy, but that's a given. I'm also considering A2DP-to-RCA converters for car installs to avoid audio wires. Avoid power wires? Get a Palm Pre and a touchstone.

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.

http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/everything-you-need-to-know-about-android-2-2-froyo/

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.

Windows and Mac, same behaviour seen on multiple machines.



My phone it set to manual, my wife's it set to auto. Whenever I had connected either one to a new iTunes install it always wants to delete everything. One unwise button click or key press and it would all be gone (if I remember rightly the "yes delete everything" is even the default button in the dialog).

Last time I actually tried moving my iTunes library it was even more painful. So much so that at the moment I have an image of my old laptop running in VMWare just so I can put off migrating my iTunes library...


I would agree with that completely about the software update side of things. It drove me mad that there was no way* on WinMo to backup everything and restore it after a firmware update. That iTunes can even do it across different device models is kind of magical.

* sure there were some third party backups apps, but in my experience they didn't always work so well

That is my experience also. Just swapping out system drives makes iTunes want to delete my entire iPod Touch. I ended up having to get iGadget (from Purple Ghost) to try to grab my stuff off the iPod so iTunes didn't delete it. Only problem is it doesn't grab photos.

I guess it wouldn't be bad, but I haven't found any way to redownload what you've purchased. It would seriously piss me off if I swapped system drives and iTunes wiped my iPod and didn't give me the chance to redownload what I bought from their store. That is why I like Steam and Direct2Drive (and Impulse, though I use it less). No matter what I do to my computer, I have the chance to redownload and reinstall the stuff that I purchased.

I should add, when I do copy the folders over, the other key thing to do is make sure the new system is activated in iTunes with the same Apple ID. Otherwise iTunes will want to delete things. Last time I copied everything from the desktop to the laptop, both my iPhone and iPad just kept syncing as if nothing had happened. When I got back home, I used rsync to pull back the changes to the desktop.

Copy Trans Photo.

Grr...it looks like Froyo is being pushed out way in advance of when they said it would (like three days instead of three weeks!), but after about a half day it appears that it's limited to review units, which makes no sense whatsoever. What, do they need more press on it? They just had a major event to showcase it!

Grr!

On xda-developers you'll find link to the upgrade-file. Just download it and install if you're on stock ROM.

Stig

Because press getting something before everybody else is unusual and doesn't happen anywhere else right? Might as well roll it out to a small group first to get some initial feedback and testing before pushing it out to everybody.

Yeah, just about five minutes after I posted that the upgrade was available. About five minutes after that I had it installed


Not sure what your point is. Did I say it didn't? I was complaining that they were doing it this way, not saying that it doesn't happen. So what do you mean?


True, but it's not like they were planning on pulling the update if it had a bad reaction. It just seemed like this was how they were staggering the release, but it's annoying to stagger it starting with the press.

Besides, every prior release has been released on the side like this. The community finds a way around this, so they might as well do a better job with the release anyway.

Whatever, I don't care at this point. I have it, initial impressions tell me it's great, and I LOVE the hotspot functionality.

How's Flash? Does it rock your world? Take some time off Farmville and let us know about it.

[edit]Less antagonism[/edit]

Members of the press shouldn't have to update their own phones. They should be given a phone with the update already installed on it, wrapped in gold leaf with a few one-hundred dollar bills cushioning the package.

Looking through the xda-developers forum, I'm glad that empegbbs isn't like that. So many whiny impatient people that appear to have the complete inability to read or use the search function. Sifting out the dross to get the actual useful posts is hard. Too many people just make stuff up as well and claim it as verified information.

Froyo isn't even out yet properly and there are already petitions everywhere trying to force the various manufacturers to jump straight to Froyo.

Sorry, I was a bit antagonistic myself. Apologies.


Yeah, I really don't like that place. I'm not sure why that thread needed to be thousands of posts long. Fortunately most people were linking directly to where you needed to go to get the update.

And good luck to them on those petitions. Nothing more productive than an online petition

Sadly, I've actually had to socialize this evening (we threw a little party), so I haven't had ANY time to play with my phone. I really should have shirked my hosting responsibilities to go play with an OS update

And if I ever start playing Farmville, please end my life.

