Android’s day-one advantages: how many are left?

When I chose my first Android device over an iPhone in 2009, each plat­form had exact­ly one device avail­able and the deci­sion of which plat­form was for me was clear.

Even back then, to those who had been pay­ing atten­tion to the smart­phone world, the iPhone arrived as some­thing that was­n’t quite a smart­phone. It had an advanced web brows­er and slick Google Maps app that were both bet­ter than any­thing else avail­able, but lacked a lot of fea­tures that exist­ed in pre­vi­ous smart­phones — the biggest omis­sion being third-party app devel­op­ment. But the world very quick­ly for­got how anti-app Steve Jobs’ Apple was at launch, and how the ‘no, you can’t devel­op for iPhone’ atti­tude led to web app mon­strosi­ties skinned with brushed met­al and pin­stripes, which peo­ple quick­ly cooked up to look “iPhone native” in the ear­ly days.

Of course, the ear­ly days did­n’t last long. An SDK and the App Store showed up a year lat­er, but for a long time iPhone remained on my “still would­n’t even con­sid­er” list because it was still miss­ing things I con­sid­ered basic func­tion­al­i­ty, things that Android got right, right from the start.

But it’s not 2009 any­more! So where are we now? Let’s take a look back and see how many of these Android advan­tages are still applic­a­ble today, 12 years later.

    • Devices avail­able from mul­ti­ple manufacturers
    • Outside-of-app-store apps avail­able (not a walled-garden)
    • Almost entire­ly open-source OS
    • Third-party devel­op­ment possible
    • Mul­ti­task­ing
    • Cus­tom input methods/software keyboards
    • Selec­tion of devices with hard­ware keyboards
    • Cut and paste
    • Exten­si­ble, sys­temwide ‘share’ functionality
    • Not AT&T‑exclusive
    • SIM-unlocking actu­al­ly allowed
    • No desk­top client need­ed for setup
    • Filesys­tem
    • Casu­al­ly swap­pable battery

Things aren’t look­ing good! Apple (and Google them­selves!) has chipped away at Android advan­tages over the years, though the two that remain on my list remain huge.

But I some­times gaze jeal­ous­ly at the iOS world and its devices with com­pe­tent sup­port and five years of updates and won­der if the prin­ci­ples that led me to choose Android are still worth anything.

Compromise and Nexus 5: a review

I know a thing or two about com­pro­mise — I bought a Nexus 5 a few months ago. It’s not the phone I want, but it’ll do. For now.

It’s been years since I bought some­thing that was­n’t the lat­est and great­est Nexus mod­el, but this time I think it was the right call. Like oth­er Android fans, I await­ed the announce­ment of the Nexus 6 with every bit as much excite­ment as the entire world does when it’s new-iPhone-time. (Yes, this is a thing peo­ple actu­al­ly do for Nexus devices.)

I found myself utter­ly under­whelmed by Nexus 6. Price, size, bor­ing, etc. But I knew I need­ed a new phone, so I imme­di­ate­ly ordered the fan-favorite Nexus 5.

It’s fast. My Galaxy Nexus — a phone from 2011 — did­n’t seem that slow, even towards the end, but I’m blown away at how flu­id­ly this thing runs just about every­thing. (That’s prob­a­bly the extra RAM talk­ing.) Anoth­er RAM-based plus is that it’s awe­some to switch between apps — and even brows­er tabs — with­out my see­ing per­sis­tent back­ground process­es dying and restart­ing. I could have avoid­ed this frus­tra­tion by sim­ply doing less with my device, but why would I?

Hav­ing 32 GB of stor­age should­n’t be such a big deal in 2015, but after deal­ing with two phones that maxed out at 16-ridiculous-gigabytes, it feels amaz­ing to not have to think about space, at least for now. Of course it’s still only 32 GB, so I’m not sig­nif­i­cant­ly chang­ing the way I use the device to make use of the extra space.

Ick: I find it a lit­tle hard to believe that I own a phone with a not-user-swappable bat­tery.1 After all, I thought that I object to these on prin­ci­ple. In the end, sigh, the Nexus plus­es won out over the oth­er devices I con­sid­ered. But I feel as if the device comes with a built-in expi­ra­tion date.

