Almost a year after my first try at switching to an Android-based phone, I'm at it again. I've had a Nexus S since Christmas Eve and have been using it as my only phone. I bought it from Best Buy for $199 with a new two-year contract from T-Mobile.

My initial impulse is to spend some time writing a detailed post like the one about the Droid, but I'm afraid that I'll either never finish it or I'll go on for so long that no one will read it. So, I'll make a shorter post of this about my initial impressions of the handset itself, and write about other parts of the phone in follow-up posts.

(Update 12/31/2010: I've been posted one of those follow-ups, and added a link to it at the bottom of this post. I'll do the same for other related posts, so check back here for updates.)

The phone is physically nice. The device is just a bit too plasticky, in my opinion, similar to the way that the iPhone 3 G and 3 GS are. I imagine this contributes positively to the weight of the phone, which is very light in the hand. It's noticeably lighter than my iPhone 3 GS and much more comfortable in this regard than the original Droid.

The Nexus S has an ever-so-slight inward curve to its face, which is both comfortable and attractive. The face of the phone is even more minimalist that the iPhone: it has absolutely no buttons and only a hint of the speaker, front-facing camera and light sensor. While I miss the main button from the iPhone to activate the Nexus S, I think the face of the phone is sexy.

The back appears almost piano black, but actually has a very slight almost-carbon-fiber pattern to it on close inspection. It's adorned with simple, tasteful "Google" and "Samsung" logos, shunning the "fine print" of the iPhones I've had. Other than that, the camera, LED flash and what appears to be a speaker or rear mic are all that are apparent on the back. There is a slight bump to the back of the device, which seems to be in vogue these days. This one is at the bottom of the phone rather than the top, and it is comfortable in practice. The back comes off with some effort, providing access to the user-replaceable, rechargeable battery and the SIM card slot.

There are two buttons on the sides: the power button on the right and volume rockers on the left. There's a Micro-USB plug and headphone jack on the bottom. Very minimalistic. Missing are the four physical buttons and trackball/pad that are standard on every Android device I've used. Samsung has chosen to make the buttons soft buttons that appear only when the phone is activated--a nice touch. The other control, which is a trackball on the Nexus One, is gone completely. The newest version of Android, 2.3 or Gingerbread, provides software mechanisms to do text selection, so the trackball is unnecessary. I always thought that control seemed out-of-place on a touchscreen phone, so I'm happy to see its elimination.

One aspect I loved about the Droid last year was its screen. What a difference a year makes! I had the opportunity to use the Nexus S side-by-side with the Droid, and the Nexus S's screen is better in every regard. The screen is bright, detailed and responds well to touch input. Unfortunately, it's not up to the comparison with the iPhone 4's higher resolution Retina Display. So, while the screen was the biggest physical factor in favor of the Droid versus the then-current iPhone 3 GS, this year's iPhone handily wins over this new flagship Android device.

Miscellany: The speaker is acceptably loud--louder than the iPhone 3 GS. Call quality is good on the T-Mobile network, and I perceive it to be slightly better than the AT&T-powered iPhone. I haven't used the camera. As I said in my post about the Droid, I carry a small camera with me almost everywhere and have little use for poor-quality phone cameras.

Overall, I'd say the Nexus S acquits itself well in the handling department. It took some getting used to the power button being on the side, but it is otherwise comfortable and attractive. I'd place it solidly above the iPhone 3 GS but behind the impressive iPhone 4 form factor. There's no comparison to the original Droid I had last year; the Nexus S is hands-down a better handset.

Other Posts About the Nexus S

• The Gingerbread Phone
• An App Apart?
• Web Surfing on Gingerbread

Trying out the Reeder beta for Mac? I am, and initially didn't like that the left-hand sidebar with the groups of your news sources was a small icon that was hard (for me) to parse. It wasn't immediately obvious to me, but if you drag the separator mark in the footer to the right, the sidebar expands to show you the group names in plain text. Much better, in my opinion.

I use Adium for IM on the Mac because, like most people, I have friends and colleagues on just about every IM system out there. I don't love Adium, but it's not bad. I've never been able to get my wife to reliably log on to any IM service during the day, which is annoying when I just want to shoot her a quick short message. She has taken to Facebook Chat, though, for better or worse.

