Chatter Of The Squirrel

Tech: Google Nexus One

February 8, 2010 on 11:26 pm | In Tech | No Comments

Just concluded a week of Android programming that our department somehow conned out of HR. There’s no conceivable reason why a bunch of techs need to know how to program a phone, but the training came our way via a suspicious ally… So, eat first. Think later.

The trainer was a young man from India, and the venue is at this shitty old place in town: McOrange Institute. The venue had serious plumbing issues, failed airconditioning, a 30yr old elevator that didn’t work half the time, and indescribable odours haunt various corners of the building. We had to move the training over to our own campus. But overall, the training was fun and informative. Although the pace of the teaching had to match the pace of the slowest student, so I felt that many higher level stuff was never covered.

But at the end of the day, our ally managed to procure a unit of the Nexus One for our department for use as our development phone. I was quickest to grab hold of the unit, and had been hogging it all to myself for almost a whole week.

This is the first time I am using a phone costing this much. It’s not technically available in Malaysia, but I’m on the newsletter list of a trader who imported a couple of units from HK. It’s available in the US for US$529. The guy over here sold the Nexus One at RM2400 each.

A simple looking phone. Doesn’t look too flashy, but the big shiny touchscreen already gave me an R+J moment…

HTC manufactured. 1GHz Snapdragon processor. Android 2.1. OLED display. Capacitance multi-touch screen. Thin and solid.

The moment everyone else got done looking at its shininess and tested out the camera… I commandeered the unit and lost no time tossing my SIM card and SD Card in. So, in the order of things I tested…

#1 Multimedia:
I want to know how my music and audio book will sound. The multimedia uses the crappy ringer speaker. Volume leaves much to be desired. Quality will obviously be crap too. Even at full ringer volume, I don’t hear the phone ring in my pocket.

#2 Phone:
Comes with 2 mics. One on the back, one on the bottom. Noise cancellation. But can’t speak for how well it works. Signal reception does seem to be a little bit worse than my Nokia. Loses signal occasionally underground.

#3 Wifi:
Grabs a signal and starts working very fast. Very easy. Just works. And once there’s wifi…

#4 GMail:
Log in GMail, and everything else starts working. Mail starts coming in. GTalk starts working. Even the picture gallery starts to grab everything I’ve uploaded onto PicasaWeb. My Contacts list starts filling up.

#5 FaceBook:
Log in this one, and my Contacts list fills up to the brim with everyone’s email addresses.

#6 Market:
Once you’ve logged in a Google account, the Marketplace opens up for you. Head right there and browse thousands of free apps that downloads and installs easily onto the phone. Lots of useful and show-offy stuff like Google Sky Maps. And a Sudoku game is practically a must. No good, free Kakuro game yet though…

#7 Web Browsing:
Flash support. SUCK ON THAT, iPhone! Everything is smooth. But there’s no multi-touch in Android 2.1. Some patent issue. Apple wants to hold exclusivity to the interface. Just like what they did with the iPod shuffle wheel and UI a while ago.

But with an OTA (Over The Air) update that happened on Friday afternoon, the multi-touch function is suddenly enabled! The hardware is there all along. Pinch zooming and other gestures now available.

#8 Battery:
Takes an insanely long time to charge. About 5hrs for a full charge. It depletes about 50% in 7hrs. Hardly enough, especially with the myriad of things you will want to do with it when you’ve got a web connection. But on the plus side, the battery is replaceable. There’s another inconvenience: you need to remove the battery every time you swab out the SD Card. The slot is on the inside of the device. Pain.

#9 Keyboard:
Not very pleasant to use. The predictive text and such helps a fair bit. But it requires much more concentration to type messages on this as compared to a T9 input. And tapping out long URLs are a particular pain, if you accidentally touch the Search or Back button and lose all your hard work and have to start over again and again…

#10 Voice Input:
There’s a handy little mic button on the keyboard. Tap, and speak into the mic. Voila, voice to text! But it uses the internet for this. Very clever, using off-device processing and database resources to do this. And it’s so responsive that you don’t actually realise that your voice was just digitally encoded, pushed into the internet, parsed by a giant datacenter somewhere, crunched through a very good algorithm, the results matched to a database, and the results pushed back through the internet and back onto your keyboard. It’s like being able to eat French fries that was fried in France and freighted over, that still tastes as good as MacDonald’s French fries. On the down side, this doesn’t work when you have no internet access. And it also censors vulgarities. “Asshole” comes out as “####”.

#11 The Mouse Clit:
I’m inventing a rude name for the tiny trackball interface, to see if the name will catch on. Male rodents have had their genitals maligned for much too long, so I figured there should be equal opportunity for the other gender. Besides, it’s quite apt, descriptively. It’s a little nub at the bottom of the phone that serves little purpose. There isn’t a way to adjust the sensitivity of the clit, and when trying to move the cursor around a line of text, the clit moves it way too slowly. But I can appreciate why such an interface is still very much needed for accurate cursor movements. Cos you can’t use a stylus on this screen, and fat fingers can’t poke exactly where you need things to go. But the sensitivity needs to be very much better for it to be useable. Also, it serves to protect the shiny screen cos it keeps the screen off the surface if you put the phone facedown on a table.

In summary, this is a fine fine tool. Especially if you’re willing to pay for 3G broadband access, so that you can use all the cool shit everywhere you go. All the truly neat stuff needs the net. Very cool to sip coffee with friends, and be able to MSN when everyone starts talking about work.

I want one. But not at this price.

The name of the phone is an obvious reference to Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep which got made into the Harrison Ford movie, Blade Runner. In the story, the Nexus 6 is a series of bio-engineered androids made for off-world work. Does Google think it can get that far with five more iterations of its phone?