So far, very very cool. It's amazing being able to pull up Google Maps and see other users in your area, what they're saying, and being able to comment on it publicly. So far, it feels like Twitter on steroids. One very interesting thing I've noticed, though, is that when you get an email notification that someone has commented on a Buzz that you commented on, each notification appears in the ORIGINAL email notification you got, very much like how Wave works. It's quite nice!
All in all, it feels more robust and "complete" than Twitter does. It'll be interesting to see how the web GUI feels, and how it connects with Facebook and other social networks.
10 February 2010
09 January 2010
Nexus One: The Wordy Review
Ok, first off, I'm just going to get this out of the way: it's not an iPhone. Straight up not an iPhone-killer. Some features, yes, are lightyears beyond what the iPhone currently has. But the iPhone remains the easiest to use smartphone there ever was, and Android, in its current form, is no where close to being as easy to use as iPhone OS. Ok, now with that out of the way...
Unboxing
The packaging is gorgeous, mostly due to the fact that it's heavily Apple-inspired. It's basically a bigger version of the iPhone box, but completely white, with a basic "nexus one" logotype on the front, and a small "google" sitting closer to the bottom. Very tasteful and simple, and it immediately gave me a warm fuzzy. My favorite part, however, is the Google colors running around the sides of the box, against the back. A very nice touch.
The phone was presented nicely upon opening, sitting alone in a recess. You remove the cardboard face that holds the phone to reveal the USB cord, power cable and headphones, as well as a very cute little soft-to-the-touch book that contains useless usage warnings about how you can injure yourself using blah blah blah blah... the stuff they're required to tell you, basically. No documentation about how to actually use the little bugger, mind you, which would have been handy. The iPhone doesn't need such things... Android, however, does. I was able to figure out most things, but I'm a nerd. Most people aren't.
Hardware
Speaking of headphones, why is it that when you purchase a $500+ phone (Nexus One, iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS... you get my point), they come with the shittiest headphones they could manufacture? I swear... the iPhone headphones were basically too big to fit in any ear I've ever seen, and the same is true with the NO's (heh, I love that abbreviation). They look nice, sure, but I've since reunited them with the box they were shipped to me in. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to find that the pause/play button on my Apple iPhone in-ear buds works on the Nexus One! As for the cable situation as a whole, while these HTC-made cables are nice, the cables for the iPhone are a bit nicer, and they don't come pre-wrinkled (I hate hate hate that!).
Ok, so on to the phone: it's amazing. The hardware, in my opinion, is gorgeous. Very simple, very clean lines, and I actually like the trackball (although I only use it for notifications, as it lights up when you get an email, text, tweet, etc., which is all customizable). The screen is absolutely stunning. If Apple doesn't match this screen in the next iPhone, I swear to something holy that I will punch a baby kitten. I want to see iPhone OS on this screen–which I believe is the same screen used in the Moto Droid–badly. It's incredibly high-res–in fact, so high-res that when viewing web pages, the browser will actually up-res images so that they're not incredibly tiny. If the images were to be displayed pixel-for-pixel, they'd be indescribably minute. The up-res'ing does make images a touch fuzzy, but not horribly so. It's very acceptable.
One thing about the touch screen I do not like, however, is the "calibration" (for lack of a better term). With iPhone, Apple wisely made the tap area for an element just below where your finger hits. Google didn't do this. What this means is that I often tap on a screen element (web link, button, menu item, etc.), but end up selecting the element just below it. Annoying. I'd pay money for an application that would allow me to remedy this.
The power button is located on the upper left side, which is different from the iPhone, but the same as the iPod touch. As I don't have the latter–but I do the former–it's been a bit of an adjustment for me. It's no big deal, but I do, actually, really miss the "ker-shick!" of the iPhone when sleeping the NO. It was nice having that "yep, I'm cool, toss me in your pocket" sound.
Just above the trackball and built into the bottom of the screen are four buttons (back, menu, home, and search). I don't mind the presence of buttons, but only when they don't get in my way. I mind these buttons. I find myself tapping them inadvertently when going for the spacebar while typing, and I have to say it's aggravating.
The "back" button took some getting used to... Android relies on it heavily, as opposed to the Apple way of doing things, which is to have a "back" button in the GUI of the app you're in, in the upper left corner. It's... different. However, it's universal, in that when you hit back, it takes you back to exactly where you were before, across applications. So, if you're in your browser and a text message comes in, you hit the notification tray (more on that later), tap on the text message, which then takes you to the text. When you hit "back," you're back in your browser. If you hit "back" again, you'll head back to the other browser window you were in before this, or even back to the main screen of the application you were in where you tapped a web link to bring you to the browser in the first place when the text came in. It can be a bit confusing, but you pick it up pretty quickly.
The "menu" button typically holds the icons for an application that you'd see at the bottom of an application on iPhone OS (in blue on a black background, or in a "tray"). "Home" brings you home, and search brings up the universal search function, which is much like Spotlight on the iPhone, but on steroids.
