Friday, May 13, 2011

Google Nexus S



Earlier this week I finally decided to upgrade my old Nokia E51 to an Android phone. Iphones are cool and all, but as a programmer who would like to make some apps of my own, it would be too much to have to both get a Mac and learn objective C as well as iCocoa-whatever-it's-called. You can even code Python on the android!

I think I bought the E51 around 2007-2008. It was good enough for some basic web surfing and worked excellent as a mobile broadband device on train trips at least. However, for a long time I've felt inferior to all the smart phone owners.

I'll get the minor problems I've had out of the way first, so I can end on a positive note. The wlan at the office has been very weak. It has seemed to work fine in my wlan at home though. I was able to download some of my Spotify playlists without problems. Also Angry Birds crashed during start-up and after that there was some bug that shifted the whole set of levels one step down, so I had to reset the game's data.

Apart from these problems, I've been very satisfied with the Nexus S so far. The jump in web browsing convenience from the E51 is huge. The UI is very smooth. One of the reviews I read before getting the phone mentioned something about slight delays in the UI, but I haven't noticed anything. Setting up e-mail was incredibly easy. I guess it helps that I use gmail both for my personal e-mails and for my work e-mail. Now I get nice little notifications every time I get an e-mail to either of them.

There are a lot of nice touches too. I like the effect when the screen is turned off which looks a bit like an older TV screen being turned off. There were some pretty nice blip and blop message notification sounds to choose from.

There are still many areas I haven't explored that much yet. I have only tried taking two pictures so far. Both of which seemed perfectly fine. I haven't tried tracking that much with the GPS yet. There are still a lot of settings to explore. Today, for example, I figured out that it was possible to easily switch between languages while typing an SMS. Another thing which is a bit unclear is how to tell which apps can show a widget with extra information on the home screen.


I've only downloaded free apps so far, so I don't know if you can buy apps without a credit card in Finland yet. Not that it matters that much to me. I have to say I'm a bit overwhelmed with all the crap apps in the app market though. I would much rather have an app market which is free from Coder Joe's MyFirstAndroidApp which is either a crappy clone of some other game (like Angry Birds, Bejeweled or Tetris) or some lame memory game with naughty pictures. Google, please give us a way to filter these apps out!

Well I guess that's about it. This was just supposed to be a brain dump about my initial opinion of my new awesome phone.

PS. The image entering functionality on blogspot (blogger?) is awful. I tried putting the cursor where I wanted the image to go. Press "Add Image" and both of my uploaded images go to the top of the article. No way to drag them in the Compose view. So you have to edit the hellish html to get the image where you want...

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