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Jul 03 2010
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Phones

Froyo on the Nexus One

This morning I got the OTA Android update that would take my Nexus One from 2.1 to 2.2, aka Froyo.

At 33 I shouldn’t be so excited about a software update, but I was. First thing I did after installation was go to write a smug text to a HTC Hero owning friend who is a few versions of Android behind. My smugness was short-lived when I discovered Swype no longer worked. It turns out that this is because it’s a closed beta with DRM restrictions, so I just had to uninstall Swype and then rerun the installer. Back in the game.

If you haven’t done so yet, you should really get yourself onto the list for the Swype beta, it truly is a revolution in mobile keyboards.

Anyway, first thoughts on Froyo.

A few bugs are ironed out, the most noticeable one to me is that the gallery no longer seems to randomly tell me that “there are no items in your collection”. I can also now access my different Picasa accounts associated with different Google accounts which I couldn’t before.

But the main aspect of the update is the interface. There are numerous little tweaks to the interface all over the place that just make the entire thing that little bit slicker and polished. Not necessarily things that bugged you about 2.1, but the kind of thing iPhone users have been cooing about for years, and the type of thing that will help bring Android up towards the level of sophistication of the iPhone OS.

So far so good. although I should just mention that I don’t seem to have full Flash support in the browser …

ETA: I now have have full Flash in the browser after downloading the free app from Adobe in the Android market.

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Mar 25 2010
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Productivity

Saving time using Twitter favourites on the move

OK, I’ll start off by saying this only saves time if you use Twitter quite a bit, and us it as a source of information. if you don’t use Twitter then you’re not going to save time user Twitter favourites.

Using Twitter through the web interface and Tweetdeck I never really bothered with favouriting tweets. I never saw the need. 99% of useful tweets were links to a website or blog article, which if I wanted to keep I’d bookmark on Delicious.

Having installed the Seesmic app for Android I have discovered just how useful Twitter favourites can be.

I get on the train in the morning, open up Seesmic and it floods with new tweets. I have less than ten minutes to go through them. Skimming through them I might notice half a dozen that I want to investigate further.

Rather than mess around visiting the links on the move, cursing the connection speed a quick click on the star icon and the tweet is added to my favourites. Then, when I’m next at a desk I can fire up Tweetdeck and in come all the links I’ve filtered out that I wanted to look at. I find it much quicker to skim or read a page in a nice big browser window, and I will then either bookmark it on Delicious, comment on it, retweet it or deal with in other ways.

So I’m making use of what was previously dead time to be more productive later on. Double win!

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Mar 18 2010
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Phones

Why I bought a Nexus One as my first smartphone

I mean bought as in I own it outright – it’s not on a contract.

Although it has largely been sidelined as just another contender for the iPhone throne I reckon it represents a paradigm shift in phone handsets.

With a laptop you know what it is for and what it is supposed to do. Smartphones have taken some time to catch up with this, but I think we’re now there. We’ve arrived at a collection of requirements which are now being delivered all together without the need for compromise.
Over air updates mean you don’t have to live with the OS version as shipped. Open source means the developer base can be massive, active and unrestricted.

I bought it for these reasons, and because it has the highest hardware spec available at the moment. This is a key point. The software is updatable but the hardware is fixed. The longevity of the phone’s life will be dictated by the hardware limitations. When it becomes obsolete so does the phone. When it’s no longer powerful enough to run the OS it’ll be replaced by a newer model.

Like a laptop it will be replaced when it can no longer do efficiently what I meed it to do – i.e. the operating system and apps are developed for more advanced hardware so start to run slowly. We’ve all seen it happen on desktops and laptops, now we’ll start to see it on phones.

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