Speak­ing of pow­er, I did­n’t expect to pick up a wire­less Qi charg­er for this phone, but I did. (Um, two, actu­al­ly — cheap ones.) I love it. Wire­less charg­ing is not only the future of mobile devices, but for those on the Android side of the prover­bial aisle, it’s the present.

Well, no shit there’s no phys­i­cal key­board. I imme­di­ate­ly missed hav­ing one when I got my first candybar-style device in 2010. You’re get­ting on well with tap­ping, swip­ing, voice, auto­cor­rect, what­ev­er? That’s won­der­ful and I’m so hap­py for you. I miss hav­ing a real key­board no less today than I did four years ago.

Months after its gen­er­al avail­abil­i­ty, I’m still con­tin­u­ing to hold off on apply­ing the Nexus 5 Lol­lipop upgrade. The same UI flash that got Apple-enamored design blog­gers sali­vat­ing actu­al­ly sad­dens me. Exact­ly why is prob­a­bly worth a ded­i­cat­ed post, but after months of using Lol­lipop on sec­ondary devices, I still can’t see myself putting it on my pri­ma­ry phone (read: the only device that mat­ters to me).

Nexus 5 feels like more of a stop­gap than any­thing else… at least it was pret­ty inex­pen­sive. It’s clear that the world isn’t turn­ing back to the good stuff from the past (top want: badass Sidekick-style slid­er) but there is hope for the future — Nexus 5 just needs to last me until Project Ara is a thing I can actu­al­ly use.

Some­one will make an Ara key­board mod­ule. I can feel it in my hands now.


  1. I know. There are dis­as­sem­bly guides that show you how to crack open the phone and replace the bat­tery. But that is not the same as hav­ing a tru­ly remov­able bat­tery. For one thing, I can’t just casu­al­ly car­ry a sec­ond bat­tery to pop in for an instant top-up. And also, I imag­ine this com­pli­cat­ing fac­tor lim­its the mar­ket demand for replace­ment bat­ter­ies, which I fear will lim­it the bat­tery sup­ply when, down the road, the day comes that I final­ly need a replace­ment. Sealed phones are a shit­ty, dis­re­spect­ful design deci­sion by which this dude can­not abide.[]

Yes, that’s a new laptop. Yes, I know what year it is.

lenovo-thinkpad-x230-frontI know it’s 2013 and as far as “mobile com­put­ing” goes, I’m sup­posed to be pinch-zooming and app-buying and poorly-typing on a tablet like the cool kids. And I do — my  O.G. Nexus 7 (the 2012 mod­el) some­times makes a nice com­pan­ion1 to my Galaxy Nexus Android phone, by being slight­ly faster and hav­ing a slight­ly bet­ter screen. How­ev­er, over the 15 months I’ve owned the Nexus 7, it nev­er quite became the sec­ond mobile device that I want­ed. Use­ful, yes… tran­scen­dent, no.

I knew some­thing was still miss­ing, so I recent­ly went and bought a small lap­top com­put­er, a Leno­vo ThinkPad X230, to car­ry around. It runs Debian Lin­ux. It does the things I want. It’s a won­der­ful thing to have.

I needed this because…

The lap­top that the ThinkPad replaced was from 2007, and while a decent com­put­er from back then would like­ly still be good today, my old lap­top was not a decent com­put­er, even when new. Back then, I did­n’t know just how painful­ly slow an ultra-low-voltage, low clock-speed CPU could be… I guess I thought it being dual-core would some­how make up for it. Also, the cool­ing fan was a bit of a whin­er, and would con­stant­ly and very vocal­ly dis­agree with Lin­ux’s style of pow­er man­age­ment. The darned thing would con­stant­ly sound like a mini-jet-engine — too obnox­ious to use around peo­ple I actu­al­ly like.

Low on pow­er, high on noise — not a good combo.