The camera, which commands complete attention on the back of the phone due to the fact that it's huge, is decent. I really have yet to inspect the photos closely, but from what I can tell it's pretty darned good. And the video it takes is very fluid, probably because of the 1GHz Snapdragon processor (eat that, iPhone!).
Setting up the OS
This was very simple. You basically step through a few welcome pages, and are presented with a page to either put in your Google account credentials, or sign up for a Google account. Once you've done that, your contacts and calendars immediately push to your phone, and your Gmail application is configured for your primary Gmail account (and you can configure additional Gmail accounts as well, now). There are a plethora of global settings, such as what service to use for making calls (::cough!::), ringer and notification volumes and ringtones, blah blah blah. Basically, all of the settings you'd imagine would be in there are, including application management (which is how you uninstall applications in Android), the ability to manage SD cards, what the global search references when you perform said search, and other boring things.
You can also configure the OS, out of the box, with your Facebook account. Doing so allows you sync either all of your Facebook friends with your own contact list, or to sync just those in your contact list with your Facebook account (which is the default). It's nice scrolling down the contact list seeing everybody's pictures in place.
Another nice touch: your system settings get sync'd to your Google account. If you get a new phone, just put in your Google account creds, and voila, your new phone inherits all of the settings from your old phone.
Messaging and Voice Input
One thing I like about Android is a new feature Google brewed into the OS where, when presented with a "faceplate" or icon of a contact in your address book, when you tap on that icon a messaging "strip" pops up containing icons representing the various means of communicating with that person that they also support. So, if I tap on John's icon in, for example, a Twitter client, I'll get a phone (to call him), a message bubble (to text him), a letter envelope (to email him), and a Facebook icon (to send a message via Facebook). If that contact does not have a Facebook account, that icon won't be there, and the same goes with SMS (i.e. in cases where you only have a "home" number in your address book for that contact).
Texting is very similar to iPhone, as is email, with the exception that there is a dedicated Gmail application. The dedicated email application is nice, but I like MobileMail a liiiiittle bit more. One thing I do like about the Android email app, however, is that the colors of the message lists are inverted from iPhone: white text on dark grey. It's a bit easier on the eyes.
My favorite part of messaging on the Nexus One, though, is the voice input. It's awesome. It is, by no means, perfect, but I cannot tell you how much easier it is to dictate an email–even a long one!–via voice, as opposed to tapping it out on a miniature keyboard. I used to rarely respond to email on iPhone due to disliking the keyboard (this, mind you, not an iPhone thing, I just dislike tiny keyboards–physical or software-based–across the board). Now I respond to emails/texts without even thinking of it. I do have to go back and correct the transcription on occasion, but overall it's a massive time-saver.
Notifications
This part of the Android OS I love. And I can't say that enough. It is simply fantastic. Basically, the menubar of the OS is a notifications tray that applications spit messages into, or can actually display messages in. So, when you get a text message, you see the contents of the SMS scrolling across the menubar. When you flick the menubar down, it slides down to show you how many emails you've received since the last flick of the tray, how many texts, tweets, etc. Tapping on an item takes you into that items' corresponding application, and if there's only one email, for example, directly to that email. When you plug your phone into a host computer, a USB notification pops into your tray. Tapping on that presents you with a dialog that allows you to chose whether or not to mount your SD card on the host computer (that threw me off at first... I could not figure out, for the life of me, how to get the phone to appear in doubleTwist, which is the iTunes to Android phones).
This is an area that iPhone OS desperately needs to advance in.
Google Voice
I have to say that Apple really screwed the pooch on this one.
Android comes with the Google Voice app pre-installed. You launch the app, it asks you for your credentials for GV, then if you'd like to use it for your phone calls and SMS every time, when prompted, or never. As you might guess, I chose all the time. What this means is that when I make a call or send a text message, it will be done over the data connection, and not via AT&T's voice network. For free. All calls and SMS messages will be tracked in my Google Voice account. And the app has a great interface for viewing transcribed versions of, and listening to, all of my voicemails. Visual Voicemail on steroids. I f**king love it.
Working with Media
This is... not so great. As you probably know, iTunes only works with iPhones and iPods (unless you're on Windows machines, which can use the open source tool iTunes Agent to fool iTunes into working with other devices). Therefore, I use another application called doubleTwist to manage the phone. Luckily, it acts like an iLife app by referencing iTunes for your music, movies and playlists, and iPhoto for your photos. However, I'm not sure if the dynamic playlists update automatically. We'll find out this weekend when I make some changes.
You can tell doubleTwist to sync all of your music, or just certain playlists, and the same goes with your photos. It's pretty straightforward and simple, but it's not iTunes-simple. I strongly prefer being able to just plug in the phone, have it backed up, applications and music/media sync'd, done. Sync'ing Android is not complex, but it's definitely more work.
