Android 4.0.3 on Nexus S is the best reason to upgrade to iPhone 4S

Upgraded my Nexus S to 4.0.3, battery life sucks, switched to iPhone 4S, end of story.

Skype on iPhone/iPod/iPad – bad/bad/bad

If you’re having trouble getting sound and/or video on a Skype call and one of you is on an iDevice of some sort, then just it’s not bandwidth which is messing you up, it’s the compute power on the iDevice.

Switch the culprit to a computer on the same network, and you’ll probably get a usable connection.

The reason is simply the way that the audio/video codecs work. They’ll drop frames if the machine/network can’t keep up.

Team BHP

Tried to create an account on Team BHP – the car forum which showed up on google while searching for a review on the Mahindra Thar.

Turns out that the car guru who runs that site has a really fragile ego, which needs stroking with a 1000 word essay praising him, his unwashed socks and the forum itself. Else no username/account for you!

Android 2.3.4 for Nexus S

Auto downloaded (some 12Mb). Phone restarted and installed without any problems. Not bad at all. Can’t see any major changes, except some obvious typos in the USB on/off dialog boxes have been fixed.

I haven’t yet tried out the new video chat alleged to be in this release. Now that Skype is going Microsoft, that’ll become a priority pretty soon.

Dumping all your Facebook connections’ birthdays into a calendar.

Okay, not quite a calendar. But if you connect your Amazon account with Facebook, Amazon will suck up FB data into one convenient page. You’ll see it under your “Amazon Facebook Page” when you’re logged into Amazon.

Click on “See all your friends on Facebook and their birthdays” and then ask for all friends on one page. There you are – complete with mugshots and links to gift suggestions.

Also marvel at how much information is out there about you and your buddies.

Google Streetview cars in Bangalore

Just saw a Google streeview car mapping out a really narrow road behind our house. No logos or markings, just a black Scorpio with the camera system on the roof. (When the maps come out, the white Honda blocking their way is mine.

Android 2.3.3 update for the Nexus S

The whole point of getting the Nexus S was to for the updates. So when 2.3.3 came out, I updated as soon as possible. Since the OTA update wasn’t available, I found the build on the google server, and updated manually.

I’ve done one OTA update earlier, and it was extremely simple and worked flawlessly. Never really liked the Apple IOS way of doing everything over USB.

But a manual Android update is a throwback to the days of Lunix. After copying the update to the sdcard filesystem, you need to put the phone into some kind of recovery/developer mode by rebooting, and keeping the Volume Up and Power buttons pressed at the same time. (Note that some websites will say Volume Down, but that’s wrong for the Nexus S.)

After that you have to scrolll through a couple of screens, select the update file and let the phone do its thing.

Flawless again. But.

1. The screen seems dimmer. There’s been some wailing and gnashing of teeth on this aspect on some sites, but I don’t mind the change.

2. Swype broke. Haven’t bothered to reinstall, but apparently that should fix it.

3. Google Books vanished and refuses to be found again in the Market App. A region thing, I guess.

One week with the Nexus S.

I think I might like the iPhone 4, but since Jobs, in his infinite wisdom, refuses to sell it in India, or unlocked, or without a contract, I’ve done without one so far. I do have say that I did use the original iPhone for about a month before tossing it out the window. A fraud of a phone, it was worse than the worst Motorola brick phones I’ve ever had the misfortune to use. I do like the iPad, and the latest Touch, but the iPhone so far just ticks me off. Sour grapes, I guess.

Best Buy had a Nexus S on display, and the sales guy kept pestering me, as Best Buy sales guys do, that he had “just one left.”

So I bought it, and have had it for a week.

Before we get into the good, the bad and the ugly, let’s get rid of the downright stupid right now, shall we?

It can’t handle wifi proxies. I’ll say it again, slowly, so that the village idiots from Google can understand this. It doesn’t work behind proxies. I’m told, but can’t be bothered to check, that it does have options on mobile networks, and there are hacks available as well.

Why did Google do this? My theory is so that they can track location accurately. Why care about the fact that it makes the phone unusable in a corporate environment, if you can track users’ locations to better serve ads?

The good:

It’s fast, build quality is pretty good, but not in the iPad class, the UI is reasonably intuitive and in some ways better than IOS. The soft keyboard and spelling system is way better than IOS.

The Nexus S doesn’t come with Swype, pity.

Almost all the apps I need are available for free on the Android Market. There’s also a banking app from ICICI which doesn’t even exist on IOS.

Voice quality on calls is good. No one asked me if I was driving when I was driving, on speakerphone. Apparently Google has a new noise reduction algorithm in play; works really well, I guess.

I like the four fixed function keys, very usable both with and without haptic support.

The settings app is well designed, unlike Symbian. You don’t need to have a cheat sheet in your head to find settings – except for wifi proxies, of course.

Charging over USB is supported, which is a major convenience over the older Nokias.

Finally, since this is the Google platform reference phone, updates should come really quickly. The phone came with 2.3, and it updated pretty quickly and easily to 2.3.2 over wifi.

Compare with IOS which needs USB to do anything. Compare with Nokia, where updates depend on the device, the region, the operator and in my experience have been pretty poorly spaced out and unreliable.

The bad:

We’ve covered the wifi proxy scam. There’s another weirdness with wifi; it doesn’t always switch to a stronger AP. In fact I’m not sure that it even tries. I found a wifi analyzer which can switch APs at will, but the fact that you need something like this tells you that something in the wifi stack is really immature.

Bluetooth support is weak. I couldn’t get my Mac to browse the filesystem on the phone. It’s as lame as IOS in other aspects. I don’t use Bluetooth headsets, so I don’t know or care how good that support is.

The ugly:

Battery life, compared to the worst Nokia that I have, makes the Nokia look really good. The claims on the Google spec page are laughable. Change their days to hours and divide by two to get a real idea of how poor battery life really is.

Bottom-line: will I keep it or toss it out? My Nokia E71 was the best phone I’ve ever used. No touch screen etc, but the build quality and battery life were superb.

I find the Nokia X6 sluggish but usable.

The Nexus S tries hard to be state of the art and configurable, and kind of succeeds. The only reason to keep it over the Nokias’ is that Android definitely has developer attention.

The deal breaker right now is the broken wifi proxy support. Battery life being poor is something I can work with – charging overnight isn’t really a big deal.

We will play this game until I win.

This is my 4 year old’s rule for playing board games.

Ovi Music: review. One word: Rubbish

One of the attractions of the Nokia X6 was the free year’s subscription to Ovi Music Unlimited or whatever they’ve decided to call it this week.

What a load of rubbish … downloads on the PC don’t work. No way to diagnose the problem. You need WMP11, which by all accounts is another pile of steaming rubbish – it’s from MSFT, what do you expect?

Syncronizing music is another nightmare. It never works as expected. Sync should mean sync. Not for Nokia, oh no. For Nokia, sync means copy. Every sync adds duplicates (real or ghost ones, I can’t figure it out).

Deleting an album on the PC side wiped the entire library. Luckily it went to the trash folder, so if and when I have time, I can try to restore it.

Stuff you deleted on the phone mysteriously reappears. Connecting it to a Mac by mistake loaded up MP3s from itunes.

This software is so bad, words fail me. The only good thing is that I haven’t bought any music on this “service” and now never will, but I did lose my money on the device. Good bye, Nokia.

Nokia X6: Nokia’s going out of business plan at work.