Google Nexus One

August 13th, 2010

I’ve now been using my N1 since Thursday May 27 and given that my posting about the iPhone titled Things to fix in iPhone 2.0 had such high impact, I might as well finish writing this one ;-)

In general I’m very pleased. I don’t like the fragmentation in the Android handset market, but that’s maybe just me. On Android the Alarms still work when the phone is muted. The options that are provided are pretty nice and I especially enjoy the fast switching of input-locales, which switches keyboard layout and dictionary between German and English.

So what’s annoying?

  • When contacts are joined and the names differ the one that is selected to be joined will be ignored. This is a reasonable behavior and was only fixed in froyo issue 6067. What’s still annoying is that to do this with Facebook contacts you need to go into the Facebook app to import all friends into your contacts because otherwise the names you don’t have in your address book will not be displayed and later turn it back off. Is that a workflow I want to tell someone how to do? This is crazy.
  • Graphical emoticons in the messaging and gtalk apps can’t be disabled. Not sure if there are any plans to fix that or when.
  • Integration with Flickr is lacking and is much behind Picasa. Still, I like Flickr much better than Picasa.
  • Miles/KM usage is confusing in Maps and other applications and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to configure it.

Apps I installed and plan on using:

  • Adobe Reader
  • CheckMyTrip
  • Facebook
  • Goggels
  • Maps
  • Talk
  • Shazam
  • Twitter
  • Calendar and Gmail
  • Finance
  • Mein A1

Missing for me:

  • Public transport timetable app. ÖBB (Austrian Train Agency) made the stupid decision to no longer provide timetable data for public transport to Google, so this is not available in Google maps anymore.
  • Billig Tanken (as available for the iPhone) or a similar application to find the nearest & cheapest gas station.
  • Movies app to find what movies are on and to book tickets. – Movie Finder and the Flixster app look cool, but don’t support Austria.

Interesting apps I’m not currently using:

  • Yelp – very US-centric, but might be interesting when on vacation there
  • OpenTable – too limited in Austria; maybe useful in other countries
  • cab4me – interesting idea, but I didn’t ever have the need for something like that
  • Astrid – the ultimate todo app, but I’m currently trying not to use todo lists anymore :-)
  • NewsRob – I currently don’t really see the point in reading RSS feeds on a mobile device
  • WordPress – Yes, you can blog from your phone, but why would I? Maybe for getting alerts for comments and replying to them, but I already get e-mail notifications anyway.
  • ConnectBot

Mobile web sites I bookmarked:

Want to know more about my life on Android? Do you have any other questions about the N1? I’ll be more than happy to answer any of your questions about Android and the N1 in the comments.

Posted by gpoul at 9:05am CET Filed in Uncategorized
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