I have had the Nexus One for a few weeks now and while I love the operating system (Android 2.1) and the power of the device I think the industrial design is significantly flawed.

Firstly, I hate fixed touch screen buttons without any proper physical mechanism to them. I hated them on the first LG Chocolate and I have hated them on every device since. I think they are a gimmick and a bad one at that. The user experience is appalling and the Nexus One is, unfortunately, no exception. I use my phones in landscape mode a lot and the fixed back button on the Nexus One is badly placed in this orientation (at the button where it is harder to get to with your thumb) but more importantly it is also not nearly sensitive enough. I often end up having to rotate the device to portrait mode simply to press the back button. Another problem with the fixed touch screen buttons is that the on-screen keyboard floats directly above them in portrait mode and when I'm typing quickly I often accidentally hit the MENU or HOME buttons. All of this is hugely frustrating!

Second issue is the lack of bezel at the top of the device. Look at the picture of the Nexus One side by side with my iPod Touch below. See the enhanced bezel at the top and bottom of the iPod Touch? Well its there for a reason (as it is with the iPad). When holding the Nexus One in landscape orientation the bottom fleshy part of my thumb tends to come in contact with the screen. This causes the notification bar to drop down or interferes with the game I am playing. Grr!

There are also a couple of other smaller issues I could go into but they are relatively minor so I won't bother.

I would dearly love an Android web tablet but because of little things like this I think I'm going to end up buying the iPad. Jonathan Ive is worth every penny Apple pay him.

Last January I declared 2009 the Year of the Book. I started out simply wanting to read more than I did in 2008 (25 books) but it ended up being a lot more than that. In the end I read a total of 55 books which came to approximately 18950 pages. An average of 52 pages per day.

Non-fiction highlights

• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
• Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
• The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy
• Big Bang by Simon Singh
• Quantum by Manjit Kumar
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial by Singh & Ernst
• Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Doxiadis & Papadimitriou

Literary fiction highlights

• Hunger - Knut Hamsum
• Atomised - Michel Houellebecq
• Too Loud a Solitude - Bohumil Hrabal
• Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell
• Leviathan - Paul Auster
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
• All Quiet on the Orient Express - Magnus Mills
• To Have and Have Not - Ernest Hemingway
• The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem
• Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
• Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Motel Life - Willy Vlautin

Sci-fi / fantasy fiction highlights

• House of Suns - Alastair Reynolds
• Pandora's Star - Peter F. Hamilton
• Judas Unchained - Peter F. Hamilton
• The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon
• High-Rise - J. G. Ballard

These are part of the new resources tab on the Android developer site

Android Platform Versions
"This data is based on the number of Android devices that have accessed Android Market within a 14-day period ending on the data collection date noted below."

Android Sample Code
New samples include Bluetooth Chat, Contact Manager, Multiple Resolutions & Wiktionary

List of Android Technical Articles

Apple are having a really hard time in the blogosphere lately in regards to their App Store approval process and I think most of the commentary has been really unfair. I agree their application approval process is problematic but for someone who started out when WML was in ascendency and MIDP 1.0 was a pipe dream I can't help but be grateful to Apple for the changes they have brought to the mobile industry. The iPhone changed everything in terms of both mobile applications and browsing the web on mobile devices!

And let's remember that the App Store wasn't planned, it was a reaction to user demand for applications, Apple originally intended the iPhone to use the browser as it's primary runtime. Now all of a sudden all these web guys are getting irritated with Apple for being too strict with application approval. Poor babies... where were they when we were battling MIDP fragmentation and ridiculous network operator restrictions? I say give Apple a break and be thankful to them for invigorating an entire industry.

Samsung continue to amaze me. I have often mentioned how impressed I am at the astounding variety of devices they are able to deliver to the market each year (way more than any other manufacturer). Currently they support numerous operating systems (Windows Mobile, their own proprietary feature phone OS, Android, Symbian and LiMo) and two application runtimes (W3C compliant web Widgets and Java ME). They also just announced their own OS called Bada. And, of course, then there's the ever growing market share.

What I would really like to know is how they manage all of this internally... I know the company is divided up into organisations (you can figure these out from the meta data in their UA Profile documents) but that still doesn't explain the seeming easy with which they are able to knock out devices with top notch hardware and software on such a regular basis. I'm sure Samsung are a famous technical management case study in the making.

These are all the Android devices we have captured on our provisioning platform. Not bad after only one year!

For years I looked at the US mobile phone industry and wondered about it's fascination with having QWERTY keyboards on mobile phones. I thought that because the US was behind Europe in regards to mobile technology, I'm talking 5 years ago here, that maybe US mobile users just didn't yet understand the benefits of the 12 key input paradigm that was/is dominant in Europe. How wrong I was!

I have had a QWERTY keyboard on my G1 for almost a year now and I won't ever go back to the 12 key input paradigm. It's pretty much dead to me. As phones have become more powerful, better connected and we need to input more data more often the 12 key input paradigm becomes a disadvantage as it's just not conducive to this type of usage. Future mobile devices must take this into account if they are too succeed. Last week I went and had a look at the Motorola DEXT/CLIQ and although it has a full QWERTY hardware keyboard I didn't like the keypad ergonomics and rejected the device immediately. Data input has become that important to me!

And I'm still not sure about whether I want to own a device that has only got a software keyboard. I get along just fine with my iPod Touch software keyboard (especially when using my thumbs in landscape mode) but ultimately I'm quicker and feel more comfortable with a hardware keypad. Either way the current 12 key input paradigm is dead because future mobile devices will need to allow users to input data as efficiently as possible.

Here it comes... a mountain of pre-installed crapware on Android devices! Motorola have announced a range of "signature" applications for their first Android devices.

Motorola, and all the other device manufacturers, are excluded from any control over, or profits from, the Android Market which puts them in a very precarious position at the bottom of a very competitive hardware food chain. To overcome this lack of control the manufactures are adding a software user interface layer on top of the underlying Android OS (Motorola's Blur, HTC's Sense, Samsung's TouchWiz and Sony Ericsson's Rachael).

We're told this is to benefit the consumer with a better user experience than competing products (software differentiation). That may certainly be part of the consideration for doing it but it's not their primary raison d'être. None of these companies want to be 'just another hardware company' because they know that's ultimately a very dangerous place to be (hardware commodification) so they are building these user interface layers in an attempt to move themselves into more of a service delivery role.

I can completely understand why the device manufactures would want to do this but I have a sneaking suspicion that ultimately this strategy isn't going to work for them. On pre-installed desktop computers with proprietary operating systems the manufacture can supply customised installation disks so that even if the user re-installs the OS they still get their craplets installed along with the vanilla OS. Android, on the other hand, is an open source operating system and we already see modders like Cyanogen offering easy to install high performance vanilla builds of the latest Android OS. The next few years is going to be a hard time for device manufactures as they try to find a place for themselves in the new food chain and ultimately it may be the consumer who suffers.