But these days…

In the last half-decade or so, main­stream humans seem to have accept­ed the smart­phone, and seem to be doing the same for the idiot cam­era (“tablets”). It’s the “Post-PC era,” or some­thing. Plen­ty of peo­ple seem to be doing okay with­out spend­ing much time on their general-purpose per­son­al com­put­ers, but over time I real­ized that as I tried to go along with this trend, I was miss­ing out. For me, a com­put­ing life cen­tered around mobile “smart” devices was one of unac­cept­able com­pro­mise. Com­pos­ing more than a cou­ple of sen­tences with­out a key­board makes me want to just not both­er to write, devices with­out expand­able stor­age make one depen­dent on rent-seeking “cloud” ser­vices, and the mobile app ecosys­tem has hand­fuls of well-known prob­lems (pri­va­cy, lock-in, and so on).

There’s a place for these devices, even in my life, but they just don’t replace a general-purpose com­put­er. Ever.

So I did this…

I made sure not to make last time’s mis­takes when buy­ing this com­put­er. The i5 CPU is more than ade­quate, and I have a ton of RAM. ThinkPads are known to play nice­ly with Lin­ux, because they’re used by that awe­some kind of geek who fig­ures that shit out (and would­n’t put up with a jet engine lap­top). It runs Debian Jessie (“test­ing”) with only minor annoy­ances — not per­fect, but noth­ing I can’t han­dle.2

Hard­ware build-quality and dura­bil­i­ty are major plusses for an every­day car­ry machine, and that’s what ThinkPads are known for. And of course, Track­Point is tru­ly the best way to mouse. A lot has been said about the new ThinkPad key­boards, and while this one suf­fers from the bull­shit key lay­out (com­pare it to the awe­some, ugly 1337-geek clas­sic style), the key­board actu­al­ly feel pret­ty nice to type on, even if the bizarrely-placed PrintScreen key occa­sion­al­ly enrages me.

And finally…

In the spir­it of bury­ing the lede, here are some things I intend to enjoy while tot­ing around this rock-solid, large-screen-and-real-keyboard device:

  • Full desk­top OS that does all the things
  • Bet­ter web brows­ing; approx­i­mate­ly 1,000 open tabs
  • Actu­al­ly writ­ing things, blog­ging sil­ly ideas and such
  • Tons of local stor­age (SSD + HDD = yay!)
  • Semi-modern PC games, includ­ing lots of Hum­ble Bun­dle goodness
  • Codecad­e­my
  • Inter­ac­tive fic­tion, per­haps (now, where did I mis­place my patience?)

  1. My most com­mon tablet uses are as fol­lows: gam­ing, view­ing TV episodes and movies, and web brows­ing. I’m putting this in a foot­note so as not to side­track myself, but it’s an impor­tant point. One of the best things about hav­ing the tablet was that it gave me anoth­er 16 GB of stor­age, on top of the 16 GB avail­able on my phone. A lot of peo­ple seem to think that Google inten­tion­al­ly lim­its the stor­age avail­able in their flag­ship devices to push peo­ple into using their mon­e­ti­z­able “cloud” media offer­ings instead of local stor­age. I would­n’t be sur­prised if this were true, but hon­est­ly, the #1 rea­son I’d like more local stor­age in my devices is not to car­ry around more media, but more and larg­er apps — some­thing you can’t put in the cloud.[]
  2. I imag­ine Debian Sta­ble or Ubun­tu would be bet­ter.[]

goatse mobile

I had a strange moment of serendip­i­ty ear­li­er this evening.

I was read­ing some RSS feeds and I saw there was a new post to the Flickr tag “first­goatse.” (If the term goatse is new to you, I’m not sure what to say except: don’t blame me when you look it up… now. The above link is safe to view, by the way.)

I felt like I had­n’t seen a ‘first­goatse’ in a while, so I checked it out. The pho­to itself was unre­mark­able, but I was view­ing it on my Nexus S phone and hap­pened to glance away from the screen, at the phone itself. Some­thing clicked in my head, and I thought of a way to breathe new life into the age-old pas­time of show­ing your friends dis­gust­ing images and cap­tur­ing their hor­ri­fied reac­tion for shar­ing on the Internet.

HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS WE ALL HAVE SMARTPHONES WITH FRONT-FACING CAMERAS!! (It must be the future!) These tiny pock­et devices are cor­nu­copias of giv­ing: lulz for us, lulz for the Inter­net, and hor­rif­ic, can-ever-forget mem­o­ries for our friends!

Basi­cal­ly, what the best app ever would do is dis­play a hor­rif­ic image of your choice… self-supplied of course, in case your poi­son is more tub­girl, or what­ev­er kids these days show oth­er kids these days. It would also cap­ture the reac­tion of the per­son hold­ing the phone via the front-facing cam­era, at the very moment of exposure.

A series of pho­tos lead­ing up to the moment would work nice­ly too. Heck, what about cap­tur­ing a video of the entire reac­tion? For all I know, kids these days are show­ing each oth­er the video equiv­a­lent of that guy bend­ing over and… ugh. For bonus points, it might even com­bine the orig­i­nal and reac­tion videos into one, side-by-side, not that any­one would want to ever view that.

I’m ready to believe that a mobile app like this already exists. It clear­ly, how­ev­er, can’t exist for iPhone, because Apple does­n’t allow that brand of awe­some, and I can’t be both­ered to check the Android Mar­ket (aside from, okay, my quick search for “goatse,” which turned up noth­ing), but this is clear­ly the kind of app that the wold today could use.

Well, there’s a Mac app, but who can fit that in their pocket?

Hey world — some­body make this!

Nexus S review

Owing to its sta­tus as the cur­rent hot Android phone, the rep­u­ta­tion of and con­tin­u­ing sup­port for the Nexus One that came before it, and the Nexus line’s no-crapware, pure Android nature, last month I made a Sam­sung Nexus S my next mobile phone.

My pre­vi­ous phone, for ref­er­ence, was the first Android device, a T‑Mobile G1 (HTC Dream).

I like almost every­thing about Nexus S. The device is, for the most part, blaz­ing fast, smooth and com­plete­ly open.

By “open,” I mean:

  • It’s sold SIM-unlocked, mean­ing I can switch between almost any ser­vice provider. This isn’t very use­ful on a dai­ly basis, but is a great option to have for inter­na­tion­al travel.
  • Gain­ing root access to the phone is sim­ple. Rather than rely­ing on a secu­ri­ty hole to get root, Nexus devices have offi­cial sup­port for unlock­ing the boot­loader, which opens up the phone to what­ev­er you want to do, installing what­ev­er you want, etc.
  • Even if you don’t root, the Nexus S — like all Android devices — is “open” in a very prac­ti­cal way: apps can be added to these devices from any source you as a user deem wor­thy. If Google does­n’t see fit to include a giv­en app in the Android Mar­ket for what­ev­er rea­son, the devel­op­er can pro­vide an .apk file how­ev­er they like, and you as an adult can make up your own mind as to whether you want to use it.

Here are a few things I like:

  • It’s fast. There’s almost nev­er a hic­cup in run­ning apps, switch­ing between them, hav­ing calls and mes­sages come in when you’re doing some­thing else, etc.
  • Front-facing cam­eras may be stan­dard these days, but I love final­ly hav­ing one in my phone. Just need video sup­port in the Skype app…
  • The screen is amaz­ing. It’s bright, high-resolution, and the glass is actu­al­ly curved, which lets it sit face-down on a table with­out scratch­ing, fit the cur­va­ture of your face, and as some have sug­gest­ed, there are ergonom­ic ben­e­fits for your thumb as well.
  • I don’t know the specs, but the bat­tery life with active use seems way bet­ter than my G1.
  • Lots of onboard stor­age. 16 GB may not be enough for some peo­ple, but it is for me, and I pre­fer this over deal­ing with a slow, unre­li­able microSD card.
  • Small touch­es like the afore­men­tioned curved glass, head sen­sor that dis­ables the screen dur­ing a call, ambi­ent light sen­sor for auto­mat­i­cal­ly adjust­ing screen bright­ness make for a nice experience.