Calendaring
"&$*#&@!" I exclaimed when I found that the built-in calendar application, which is nice, does not support CalDAV. Thus, I cannot attach it to my work email in a read/write form. I really really hope Google rectifies this... CalDAV was one of my favorite features of iPhone OS 3.0. Other than that, the calendar is pretty normal... it does everything your normal calendaring application does. Moving on...
Home Screens
Android has a great home screen scenario. It's definitely different than iPhone, in that instead of having x-many home screens, plus the 4-item-max Dock, you have 5 home screens, plus the "everything" grid that you invoke when you need an application that you didn't add to one of your home screens. Much like iPhone OS, you can arrange your home screen items wherever you chose, but they don't arrange contiguously as they do on the iPhone (there can be spaces between them, they can all be at the bottom with some at the top, etc).
Android home screens, however, have a killer feature that really needs to make it to iPhone: widgets. A widget is essentially a miniature version of a Dashboard widget, a living application on your home screens. I was incredibly pleasantly surprised, for example, when I went hunting for the Settings application to change the brightness of my screen, and happened upon, on the second home screen, a widget that Google had pre-placed there for me that allows one to disable/enable WiFi, your cell radio, GPS, Syncing, and, of course, adjust your screen brightness! To do this on iPhone you have to find the Settings application, open it, tap Brightness, and drag the little slider. You also have to dig through menus to get to your wireless settings. On Android, it's right there on the home screen, no application required. Other widgets include a combo weather/news widget that automatically updates to show the weather in your location, as well as allow you to change the industries for which to show news for, a stock widget (you can have multiple, so I obviously have one for AAPL and one for GOOG), a music widget that controls your media player, calendar widget, Facebook widget, a clock, Pandora controller, and a YouTube widget. Third party devs can make their own, as well. You can also add icons for web bookmarks (uses the site's favicon for the icon, not the iPod touch .png (if it exists), unfortunately), and playlists, an direct dial for a contact, folders, etc. (so you could, for example, make a folder, and toss direct dial shortcuts to workmates in it, or best friends, etc.). The home screen is quite extensible, and I plan on learning more about it this weekend!
Web Browsing
The browser is just about on par with MobileSafari, but not quite there. This is mostly due to how zooming is handled by Android: with iPhone, when you doubletap a page element, it zooms the page to fit that element to the width of your screen. Android doesn't do this... it zooms to a specific zoom level, which you can adjust. This wouldn't be so bad if the browser supported pinch-zooming, but it doesn't. Bad, bad, bad, bad...
Other than that, pages look absolutely mother-effing stunning on this screen. And holy shit is it fast. Many orders of magnitude faster than iPhone 3G (and I've heard a bit faster than the 3GS, as well, probably due to the 1GHz processor). The Google web apps feel like native applications (which I love, since I use them quite a bit, especially Reader). I don't think this is an area that speed can really be deciding factor, though, as both platforms use WebKit for rendering, and processor will pretty much decide the battle.
More Later
I'll write back with more this coming week (Android Marketplace, Voice Control, etc), but so far I'll say that while I'm enjoying the experience overall, I have to repeat: the iPhone is certainly still the leader. It has a certain smoothness and consistency that Android just doesn't have yet. I will use this phone for, well, who knows how long, as my primary mobile device, but who knows... I might bop back and forth between this and the iPhone every so often.
I do like having my feet dipped in both ponds.
Unboxing
The phone was presented nicely upon opening, sitting alone in a recess. You remove the cardboard face that holds the phone to reveal the USB cord, power cable and headphones, as well as a very cute little soft-to-the-touch book that contains useless usage warnings about how you can injure yourself using blah blah blah blah... the stuff they're required to tell you, basically. No documentation about how to actually use the little bugger, mind you, which would have been handy. The iPhone doesn't need such things... Android, however, does. I was able to figure out most things, but I'm a nerd. Most people aren't.
Hardware
Ok, so on to the phone: it's amazing. The hardware, in my opinion, is gorgeous. Very simple, very clean lines, and I actually like the trackball (although I only use it for notifications, as it lights up when you get an email, text, tweet, etc., which is all customizable). The screen is absolutely stunning. If Apple doesn't match this screen in the next iPhone, I swear to something holy that I will punch a baby kitten. I want to see iPhone OS on this screen–which I believe is the same screen used in the Moto Droid–badly. It's incredibly high-res–in fact, so high-res that when viewing web pages, the browser will actually up-res images so that they're not incredibly tiny. If the images were to be displayed pixel-for-pixel, they'd be indescribably minute. The up-res'ing does make images a touch fuzzy, but not horribly so. It's very acceptable.
One thing about the touch screen I do not like, however, is the "calibration" (for lack of a better term). With iPhone, Apple wisely made the tap area for an element just below where your finger hits. Google didn't do this. What this means is that I often tap on a screen element (web link, button, menu item, etc.), but end up selecting the element just below it. Annoying. I'd pay money for an application that would allow me to remedy this.