*edit*
I might have missed something, but I just tried viewing something in flash, and it said I didn't have it installed. I wonder if there's something I have to do, or if the release that everyone grabbed today doesn't actually include it...

*edit again*
Ah, it's actually a download from the market. I'll let you know how well it works when I've played with it tomorrow.

Couldn't agree more. Seems like most of them are just kids fortunate enough to have a Nexus One...

Stig

Very awesome, thanks!

Flash seems to work well.

There's an option in the browser to turn plugins on or off or on-demand, which works basically like FlashBlock, except that once you click on a Flash applet, it turns them all on for that page, not just the one you clicked. I don't know what would happen if there were other plugins for a page: whether it would just activate the one plugin needed to run the applet you clicked on, or if it would turn them all on.

I played around with it for a bit, and everything seems to function properly, even though there are occasional UI issues due to the creators of the applets not providing for a touchscreen UI. Videos, games, and animations all seem to work fine.

Battery usage doesn't seem outrageous at all. I didn't play with it long enough to see how quickly it would drain the battery, but I did note that it didn't get even remotely as hot as I have seen it get with other applications, and I never saw any performance issues. It seems like they've actually done a decent job of optimizing the code.

The install is huge, though: over 12MB, and it's not flagged as SDCard-installable. As such, I've deleted it for now, because I have way too many apps installed, and I was already getting quite low on space.

This, I think, is one of the few areas I outright blame Google for. There is no excuse for not demanding a larger amount of space for applications. The G1 had an embarrassingly small amount of space for apps, which was one of the things that prompted me to root it.

2.2 does help with that, but it requires the developers to make their apps installable to the SD card, and I haven't seen any in my own list.

Yeah, that was definitely a poor design decision.

I haven't looked at the devkit yet to see what's required to enable the SD-able flag.

What's the largest flash capacity available on an Android phone excluding SD? I think their first mistake was requiring SD expansion at all. It's rather pointless on some devices since you need to remove the battery to swap cards. I can see its uses for data storage, but installing apps on SD is really only a replacement for built-in NVRAM. It's like using a DVDRW instead of a hard drive (ignoring read/write speed). I don't know if there's ever a situation in which I'd want to remove my SD card and lose access to a number of apps in the process.

I'm reading on various blogs covering performance that Flash enabled is slowing down any page that has any flash content, both in load time as well as scrolling speed.

Some tests out there have head-to-head-to-head comparisons with Flash off (or on-demand) of the Nexus One with Froyo versus iPhone 3GS versus some other HTC phone (probably with 2.1). It's interesting that while watching the Froyo Nexus go faster on page loads, for the most part, I didn't hear anyone mention that the Nexus one is equipped with a 1GHz processor and the 3GS only 600MHz. Froyo seems like a nice improvement in speed for some applications on the Nexus, but I think it's bringing it up to par rather than screaming to the bleeding edge.

It's going to be interesting (and much more relevant) to see comparisons against the next iPhone this summer.

The Samsung Gallery has 8GB, but that's pretty unusual.

I have a feeling you may have the situation backwards. Until 2.2 (excluding rooted phones), all apps have been installed in internal memory.

Your comparison is poor. If there were no speed difference between DVD-RW and a hard drive, why wouldn't you want to use them? It allows easy upgrades and the ability to swap out data if you're not able to upgrade enough. As opposed to a device that only has soldered-on memory, where, when it's full, you get to delete stuff. (And I'm pretty sure that hard drives are not soldered to motherboards these days.)

BTW, I don't think I implied that you'eve ver been able to install apps to SD. That's brand new and, like I mentioned about the Nav, only half-baked. Maybe because I used the word "required" - I didn't mean that it was required for app storage, I just meant in terms of a hardware spec that the devices came with little NVRAM and advertised they could be expanded via SD. I suspect Android doesn't spell out that requirement itself, it's just something these manufacturers are used to doing.

