Know It Or Blow It

This didn’t fit in a tweet, thus an actual blog post.

I’ve been using the Nexus One for a month now as my default phone (after 2.5years of iPhone only), and thus can say I’ve had my fair share of time to compare them both.

My first experience w/ the N1 was various in nature to say the least.

It took me a whole weekend to set it up as I wanted it to have, installing various software from various places (as some things are not in the market), compared to the iPhone.
The N1’s immediate out-of-the-box workings & syncing w/ Google was quite nice though.

In short, a few of my ramblings. This is not (ment to be) complete, but a mere overview of some of the things that come to mind thinking back.
Keep in mind that I’m not an Apple fan at all, I run Windows on my desktop, Debian on my servers and XBMC on my AppleTV’s:

• Camera on N1 is much, much better than on the iPhone
• Google integration is pretty slick if you only have 1 google account. I had 3 (2 private, 1 corporate), so had to spent quite some time removing merge-synced duplicate contacts, as I want to keep them seperated…
• Default calendar sucks, try Calendar Pad instead, it actually shows a usauable month-overview
• Speaking about sucking, after using the iTunes-store for years now, the Android market is utterly pale in comparison. I spent quite some bucks every month in the iTunes store trying out stuff, on the Android Market I bought just 1 thing (Beautiful Widgets).
• It takes a while to adjust, but the hard-coded back, menu & home buttons on the surface of the phone are a quite good concept. No more searching/wondering where to push, the menu button is always in reach, and you thus discoves quite some interesting options on some screens.

  What REALLY sucks though is that Google/HTC decided to place the buttons like 1 pixel-line below the screen. I can’t count the number of times I accidently pushed the ‘home’ button instead of the space-bar or whatever I was trying to select in the screen…

• Multitasking by itself is no something you need/miss. However, the way it works on the N1 combined w/ the back button is quite interesting: from my twitter client, I press a link, which opens the actual browser, which I then can use to browse normally, hopping from site to site. Pressing the back button goes back (as expected), and going back from the originally opened page goes back to my twitter client. Back again to previous twitter screens etc. etc.

  I don;t want to run multiple applications at once for “background music”, but I do want to use the back-button as designed. Hats off for this, it works as you expect it to be. Apple: copy this

• I really like the notification bar in top for new emails/DM tweets/SMS messages, it allows for a quick overview and immediate access to the messages.
• Where’s my multi-language switch for the dictionary ? You can’t switch languages at all, I solved it by installing another keyboard w/ Dutch as the primary dictionary and switching between these two input methods, but I like the original keyboard better and just want a quick dictionary switch…
• The screen is much better: brighter & high(er)-resolution
• The N1 is not really build for one-hand control: I often notice I can’t press a button on screen, because the skind beneeth my thumb also touches a sidepart of the screen. It’s too sensitive sometimes.
• A lot more is available for free: every developer and his mom can write software for the Android. So they do. So you have to hunt the internet and google-code for the latest&greatest builds… (Have I mentioned that the Android Market sucks ?)

Overall, the Nexus One is a pretty damn good phone, only not for the average consumer. Me being a nerd, I’m willing to spend the time downloading apps and configuring the phone to my likings. I wonder though if Joe the Plumber will do this, or even knows how.

I feel sad sometimes I promised my 3GS to my girlfriend, and am looking forward to the iPhone v4. After which I will certainly miss the N1’s back&menu buttons, as well as the message-notification bar for sure…

// JP
[ Oh, btw: Where’s my Skype for Android ?! Come on, Android has been out for quite a while… ]

I just wanted to add Twitter as a search provider to IE8 (like I also already did with the IE8 Twitter Accelerator), however, after visiting ieaddons.com, I noticed that there’s no Twitter Search provider extension (a lot of other twitter related stuff, but no simple, easy to use, search provider).

So, here we go again:

• Add Twitter search as a search provider to IE8.
• And the old Twitter search accelerator for IE8.

IE8 has been released yesterday, and one of the better things in it are accelerators: highlight some text, and immediatly search for the text on Google in a new tab.

As I search a lot on Twitter these days for news etc., I created a quick Twitter Search accelerator (couldn’t find one on my first search )

So, if you have IE8, you can install the Twitter Search Accelerator here

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m microblogging w/ twitter nowadays…

For “full” description, see http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/TorrentFlux-b4rt
Download my transmissioncli 1.10 build here