The power button is located on the upper left side, which is different from the iPhone, but the same as the iPod touch. As I don't have the latter–but I do the former–it's been a bit of an adjustment for me. It's no big deal, but I do, actually, really miss the "ker-shick!" of the iPhone when sleeping the NO. It was nice having that "yep, I'm cool, toss me in your pocket" sound.
Just above the trackball and built into the bottom of the screen are four buttons (back, menu, home, and search). I don't mind the presence of buttons, but only when they don't get in my way. I mind these buttons. I find myself tapping them inadvertently when going for the spacebar while typing, and I have to say it's aggravating.
The "menu" button typically holds the icons for an application that you'd see at the bottom of an application on iPhone OS (in blue on a black background, or in a "tray"). "Home" brings you home, and search brings up the universal search function, which is much like Spotlight on the iPhone, but on steroids.
The camera, which commands complete attention on the back of the phone due to the fact that it's huge, is decent. I really have yet to inspect the photos closely, but from what I can tell it's pretty darned good. And the video it takes is very fluid, probably because of the 1GHz Snapdragon processor (eat that, iPhone!).
Setting up the OS
This was very simple. You basically step through a few welcome pages, and are presented with a page to either put in your Google account credentials, or sign up for a Google account. Once you've done that, your contacts and calendars immediately push to your phone, and your Gmail application is configured for your primary Gmail account (and you can configure additional Gmail accounts as well, now). There are a plethora of global settings, such as what service to use for making calls (::cough!::), ringer and notification volumes and ringtones, blah blah blah. Basically, all of the settings you'd imagine would be in there are, including application management (which is how you uninstall applications in Android), the ability to manage SD cards, what the global search references when you perform said search, and other boring things.
You can also configure the OS, out of the box, with your Facebook account. Doing so allows you sync either all of your Facebook friends with your own contact list, or to sync just those in your contact list with your Facebook account (which is the default). It's nice scrolling down the contact list seeing everybody's pictures in place.
Another nice touch: your system settings get sync'd to your Google account. If you get a new phone, just put in your Google account creds, and voila, your new phone inherits all of the settings from your old phone.
Messaging and Voice Input
One thing I like about Android is a new feature Google brewed into the OS where, when presented with a "faceplate" or icon of a contact in your address book, when you tap on that icon a messaging "strip" pops up containing icons representing the various means of communicating with that person that they also support. So, if I tap on John's icon in, for example, a Twitter client, I'll get a phone (to call him), a message bubble (to text him), a letter envelope (to email him), and a Facebook icon (to send a message via Facebook). If that contact does not have a Facebook account, that icon won't be there, and the same goes with SMS (i.e. in cases where you only have a "home" number in your address book for that contact).
Texting is very similar to iPhone, as is email, with the exception that there is a dedicated Gmail application. The dedicated email application is nice, but I like MobileMail a liiiiittle bit more. One thing I do like about the Android email app, however, is that the colors of the message lists are inverted from iPhone: white text on dark grey. It's a bit easier on the eyes.
My favorite part of messaging on the Nexus One, though, is the voice input. It's awesome. It is, by no means, perfect, but I cannot tell you how much easier it is to dictate an email–even a long one!–via voice, as opposed to tapping it out on a miniature keyboard. I used to rarely respond to email on iPhone due to disliking the keyboard (this, mind you, not an iPhone thing, I just dislike tiny keyboards–physical or software-based–across the board). Now I respond to emails/texts without even thinking of it. I do have to go back and correct the transcription on occasion, but overall it's a massive time-saver.
Notifications
This part of the Android OS I love. And I can't say that enough. It is simply fantastic. Basically, the menubar of the OS is a notifications tray that applications spit messages into, or can actually display messages in. So, when you get a text message, you see the contents of the SMS scrolling across the menubar. When you flick the menubar down, it slides down to show you how many emails you've received since the last flick of the tray, how many texts, tweets, etc. Tapping on an item takes you into that items' corresponding application, and if there's only one email, for example, directly to that email. When you plug your phone into a host computer, a USB notification pops into your tray. Tapping on that presents you with a dialog that allows you to chose whether or not to mount your SD card on the host computer (that threw me off at first... I could not figure out, for the life of me, how to get the phone to appear in doubleTwist, which is the iTunes to Android phones).
This is an area that iPhone OS desperately needs to advance in.
Google Voice
I have to say that Apple really screwed the pooch on this one.
Android comes with the Google Voice app pre-installed. You launch the app, it asks you for your credentials for GV, then if you'd like to use it for your phone calls and SMS every time, when prompted, or never. As you might guess, I chose all the time. What this means is that when I make a call or send a text message, it will be done over the data connection, and not via AT&T's voice network. For free. All calls and SMS messages will be tracked in my Google Voice account. And the app has a great interface for viewing transcribed versions of, and listening to, all of my voicemails. Visual Voicemail on steroids. I f**king love it.