Here are a few things I don’t:

  • The brows­er some­times lags a bit while scrolling web­pages with mul­ti­ple large images. I don’t see a lot of this, so it’s not that annoying.
  • No 4G. Of course, T‑Mobile does­n’t have “true” 4G ser­vice, and 3G speeds are enough for web brows­ing… and almost every­thing else I usu­al­ly want to do. Where this has been a prob­lem for me is in stream­ing high-quality music using the Last.fm app; the play­back very often catch­es up to the load­ing. That said, I feel like Last.fm may be part­ly at fault too, as the app seems unre­li­able in oth­er ways that make me doubt it.
  • In-browser Flash per­for­mance sucks, but I’ll take it over none at all so long as Flash ele­ments can be off by default and loaded only on-demand (and they can).
  • I get annoy­ing audio inter­fer­ence in the car when the phone is plugged to the audio while also charg­ing. Not sure if this is the phone’s fault, as it does­n’t hap­pen in the house.
  • Does­n’t shoot HD video, but instead, widescreen VGA… sim­i­lar to my Canon Pow­er­Shot from six years ago. I can’t fig­ure out who thought this was a good idea. I don’t do much video, so it’s not a deal-breaker, but an annoy­ance. I’d love to see them fix this with a soft­ware update, which should be pos­si­ble giv­en the beefy hard­ware in this thing.

The lack of key­board wor­ries me:

  • While the aver­age per­son prob­a­bly has to occa­sion­al­ly enter a sim­ple pass­word and a poor­ly thought-out sta­tus update, I’m a writer and a geek (did you guess?), so accu­ra­cy of text entry is impor­tant to me. Typ­ing on-screen kind of both­ers me.
  • I hate the lack of con­trol when com­pos­ing text, even if auto-correct takes care of most of the inac­cu­ra­cies. It also cor­rects my inten­tion­al mis­spellings, col­lo­qui­alisms, “big words” and many prop­er nouns. The thing to do here is obvi­ous­ly make sure it says what I want before click­ing “Send,” but that’s not always easy.
  • Like I said, I’m also a geek. Who the fuck uses com­mand lines these days? I the fuck do. I man­age a Lin­ux serv­er at work, and very often remote­ly con­nect to the com­put­ers at home to do things through­out the day. Not only is typ­ing awk­ward, but oth­er things don’t work, like double-tabbing key for com­plet­ing com­mands and filenames.
  • On the plus side, on-screen options like Swype and SwiftKey, and Google’s pret­ty good voice input makes this hurt a lit­tle less. Still, I’d total­ly go for an iden­ti­cal phone with a key­board, even if it was a bit thick­er and heavier.

But I’m opti­mistic about the future of my phone:

  • As a Nexus phone, its updates are man­aged by Google, so there isn’t any wait­ing for Sam­sung and T‑Mobile to get their act togeth­er and release updates to future ver­sions of Android.
  • Its open-phone sta­tus should make it appeal­ing to third-party devel­op­ers like Cyanogen, who will hope­ful­ly con­tin­ue sup­port­ing it into the future.
  • While I’m a lit­tle con­cerned about buy­ing a new phone now, giv­en the upcom­ing wave of Android phones with dual-core CPUs (Tegra II and oth­ers), I’m not sure that my phone being left “in the dust” will be a con­cern for the next cou­ple of years. After all, desk­top devel­op­ers haven’t exact­ly made great use of multi-core CPUs, which have been wide­ly avail­able there for at least five years now. They’re still good to have for mul­ti­task­ing, which is a nice fea­ture to have your mobile OS sup­port, but the sort of mul­ti­task­ing we expect out of our phones does­n’t usu­al­ly involve two CPU-intensive tasks, but rather one that chugs along per­form­ing some menial task (play­ing music, rout­ing GPS, etc.) while anoth­er in the fore­ground does what you want it to at the moment.

In all, I think Nexus S makes a pret­ty good G1 replace­ment, and will serve me well into the future. I’ll keep you post­ed, uh, Internet.

I basically have the mobile phone I want, and that is awesome

My G1, in its rooted gloryI just real­ized that I, basi­cal­ly, have the mobile phone I want. I use a T‑Mobile G1 (HTC Dream), root­ed, SIM-unlocked, and run­ning the great Cyanogen­MOD.

