The Nexus One

I've had the Nexus One for a week now, and the experience has been mostly good. I've never owned a smartphone before, so of course I am happy to be able to do more than just call people and calculate tips.

I don't have a data plan, because I spend most of the day covered in Wi-Fi, and I don't want to pay the money for it. T-Mobile I think has made a good move in allowing cheaper month-to-month plans without subsidized phones.

My biggest beef with Android + Nexus is that on certain websites like Google Reader or the mobile version of WordPress, the text size is way too small and it is impossible to increase it. You cannot increase it through the text size settings for the browser, because apparently those pages ignore that setting. You cannot zoom in, because apparently that has been disallowed. There are threads in the support forums about this, but no solution.

One minor difficulty about owning a smartphone like this is sifting through all the apps to find the good ones. Apps for Android or for the iPhone follow Sturgeon's Law pretty well. There is a simple rating system that helps a little bit, but you still have to spend some time researching. It's hard to see which apps are the most popular when you search for something specific. They're all listed in a big long egalitarian list. If you just want a simple app that allows you to take little notes, you'll find a hundred apps that claim to solve this problem, and maybe only two of them are worth installing. Not only do you have to look at the rating, but you have to sift through the comments. The comments are only about one step above YouTube comments, which is to say they are mostly uninformative drivel. Sometimes I'll click on the developer's website to see if it's nice or well maintained. Since I'm a software guy, I have a deep understanding of what kind of ugly underbelly a lot of software can have, and my trust is not easily won. Browsing through a mobile application store is like sifting through a junkyard.

One big problem is that app developers apparently have no qualms with requiring access to users' personal data. I was about to install a simple little timer app before I saw that it required access to my location, settings, email, and phone data. Why do people put up with this?

Overall the Nexus is very cool, and I have wasted a lot of time with this newfound ability to read blogs in bed. Now I have to see if I can get it to do my bidding.