Working with Media
This is... not so great. As you probably know, iTunes only works with iPhones and iPods (unless you're on Windows machines, which can use the open source tool iTunes Agent to fool iTunes into working with other devices). Therefore, I use another application called doubleTwist to manage the phone. Luckily, it acts like an iLife app by referencing iTunes for your music, movies and playlists, and iPhoto for your photos. However, I'm not sure if the dynamic playlists update automatically. We'll find out this weekend when I make some changes.
You can tell doubleTwist to sync all of your music, or just certain playlists, and the same goes with your photos. It's pretty straightforward and simple, but it's not iTunes-simple. I strongly prefer being able to just plug in the phone, have it backed up, applications and music/media sync'd, done. Sync'ing Android is not complex, but it's definitely more work.
Calendaring
"&$*#&@!" I exclaimed when I found that the built-in calendar application, which is nice, does not support CalDAV. Thus, I cannot attach it to my work email in a read/write form. I really really hope Google rectifies this... CalDAV was one of my favorite features of iPhone OS 3.0. Other than that, the calendar is pretty normal... it does everything your normal calendaring application does. Moving on...
Home Screens
Android has a great home screen scenario. It's definitely different than iPhone, in that instead of having x-many home screens, plus the 4-item-max Dock, you have 5 home screens, plus the "everything" grid that you invoke when you need an application that you didn't add to one of your home screens. Much like iPhone OS, you can arrange your home screen items wherever you chose, but they don't arrange contiguously as they do on the iPhone (there can be spaces between them, they can all be at the bottom with some at the top, etc).
Android home screens, however, have a killer feature that really needs to make it to iPhone: widgets. A widget is essentially a miniature version of a Dashboard widget, a living application on your home screens. I was incredibly pleasantly surprised, for example, when I went hunting for the Settings application to change the brightness of my screen, and happened upon, on the second home screen, a widget that Google had pre-placed there for me that allows one to disable/enable WiFi, your cell radio, GPS, Syncing, and, of course, adjust your screen brightness! To do this on iPhone you have to find the Settings application, open it, tap Brightness, and drag the little slider. You also have to dig through menus to get to your wireless settings. On Android, it's right there on the home screen, no application required. Other widgets include a combo weather/news widget that automatically updates to show the weather in your location, as well as allow you to change the industries for which to show news for, a stock widget (you can have multiple, so I obviously have one for AAPL and one for GOOG), a music widget that controls your media player, calendar widget, Facebook widget, a clock, Pandora controller, and a YouTube widget. Third party devs can make their own, as well. You can also add icons for web bookmarks (uses the site's favicon for the icon, not the iPod touch .png (if it exists), unfortunately), and playlists, an direct dial for a contact, folders, etc. (so you could, for example, make a folder, and toss direct dial shortcuts to workmates in it, or best friends, etc.). The home screen is quite extensible, and I plan on learning more about it this weekend!
Web Browsing
The browser is just about on par with MobileSafari, but not quite there. This is mostly due to how zooming is handled by Android: with iPhone, when you doubletap a page element, it zooms the page to fit that element to the width of your screen. Android doesn't do this... it zooms to a specific zoom level, which you can adjust. This wouldn't be so bad if the browser supported pinch-zooming, but it doesn't. Bad, bad, bad, bad...
Other than that, pages look absolutely mother-effing stunning on this screen. And holy shit is it fast. Many orders of magnitude faster than iPhone 3G (and I've heard a bit faster than the 3GS, as well, probably due to the 1GHz processor). The Google web apps feel like native applications (which I love, since I use them quite a bit, especially Reader). I don't think this is an area that speed can really be deciding factor, though, as both platforms use WebKit for rendering, and processor will pretty much decide the battle.
More Later
I'll write back with more this coming week (Android Marketplace, Voice Control, etc), but so far I'll say that while I'm enjoying the experience overall, I have to repeat: the iPhone is certainly still the leader. It has a certain smoothness and consistency that Android just doesn't have yet. I will use this phone for, well, who knows how long, as my primary mobile device, but who knows... I might bop back and forth between this and the iPhone every so often.
I do like having my feet dipped in both ponds.
06 January 2010
Nexus One: Ordered.
... and holy crud am I geeked. A co-worker just told me that he hasn't seen me this excited since the day I got my original iPhone (the day they came out, so it's been a while!). Things are getting a bit stressful here at the workplace, and I foresee it getting a lot worse, so I figured I'd get myself a little (and by "little" I mean kinda expensive) nerd toy, since the last one I got was about a year and a half ago (my iPhone 3G).
No, I've never touched one. I've always been somewhat enamored with Android phones, but they've always had some pretty major flaws (be it design, capacity, carrier, infancy of OS, etc.) that, aside from the fact I'm nowhere near the end of my AT&T contract, absolutely shot down any chance of purchasing one.
This time, however, the vast majority of those roadblocks are gone. Yes, I'm still about 6 months away from the end of my AT&T contract, but I'm simply going to use the Nexus One with my AT&T plan (yes, I'm aware of being limited to EDGE). Capacity issues will be wiped away with a nice 16GB or 32GB microSD card (which are dirt cheap), the OS is nice n' mature, and the design is actually pretty damn nice!