Adium supports Facebook chat, but recently it hasn't been showing any of my Facebook contacts. It turns out that the implementation in Adium right now is using a screen-scraping technique, and that's a bit flaky. The solution is to use Facebook's Jabber interface to its chat service. I configured this in Adium, and now it works like a charm. It also works in iChat, for those who are partial to that client.

My wife's 15-inch MacBook Pro was a good hand-me-down; I don't buy shitty computers, and that one was no exception. But it was the first MacBook Pro made, and even as a built-to-order model, it was past its prime. Not only that, but it's seen hard combat duty on her lap with the kid going from 0-2 years old, and the abuse it's sustained would radically shorten the life on any computer. The keyboard had been replaced after the baby decided that it would be better with fewer keys. (That's not a replacement for the faint-of-heart, by the way.) It's been spilled on, hit, thrown, and generally beaten down. Since it was on its last legs, we went to the Apple Store to see what the best fit was for her replacement.

She knows I love my iPad more than is reasonable, and since she's a typical home user--email, web, Facebook--she thought that an iPad might be best for her. I convinced her that wasn't a good idea, mostly because she's a big Facebook chat user and a pretty sophisticated Google Maps user, and those aren't the best on the iPad. She doesn't need or want anything big, so we looked at the 13" MacBook and MacBook Pro and the newly released MacBook Air family.

The new Airs are dead sexy. While the 11" model is interesting, the sweet spot for her seemed to be the 13": it's a bit more powerful and has more screen real estate for the price. After comparing them, she liked the Air over the Pro, and we ended up taking home the 13", 2 GBRAM, 256 GB Air. We have my 17" MacBook Pro and her old machine laying around, so we weren't worried about the lack of optical drive. It didn't end up being a problem anyway, since we simply had Time Machine, which backed up her old machine, migrate her data and apps to the new machine. It took awhile, but it went flawlessly. New machine, same setup.

The form factor is great. It's more on the scale of the iPad than it is my 17-inch MacBook Pro. The screen is unbelievably thin; the LCD is acceptably bright, but less so than my Pro. The pixel density is nice, cramming in more pixels than my original 13" MacBook Pro was a few years back. It has the standard-sized keyboard from the current generation MacBooks, albeit not backlit. The trackpad is also MacBook standard-issue, which is to say it's great. Two things that are marked improvements over the Pro line, other than size, are the noise and heat. Rather, the lack of noise and heat. The Air is dead silent without the spinning platters of the hard drive, and since it runs cool to the touch, even under strain, the fans don't kick up either. When was the last time I could say that a MacBook was cool to the touch? I'm not sure I've ever had one that was. The whole thing is a wonderful package.

The machine is faster than it has any right to be, given its specs, which must be due to the solid state storage. It boots in a jiffy (about 15 seconds from powered off), wakes nearly instantly from sleep, and the battery life is incredible (not iPad incredible, but awesome nonetheless). Every app she has installed launches in one bounce on the Dock. Everything I've done has been met with instant, fluid response.

There's no way I could live with the 2 GBRAM with some of the apps I use, but I have to admit being jealous of the sexiness of this machine. This is her first all-new machine in years, mostly because I upgrade every couple of years and give her my previous model. This is the first time she's got a newer Mac than me and I think she's happy to have something that is all hers.

I've been trying some alternative input devices recently, and wanted to share my experiences for those who are interested. My input devices, both at work and home, have been the most stable part of my computing arsenal for the last few years; it's the only part of my system that I rarely change. Both at work and home, I use the excellent Matias TactilePro keyboard (although that's a newer model on the linked page). The Matias has positive, clicky keys that I love. My coworkers don't complain, but I doubt they have the same love for them, given the racket they make when I'm typing. Still, I've had 2 copies in constant use for years. Mousing duties have been handled by the Logitech MX Revolution which has been solid and comfortable.

Being a long-time Macbook Pro user--I've used a Mac laptop as my only machine for work and play off and on since the early Powerbook days, and exclusively for over a decade--I'm very comfortable with the Apple keyboard and trackpad. Especially with the latest versions, Apple has dialed it in, in my opinion. The trackpad has been particularly refined in the recent past, as Apple gets more and more behind its touch surfaces. Even though I'm very comfortable with the trackpad when using the laptop on its own, I didn't seriously consider the recently introduced Magic Trackpad until I watched the "Back to the Mac" presentation, and the Lion operating system. It's clear that touch is going to be an even bigger part of Mac OS X in that version of the OS, and I think it's worth seeing how a trackpad would work as a desktop input method. So I bought one.