I could not real­ly say this about my pre­vi­ous phone, a Palm OS Treo. Though it had its strengths (read: the orga­niz­er fea­tures), I bought it pret­ty much right before the first iPhone was announced, which, for bet­ter or worse, rede­fined what a smart­phone would be.1

My affin­i­ty for the G1 re-occurred to me as I opened the Ter­mi­nal app to check some­thing. I slid the screen open with a sat­is­fy­ing click, typed su and checked that some­thing. I want­ed to go back a bit through my shel­l’s com­mand his­to­ry, and a quick flip of the track­ball made easy work of that.

Sure, I have my gripes… it’s a lit­tle slug­gish some­times, com­plete­ly short on app stor­age space (root­ing fixed that) and takes the crap­pi­est videos I’ve ever seen (worse than my circa-2001 Nikon CoolPix). And now that new­er Android devices are out, I com­plete­ly have 1 GHz CPU-envy, high-res screen-envy, and Android 2.1‑envy (Google Earth, want!).

But for the fore­see­able future, my G1 and I are cool. Its form fac­tor is per­fect. Its phys­i­cal key­board is unmatched by new­er devices with cramped lay­outs. It’s clear­ly no svelte iPhone, but it’s not too chunky either.

My sat­is­fac­tion is matched only by my antic­i­pa­tion for what­ev­er could mate­ri­al­ize in the future and top this. Bring it, future!


  1. By this, I most­ly mean “have a real web brows­er,” not “have no native app sup­port and a charis­mat­ic CEO try to con­vince you that you don’t real­ly want apps on your smart­phone, any­way.”[]

The case of the disappearing, reappearing dictionary

I was a vora­cious read­er from a rather ear­ly age. I recall hav­ing had my read­ing lev­el, in first or sec­ond grade, assessed at that of an eighth-grader.

My read­ing prowess could be attrib­uted to a few things, like my par­ents read­ing to me from a young age, and often encour­ag­ing me to read to them. More impor­tant­ly, if I came across a word I did­n’t know and asked them what it meant, they almost always made me go look it up in the dic­tio­nary. I had a chil­dren’s dic­tio­nary that I adored, but for words that did­n’t appear in there, I’d use their musty col­le­giate dic­tio­nary. This fos­tered an envi­ron­ment where lit­er­al­ly no word was beyond my com­pre­hen­sion, an empow­er­ing feel­ing for a pre-geek with a single-digit age!

As I grew up, I did­n’t always man­age to keep read­ing with such vol­ume and tenac­i­ty, and today, while I read tons of bits and blogs from the Web, long-form con­tent isn’t some­thing I take in a lot of. When I do, it tends to be an e‑book. (I read these, in epub for­mat, on my Android phone using the excel­lent open-source FBRead­er. Yes, read­ing off of a small back­lit screen sucks, but this is mit­i­gat­ed by a nice serif font and the knowl­edge that, as I’m often read­ing in the dark, I would­n’t real­ly be able to read any oth­er way.)

As I read, still I come across the occa­sion­al word I don’t know. These days, my main dic­tio­nary (either Free Dic­tio­nary Org or Lex­i­con Lite) also lives inside of my phone. FBRead­er does­n’t have its own built-in, and to switch to anoth­er app is kind of a pain, so I’ve late­ly been find­ing myself shrug­ging off unknown terms. I have become the sort of per­son who stopped learn­ing new words.

This both­ered me, so I decid­ed that, damn the incon­ve­nience, I would start look­ing up words again. Once I tried, I learned that it actu­al­ly was­n’t so hard, after all.

The secret (if you could call it that) was to long-hold my phone’s Home but­ton. This is the equiv­a­lent to the Alt+Tab key com­bi­na­tion in Lin­ux and Win­dows, which allows you to flip through open apps (only, in Android, it’s a list of the six most recent­ly used apps, open or oth­er­wise). As long as the dic­tio­nary is among the last six, it’ll appear in that list… as does FBRead­er, when it’s time to switch back. This is much more enjoy­able than going back to the home screen, flip­ping open the apps draw­er, etc.

I guess that’s a pass­able not-so-new-anymore year’s res­o­lu­tion: to leave no word un-lexicized.