Oh yeah, and one last thing: Google Voice. I cannot tell you how excited I am to be able to finally use my GV account on a mobile to actually make calls and send text (without convoluted workarounds, such as is required with the iPhone).
Speaking of iPhone, I am going to miss it. I will. No Android phone has the well-roundedness that the iPhone has. No mobile OS is as slick as iPhone OS. Android 2.1 comes close, but I'm not expecting it to be as nice as iPhone OS... but I've had iPhone for 2.5 years now, and I'm ready to take a bit of a break to either see if the grass is greener, or to prove that the iPhone pasture is the best there is. I can always go back to iPhone (seeing as how I have 2) if something drives me nuts about Android.
One thing that does worry me, however, is managing of media. I do listen to podcasts and music on my iPhone, and I know I'm now going to have to manually manage that on my Nexus One, at least until someone figures out how to sync it with iTunes (yes, I know there are management apps out there, but none are as slick and easy as iTunes, and I'm not going to take a step back in that department). We'll see.
A few notes:
- Google allows you have it engraved for free (with a warning about how engraved phones cannot be returned). I did not get mine engraved... I'm trying to keep it as simple and Apple-esque as possible. ;)
- The purchase process could not have been faster/easier. Wow, has the Goog it simple. This may have something to do with the fact that I purchased an un-locked phone, but I did venture into the "let's ditch AT&T" territory last night, and it, too, looked incredibly easy.
- A few numbers analysis I've seen around the web peg the 2-year cost savings of an unlocked Nexus One on a T-Mobile plan at around $500 or more over the iPhone 3GS or Moto Droid. I have no qualms about switching to T-Mobile, especially when it's moving away from AT&T.
I'll post back after a week with what I find.
27 May 2009
john and kate plus eight? seriously?
This is a post about John and Kate Plus 8. I honestly have to say that I really have no idea who these people are, but I hear things around the office about this show from time to time...nalthough nothing that's impacted me to the point that I'd remember what was said. I honestly have no idea who they are, and I'm not going to google them to find out about them.
I'm writing this, however, because I've heard markedly more about them today than normal... something about how their show last night sounded scripted, rehearsed, heartless, fake, abnormal, cold, et cetera. (Here's the part where I come off as pompous) But I'm not going to look more into their lives, because I believe that, while many Americans think that we're becoming a nation of abortion-loving, pot-smoking welfare sponges, our thirst for "reality" television soaks into and exploits peoples lives in ways that, had these more conservative-type folk been personal friends of the subjects of these shows, they would never approve of (If you value individual privacy so much, then why are you so into John and Kate Plus 8?), and would think these shows are, in my opinion, not really of any value to any of us.
So apparently this couple is having marital issues. Real, manfactured, I don't know, and I really couldn't care less. It's not that I don't care at a personal level, because I can certainly relate: marriage is the source of the most wonderful, as well as most trying, times of my life. But I turn on the TV late at night, and on the very day that I start really hearing about this show, the first thing I see is Larry King with a marriage counsellor and 2 other "analysts" on his show talking about what's going to happen to the show, what this couple needs to do, blah blah blah. It's all over the blogs. It's one of the most-searched tags on Twitter. Facebook statii are alight with confessions of T+K+8 obsessions/concern. Suddenly, the nation is even more obsessed with this couple because omfg, they're having relationship issues, and finally it's interesting.
You might say "well, they put their lives out there on TV, so we're entitled to our opinions, because we know them so well!" I can see why you'd make that argument. But no, American knows what it sees on their TVs. They know what the studio/network allows them to see. They all thought Jessica and Nick were so effing perfect, then all of a sudden it fell apart (gasp!). America knows nothing–yes, nothing–about John and Kate. Nothing. Let it go. And when people's relationships start falling apart, please don't start making money off of it. And if you see people making money off of it, don't perpetuate it.
I guess it just astounds me that we've gotten to the point where we find these people with an interesting situation, start making a reality show about their perfect/interesting little lives, and when it starts to fall apart, we're all more than happy to keep the rollercoaster going and exploit the suffering of others. Suffering is a key point here: from the little I've heard, it sounds to me like this couple is in a state of suffering. Perhaps they're at an impass in their lives where they're realizing that it's not working. Their family is falling apart. And we're all sitting there watching it, and the advertisers are loving it, because they all know that we're eating it up.
The only way it's going to stop is that we stop watching. If you want to see families falling apart (which I actually think is a helpful thing to see, but not as a reality series), there are plenty of real-world examples that will drive home the lesson and have a more worthy and effective effect on you than any television series. Families can be fucked up, and that's where you should be learning these types of lessons from.
Let John and Kate work on their issues by themselves. It's hard enough when you don't have cameras jammed in your face... and if any of you actually cared about these people, you'd stop watching.