When I first bought the Trackpad, I was ambivalent. I mean, it was pretty much what you'd expect: a standalone version of what's on the current Macbook lineup. One thing I didn't like was the angle at which my wrist was turned when the trackpad was to the right of the keyboard instead of in front of it. To narrow that gap, I decided to try a different keyboard. Enter then Bluetooth-connected Apple Aluminum Keyboard. It's the perfect companion to the Magic Trackpad, and its small size brought the trackpad in closer and reduced my wrist rotation. I'd bought the keyboard back when it was first introduced, but never really used it as my primary keyboard. There are things I like about it, namely the iTunes controls that are mapped to the function keys and the small size, but in general it's not as good as the Tactile Pro.

I think the Magic Trackpad is different, though, in that after more than a month of using it, I think it's a worthy mouse replacement even now, before the enhancements Lion is going to bring. I find that now that I'm using a trackpad all day, every day, I'm using the newer gestures more than I did before. I mean I've always used the two-finger scroll and tap to click, etc. But now that I'm using the Magic Trackpad, I've made some other adjustments that are now habit, and I love them.

First is a switch from double-tap and drag to drag or move objects. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go to the Trackpad System Preference pane, and under "one finger", select "Drag" and "Drag Lock". I've been dragging that way for years, and was always happy with it, but for limited periods. Now I've trained myself (it took a couple days of get it in muscle memory), I love using three-finger dragging. It's just like it sounds: you place the pointer on a draggable item, like the title bar of a window, and drag with three fingers. If you get to the end of the trackpad and need to keep dragging, you can lift and continue, like you would with a mouse, as long as the transition is done reasonably quickly. It's a nice, fluid way to drag.

Second is the four-finger swipes up and down to do Exposé. Four fingers up the trackpad, and the desktop clears, like F11 used to (or Command-F3 on a newer Mac keyboard layout). Four fingers down is the "standard" all windows Exposé that I used to trigger with F9. I really like those gestures; they feel really natural in use, and it took no time at all before I was using them all the time instead of the function keys. I can't wait until the four fingers sideways motions are more useful--the current Command-Tab-app-switcher replacement behavior is terrible and I never use it instead of Command-Tab itself.

Lastly, I love the scrolling with inertia. Two finger scrolls can be "flicked", and the scroll continues naturally, like on an iPhone or iPad. I was using this on the laptop before the Magic Trackpad, but now I enjoy it all the time. It's a nice, intuitive effect and I'm hoping Lion brings more of these kinds of small things to the Mac.

Overall, it's been a good experience. I'm probably going to go back to my old keyboard, which means I'll need to figure out how to configure my desk to get around the wrist angle issue, but I have some ideas to try there.

Next post on this topic, I'll talk about my experience with the Wacom Pen & Touch tablet, which I've had for a few months now, but never written about. It's got some similarities to the Magic Trackpad, but since it also has a stylus, many other interesting bits it brings to the table.

Irvin Kershner is dead at 87. I just watched The Empire Strikes Back with my two-year-old daughter yesterday. (Well, OK, she watched the beginning of it, and paid spotty attention to it thereafter, but I watched it yesterday.) Man, what a great movie that is; he should be proud of it being a defining moment in his career.

Boston.com's "The Big Picture" feature is a favorite of mine, as it consistently curates sets of amazing photography. They have a gallery of shots for the 2010 edition of National Geographic's photo contest, and the quality is out of this world. I mean, practically every image there could win a contest. I don't think I could pick an outright winner, but if I had to, the second image might be it. Awesome image of an awesome moment.

Winding Road has a great gallery of pics of the 911 Turbo.

Really? A lack of good processors is the reason that Microsoft hasn't yet created a good iPad competitor? Riiiight.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that once Intel delivers its Oak Trail processors, Microsoft and its partners will deliver Windows slates that can be considered iPad competitors.

I'm excited to see this excellent-looking remote app for the TiVo. I've been hoping something like this would be coming, and I'm glad to see TiVo do it. They haven't been fast enough to do stuff like this, as far as I'm concerned. They deserve kudos for working on this kind of thing.

