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Friday, April 16, 2010

Nexus One is rock solid

The following was my long comment to Droid vs. iPhone 3GS: An Update article on Technologizer site.

Interesting! I never had Verizon Droid, but I used my beloved ADP1 (HTC Dream, G1) + Cyanogen mod on AT&T EDGE for one and half year and finally switched to Nexus One on AT&T 3G.
Yes, ADP1 was slow and clearly lacked memory and CPU power, but I still loved it and it became better and better with new apps and Cyanogen updates. It was necessary to kill some apps periodically and to reboot phone periodically, when it became to freeze or to behave irrationally.

Since I bought Nexus One I never had a real need in killing apps. It almost never becomes slow or strange due to too many apps running. In rare occasions, I prefer to reboot the phone, as Steven suggested above. Overall, everything is really stable and solid. Because of that, I didn't want to experiment with installing Cyanogen for Nexus One so far.
Yes, there are few quirks in this phone too (show me the electronic device which doesn't have bugs, please.) For example, after taking Nexus One out of a dock it sometimes starts to respond strange. But turning screen off with a top button and then back on and unlocking the screen fixes it immediately. So, it's quite minor bug, which hopefully they fix soon.

Otherwise - rock solid. I never had iPhone, so I cannot compare, but to me, Android's interface of Nexus One is absolutely sleek and intuitive.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Android’s Copy/Past issues

It looks like there is no way on Android to select and copy text from existing email in order to paste it to some other place. It's strange. There is so obvious need for that, why isn't it implemented after almost two years o the first available Android phone?
And that's not only email. I should be able to open a Web page in browser and to select some arbitrary area of a text on a web page and copy it to a memory buffer (clipboard).

http://tinyurl.com/ydn7p99

iPad hands-on, Notion Ink Adam, and reading electronic books

I've just had a chance to touch my boss' iPad.

First of all: it's really fast. I'm pretty sure it's faster than my Nexus One phone. It's either faster CPU, or maybe a faster graphic card. Its touch-screen is perfect in terms of responsiveness. It's nothing like a resistive screen of Archos 5 Android table which I happily sold on Ebay (I'm not even talking about awful resistive screen of Camangi WebStation.)

As a photographer I have above-normal requirements for visual quality of screen. I cannot work on bad PC screens. I'm very sensitive to pixelation of a screen, I hate screens on which individual dots are clearly visible. This makes many LCD screens unusable for photo editing. This makes Camangi WebStation's screen almost unusable. Another critical thing is a sharpness of black-white boundaries (i.e. text sharpness). I think that otherwise beautiful screen of Nexus One phone suffers from a bit blurry text. See Secrets of the Nexus One's screen: science, color, and hacks and my blog.

In terms of screen colors iPad's screen is very good. I probably didn't play with it long enough, but the fact it's screen is much bigger than Nexus One, makes it way more comfortable for browsing sites, looking at pictures, etc. (I like little "Select all", ... pop-ups which are displayed when you touch and hold input boxes.)
What I noticed, however, is a significant pixelation. It's not as bad as on 7" Camangi WebStation, but noticeable worse than on (smaller) Archos 5 Android tablet. It makes me really doubt iPad is a good device for reading books online. I would advise to stick with Kindle if you have one, or to wait for promising new Notion Ink Adam Android tablet   - a very first device to use Pixel Qi screen. (I'm eagerly waiting for Mirasol screens)

Note, that I didn't touch numerous slick interface features of iPad, good Exchange integration, etc., etc. But to me its claim to become better e-Book reader than Kindle does not stand.