06 May 2009
Windows 7 RC Update
Windows Aero
Here's a few screenshots of what I was talking about with Vista/7 Aero:
This, my friend, is the Gadget Gallery, where you add Apple Dashboard-esque "gadgets" to your desktop. But what the fuck was Microsoft thinking with this one? What the hell is with the glowing text?! Seriously. Look at this window. Look at it. It's shit. It's worthless. It's making me angry just looking at it. Now if you'll excuse me, I must go punch a baby.
Another shot of the Gadget Gallery, with a background that's a little more "realistic." But see, in my experience, most people don't have realistic backgrounds. They have pictures of themselves with 82 other drunken frat/sorority kids turning each other upside down to get the treat. Aero should look decent against any background, as Mac OS X's Aqua does. And even with this different wallpaper, it still manages to downright anger me. Glowing link text? Seriously. Fire that designer, now.
Sloppiness
Microsoft still hasn't put the touches on applications sitting around the filesystem that have been around for literally over a decade. Apps like Notepad, Regedit, Write (WordPad), etc. still have the 8-bit icons they were born with, which effing games have updated, 512x512 pixel 8-bit masked goodness. Oh, and the filesystem, while having been cleaned up a touch, still has shit like this going on:
Program Files, sure... integral part of any OS. Makes sense. Users, of course. Critical info in there, and shouldn't be buried. Windows: obviously. That's the meat n' potatoes. PerfLogs? What the fuck is that? I mean, I know what it is, but why the hades is it sitting with the very few, directly OS-related main components? After all of the crap they have cleaned up from the filesystem root, they leave Performance Logs? That's like cleaning up a massive oil spill in the arctic, and leaving 167,000 empty boxes of Tide on the shore when you leave. C'mon!
As for the MacBook Pro installation last night, it had a few hitches, but all ended well. Initially, after installing the Vista64-compatible drivers that came with the MacBook Pro, Aero wouldn't work, and would only do Aero Basic (which is incredibly ugly, even moreso than what's shown above... even in light of it not having transparency support, save menu shadows). Miraculously, running the performance rating tool in System Properties "activated" Aero's full effects. Whatever. Also, Kaspersky's Windows 7-compatible AV application, which installed just fine on the Mac mini, actually brought Windows 7 to its knees immediately after install while self-updating, and I had to force-power off the MBP. Nothing should be able to do this, save a crashed driver.
I am enjoying Windows 7 more than Vista on the same hardware, so far, even with the RC's current misgivings (which will probably end up in the release anyhow)... we'll see how the few games I use Windows for fair (Company of Heroes and America's Army, basically).
Man I'm glad I'm a Mac guy.
Here's a few screenshots of what I was talking about with Vista/7 Aero:
This, my friend, is the Gadget Gallery, where you add Apple Dashboard-esque "gadgets" to your desktop. But what the fuck was Microsoft thinking with this one? What the hell is with the glowing text?! Seriously. Look at this window. Look at it. It's shit. It's worthless. It's making me angry just looking at it. Now if you'll excuse me, I must go punch a baby.
Another shot of the Gadget Gallery, with a background that's a little more "realistic." But see, in my experience, most people don't have realistic backgrounds. They have pictures of themselves with 82 other drunken frat/sorority kids turning each other upside down to get the treat. Aero should look decent against any background, as Mac OS X's Aqua does. And even with this different wallpaper, it still manages to downright anger me. Glowing link text? Seriously. Fire that designer, now.
Sloppiness
Microsoft still hasn't put the touches on applications sitting around the filesystem that have been around for literally over a decade. Apps like Notepad, Regedit, Write (WordPad), etc. still have the 8-bit icons they were born with, which effing games have updated, 512x512 pixel 8-bit masked goodness. Oh, and the filesystem, while having been cleaned up a touch, still has shit like this going on:
Program Files, sure... integral part of any OS. Makes sense. Users, of course. Critical info in there, and shouldn't be buried. Windows: obviously. That's the meat n' potatoes. PerfLogs? What the fuck is that? I mean, I know what it is, but why the hades is it sitting with the very few, directly OS-related main components? After all of the crap they have cleaned up from the filesystem root, they leave Performance Logs? That's like cleaning up a massive oil spill in the arctic, and leaving 167,000 empty boxes of Tide on the shore when you leave. C'mon!
As for the MacBook Pro installation last night, it had a few hitches, but all ended well. Initially, after installing the Vista64-compatible drivers that came with the MacBook Pro, Aero wouldn't work, and would only do Aero Basic (which is incredibly ugly, even moreso than what's shown above... even in light of it not having transparency support, save menu shadows). Miraculously, running the performance rating tool in System Properties "activated" Aero's full effects. Whatever. Also, Kaspersky's Windows 7-compatible AV application, which installed just fine on the Mac mini, actually brought Windows 7 to its knees immediately after install while self-updating, and I had to force-power off the MBP. Nothing should be able to do this, save a crashed driver.
