Most prominent is my new phone. In a moment of decisiveness and irresponsibility, I ordered a Nexus One a week ago. The combination of growing frustration with my CLIQ and the impending closure Google's online store for the Nexus One proved too tempting to avoid, so I placed my order Saturday afternoon and impatiently awaited my phone, which arrived on Tuesday. So far it has been incredible. Maybe it is just because my prior experience with Android was 1.5 on lacklustre hardware, but the N1 and Android 2.2 are an excellent paring. Everything is snappy and responsive - especially the soft keyboard - a nice change from the CLIQ's propensity for lag. Speaking of the keyboard, this is the device that's convinced me I don't need a hardware keyboard to retain typing speed and accuracy. I am still getting the hang of the finer points of Android's default text correction, but the stock keyboard has won my trust. The increase in screen size - from 3.1" on the CLIQ to a glorious 3.7" of AMOLED goodness on the N1 - is also a large factor in usability when it comes to text input. I haven't yet tried to use the N1 in direct sunlight - I'm usually inside or at work - but I haven't had any issues with the display getting washed out. The most difficult transition as far as hardware goes is the relocation of the lock/power button that wakes up the phone. The CLIQ had the button placed on the upper right side of the phone, falling right at my thumb when holding the phone with my right hand whereas the N1's wake button is on the the top left of the screen. Not a big deal, but something to get used to. I have found the capacitive buttons for back, menu, home, and search useful, though the activation area for each is slightly above the icon, making it a smidge more difficult to find the correct button. I haven't yet had trouble with keyboard presses being counted as button presses, but I have been favouring the landscape keyboard. The trackball seems somewhat superfluous, but I have found a few specific functions that make it useful. Most notably, the trackball is lit by an RGB LED, allowing it to blink different colours based on what notifications are present. Google Voice, for instance, causes it to light up green while Gmail has is shine white. It makes picking up information at a glance simple. My second important use of the trackball is to do fine text selection. If I mistype a letter or word in a message, it can be difficult to use the touchscreen to get back to the exact location to backspace and correct. The trackball allows me to touch close to the word and navigate carefully to the typo.
As a whole, the hardware is wonderful. The device itself is very solid, if not on the heavy side. It has a sort-of unibody feel, with a metal band that surrounds the screen and loops around to the back. The plastic sections are a halfway point between soft-touch plastic and the normal, harder plastics used on most phones. It isn't so soft that it feels like it will pick up dirt easily like my Motorola Q, but it has enough of a soft texture that I'm not worried about dropping it.
Android 2.2 is brilliant. I am sure it would feel less revolutionary and more evolutionary had I not come from 3 or 4 versions behind, but as it is, 2.2 is a solution for many of the issues I had with 1.5 while piling on the new features, such as deep Exchange sync. I also appreciate having access to everything in the app market, and getting to use the new app market. Also, and it may be a small detail, but the news and weather widget included with 2.2 is brilliant: I can pull up a graph of the day's predicted temperature and chance of rain with two taps from the homescreen.
So, in short, I love it. I am extremely sad that Google has decided to stop selling the Nexus One, as I feel it shows the true power of Android. When set free from the constant attempts to "improve" its interface, Android truly shines as an OS. Subtle but pleasant transitions are built in, and the interface is quite uniform across the OS as a whole. Contact syncing is also brilliant: all my Google contacts were pulled down to the phone, and when logging in to the Facebook app, I was asked if I wanted to sync (1) all Facebook contacts, (2) no Facebook contacts, or (3) only the Facebook contacts who were already in my address book. The result is an uncluttered contact list that has rich Facebook information about the contacts who match up with a Facebook friend. It is far, far better than Motorola's attempts at contact integration with Motoblur. Device search is another fantastic feature. No longer do I scroll through a list of contacts or apps. Rather, everything is searched by using the Google Search homescreen widget or hitting the search button. From the search dialogue I can select what type of data I want to search for (contacts, apps, web, etc) and start typing as it filters information. The result is a quick way to find anything on the phone, and it is terribly helpful.
My real regret at this point is that I did not buy the desktop dock when I got the phone. Now that the store is closed, I have no way to obtain a new dock, and if I decide it is worth it in the future, I'll have to hunt one down on eBay. The N1 has a clock mode, in which it changes its display to show the time in large numbers while showing any upcoming alarms and other pertinent information. The display dims while charging in this mode to allow the phone to serve as an alarm clock, and it works. The dock would, of course, make it a more effective clock by giving the phone a base to stand and charge on, but also by automatically switching into and out of clock mode when place into or removed from the dock.
And now I am all tuckered out, so you get a short synopsis of my other escapades. Work is going well, and this past week I really started to get some real work to do. It has been a blast, even moreso than sitting in my cube and reading Reddit half the day. I'm learning new things and getting to put them into practice right away, and I am helping make real progress. This next week I get to learn and port an app to C# which will certainly be an adventure, and the week after that I will finally start in on my first real project. I'm glad to have things to do, and the amount of variety and learning I have already experienced makes me feel even more confident that I made the right call by taking this job and moving down here.
As for a social life, things are going well. Alleigh and I made friends with some rad folks through our church, and they have been doing an excellent job of getting us out of the house on the weekends - a fact I appreciate. Friday night was spent playing board games with some of my coworkers, an excellent time marred only by the fact that I was the only single patron of said games night. Nevertheless, things are going well - surprisingly so considering my reclusive tendencies.
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