My comparison was just one of having to swap in and out rather than having everything installed at once. Even on the 8GB device, how much capacity can be used for apps? I was pretty sure there were some other limitations on these devices.

Having a swappable SD slot is certainly very nice, if it's in a convenient, hopefully externally accessible, location. Great for data, such as pictures, etc. But internally it's really just a swappable HD equivalent. How often will you want to swap your HD? Usually only when upgrading. You certainly don't want to be doing that to move from one set of apps to another.

So with all prior Android revs, not being able to put apps on SD was an extreme letdown because there was really no point to upgrading the SD storage. If the solution weren't half-baked and requiring specific apps support, you could just treat it like HDs on a computer and slap in a 32 or 64GB card and simply just leave it in there as if it were internal memory. Most people however will want to upgrade their phones before they will need to upgrade the storage, so Apple's solution isn't really much of a down side.

It's just another area where I think Google just played along with existing (HTC) hardware norms which were originally defined and pushed by newer WinMo specs. Shit, at least they don't store applications and data in bloody SDRAM like all WinMo devices used to do. People wonder why WinMo didn't go anywhere. Hint: everything about it sucks. It wasn't/isn't even as good as the Newton was back in 1997 in many respects.

Anyway, the benefit of removable storage isn't as a replacement for fixed storage. It makes a wonderful compliment, but in the case of the Android phones, it's really to make up for an otherwise lacking hardware spec (at least on the NVRAM side).

As far as I know, the specs between the internal memory and the external memory should be similar. Other than prior versions of Android having a stupid limitation against installing to SD, I can't see what your problem is. It allows upgradability at the expense of … the fact that if you remove the card your data goes away? Shocking.

Problems:

1. You can't install apps to SD cards. 2.2 will allow this. 2.2 hasn't been released yet.
2. Once 2.2 is out, you still can't install apps to SD cards. Apps have to opt-in and specifically support this.
3. The location of the SD slot on many phones makes the SD expansion suited ONLY for permanent app installation. See #1 and #2

The way I saw it, the SD card makes it up to the customer how much storage they want on their phone. They can buy the phone with 4GB, but upgrade to 32GB if they want. The problem is, of course, that 32GB cards are ridiculously expensive and hard to find, so you automatically limit most people to 4, 8, and 16GB capacities.

I would be more upset about it if I used my phone to listen to music or watch video, but I use my Zune HD for that, so I don't really care about the SD card stuff.

Another advantage of the card is that when I changed phones, all I did was pop the card out of the old phone and into the new one, and all my apps had their data right there. I didn't lose my save game for Robo Defense, for example.

But that wasn't your argument.


None of those problems have any relevance to your initial claim. I'm asking you why installing apps to SD is inferior to installing them to builtin storage.

1. "You can't" is irrelevant to why it would be bad if you could.
2. See #1
3. Suitability for a purpose is not a reason for its unsuitability. Quite the opposite, most would argue.

Completely out of the current conversation here, but I think this was brought up somewhere else in this super-long thread:

Apparently voice-activated dialing now works over bluetooth in 2.2.

I never made that claim. In fact, I specifically called out that using SD for storing apps, as a permanently installed alternative to NVRAM, was about its only good use. However that use is currently not possible.






Given that it's not possible, and given the stupid location of many SD slots, the SD card option on many of these phones has been totally useless. Again, because the inability to quickly swap cards makes them rather pointless for swapping data, like pictures from the camera, etc.

Once SD can be fully utilized as real built-in storage, it will be a fine alternative to soldered NVRAM and gives you the option (also as I've previously mentioned) of upgrading your storage capacity without upgrading to a new handset. However, I also mentioned that at the rate most phones are replaced, this isn't much of a concern. Someone will probably upgrade to a new phone in step with the release of larger capacity SD cards and/or the ability of the old phone to actually use those cards.

So, having had real built-in storage right from the start would have benefitted customers using Android handsets for over a year now. And for many would have benefitted them for 6 months to possibly another year - how long is going to take Froyo to get onto current handsets? How long will it take to revise every application installed already?

Oh, whoops. I totally misinterpreted what you wrote.