I am enjoying Windows 7 more than Vista on the same hardware, so far, even with the RC's current misgivings (which will probably end up in the release anyhow)... we'll see how the few games I use Windows for fair (Company of Heroes and America's Army, basically).
Man I'm glad I'm a Mac guy.
05 May 2009
Windows 7 RC + Mac mini
Ok, I just downloaded the 32-bit version of the just-today-released Windows 7 Release Candidate (64-bit is coming down the webs as I type this), and I thought I'd blog about the install on a 1.83GHz Core2Duo Mac mini w/ 3GB RAM, hit-by-hit style. With the ISO burned and in the drive, here we go!
Of course, the first thing I do is snag the latest beta of Google Chrome, as I cannot stand IEx. Once installed, I head into my favorite Google apps, Gmail and Reader. Lightning quick. Reader cold-loads in under 3 seconds.
The included themes seem decent. There's an eccentric theme called "Characters" that's got some good colors going on, so I go with that.
I notice a pulsing flag icon in the system tray (which is now monochromatic, much like another OS I've used (::coughmacosxcough::), which is a welcome change.... MUCH less distracting. We'll see how long it takes the OEMs manage to ruin this. I click the flag, which informs me that I haven't an anti-virus package installed. Let's fix that. Symantec Antivirus Corporate 10.2 seems to install properly, and has self-updated flawlessly. Unfortunately, a look at the Action Center (which is invoked when you click the flag in the system tray) informs me that SAV 10.2 tells Windows 7 that it's no longer supported. Drats!
I head to Microsoft-recommended Kaspersky Labs, and download their Windows 7 Technical Preview AV app. Installation is a bit of a pain, but I won't hold it against MS (yet).
Tonight I'll be installing the 64-bit version on the MacBook Pro. I'll post with any interesting tidbits!
- Boot the Mac mini holding Option to get Startup Manager. "Windows" optical disc shows, as expected. Chosen, and booting begins.
- In Setup now. This lil' guy has a few partitions on it, so I'll wipe those. Interesting: the Setup disc manager sees the EFI partition, which is rare. It appears you can even delete it!
- Removed all partitions (except EFI), and attempt to create a new single partition for Windows 7. Notice my use of the word "attempt." Dissed. Stiffed. Stifled. No. "Windows cannot be installed on this partition because it resides on a GPT-style disc" (not exact verbiage, but that's the gist). Ooook... weak.
- Actually restoring Mac OS X Leopard on this guy so I can Boot Camp it and make sure the MBR "emulation" for the partition table is there. This should absolutely NOT be required, Microsoft... no excuses. Support for EFI and GPT should be flawless out of the box with this OS (heck, should have been back with Vista).
- Ok, back in Windows 7 Setup. MS really needs to get rid of the Spinning Doughnut of Light (the wait cursor). That thing is just lame.
- Setup will now allow installation on a newly-formatted NTFS partition. EFI partition appeared to have been turned into a 128MB "Unallocated Space" partition. I'd like a straight-up Windows installation, so I remove all partitions, save the initial mini-partition (assuming it's still EFI).
- Back to step 3. I'm glad I've got a NetRestore environment and the restores only take 5 minutes. I'm not sure if this is an Apple thing, but I'm assuming not... neither the Intel-based architecture, nor EFI, are Apple-specific.
- Restored Mac OS X, Boot Camp'd, etc. Back in Setup. Installing on a fresh NTFS volume. Didn't touch the other partitions. Movin' right along!
- Setup's finished, and just rebooted the machine. There's a new animated welcome screen: 4 colored lights swirl together to form the new Windows 7 logo. Looks decent.
- Set Up Windows has greeted me, and is prompting for information: User name, computer name, password and password hint. I hate how it requires a password hint to continue. I type "no." Other typical setup stuff such as time zone and product key.
- "Preparing your desktop..."
Of course, the first thing I do is snag the latest beta of Google Chrome, as I cannot stand IEx. Once installed, I head into my favorite Google apps, Gmail and Reader. Lightning quick. Reader cold-loads in under 3 seconds.
The included themes seem decent. There's an eccentric theme called "Characters" that's got some good colors going on, so I go with that.
I notice a pulsing flag icon in the system tray (which is now monochromatic, much like another OS I've used (::coughmacosxcough::), which is a welcome change.... MUCH less distracting. We'll see how long it takes the OEMs manage to ruin this. I click the flag, which informs me that I haven't an anti-virus package installed. Let's fix that. Symantec Antivirus Corporate 10.2 seems to install properly, and has self-updated flawlessly. Unfortunately, a look at the Action Center (which is invoked when you click the flag in the system tray) informs me that SAV 10.2 tells Windows 7 that it's no longer supported. Drats!
I head to Microsoft-recommended Kaspersky Labs, and download their Windows 7 Technical Preview AV app. Installation is a bit of a pain, but I won't hold it against MS (yet).
Tonight I'll be installing the 64-bit version on the MacBook Pro. I'll post with any interesting tidbits!
21 April 2009
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