Going against the opinion of almost any fan of the BBC's wonderful TV series, Top Gear, a US version premiered tonight on the History Channel. Really, there are a couple WTFs in that sentence. I mean, the original is so loved by car enthusiasts that even the best attempt is destined to be met with disdain. On top of that: why The History Channel? I guess all the first- and second-tier channels had better judgment, or at least much less tolerance for risk and scorn. At least the early idea to have Adam Carolla host was tossed; maybe the History Channel had some better sense than the previously interested parties.

Anyway, like I said, there's really no way this show can win, and maybe that's why I didn't hate it. It follows the original show's formula to a T: silly car challenges; hot, exotic cars on runway; guys palling around doing what must be a dream job (for however long it lasts); high production quality with over-processed footage; an American Stig. I'm not the first one to say this, though: Top Gear isn't really about the cars as much as it is the personalities of the hosts. It didn't start out that way, but that's the Top Gear that "petrol heads" everywhere love. Seriously opinionated, damn-it-all personalities making a show that any car lover dreams of being part of.

In that way, this first episode was strained. Obviously aware of the huge shoes they have to fill, these guys clearly are just trying to have some fun and hope that shows through. It does in spots, but there are obviously scripted parts that are just plain awkward. Still, it's the first episode and it mostly does better than it had any right to do. Here are a couple of things I think they should do in the future:

• Don't be afraid to break from the BBC show and do something original. The Stig is a fun character on the British show, but he (it?) feels tacked on here. It would be better to leave the Stig to the Brits and just have a racing driver with a personality, a track record (no pun intended) and credentials maybe chime in with his opinions on the cars and the run he did in them.
• The track has a few smart decisions in its layout. It appears to favor cars with raw speed in the straights quite a bit, which is a good idea if the producers don't want American cars getting trashed all the time by more sophisticated foreign competition. They shouldn't have felt, however, that they had to give UK Top Gear-style names to the turns, but rather should have let them get named over time by events on the show.
• Most of all, we need to see that the hosts are interesting, funny guys that we want to spend an hour with. Luckily, they didn't go out and find clones for each of the roles of the UK hosts. On the other hand, they need to develop personalities pretty quickly. There were some funny, seemingly honest moments, but they need more.
• They need to trash on some cars. Until the audience believes that they'll dish honestly on a shitty car, even one that is too expensive for most viewers to ever own, they won't have the kind of respect the UK hosts have.

In all, I'll keep it on my TiVo for now. But I totally expect it to be solidly panned by both critics and fans of the original, and I don't know how long the format can withstand the pressure. We'll have to see, I guess.

I can't recall anything that's ever made me want to buy a Ford more than this. Awesome, indeed. (Really, that's what they ought to officially name it.)

I'm not sure what to make of the new Panasonic GF2. As a happy owner of the GF1, I'm at once relieved to not be tempted by a true successor to the throne and disappointed that the GF2 isn't a successor. It sounds like it's a slightly smaller GF1 with a touchscreen and fewer dials. I'm pleased to hear that the ISO has been bumped and that noise appears to be a bit lower at given ISOs, but that's it?

Ah, well. My wallet is safe.

I posted awhile ago about my dabblings into some new-to-me methods of testing Ruby. Since then, I've done some more work, and wanted to say that BDD in general, and specifically doing BDD with RSpec, Cucumber and Webrat is a great way to code. The tools have grown quite a bit since my last post on the subject, and if you are a Ruby programmer and aren't using them, or haven't looked at them recently, I'd highly recommend taking a look.

Also much-improved is the RSpec book. It was in beta back when I first read it, and it's quite different than it was then, and is also now in print. It covers the newer versions of those frameworks, which in turn now work with the recently-released Rails 3. There is a lot to learn if you're new to these libraries, and the book is a good way to find what you need in one place.

Serrano, my pet project, now has many of its main use-cases (user stories) covered with Cucumber features. There are some specs on the underlying objects in the codebase, but not as many as I intend. I plan to rewrite a lot of the functionality, using today's idioms and features, and the tests will be my safety net. I just fixed some long-standing bugs in the code after covering those areas with tests, and it was a great feeling to be confident that the fixes not only worked, but didn't break anything major. "Anything major" is a cop-out, of course. Ideally, I'd have confidence that nothing was broken, but I don't have that many tests. I'm building them up, though.

I also updated Serrano to work on the latest 2.3 Rails release, 2.3.10. That was a much larger pain than I'd intended, but it was mostly my own doing. I host Serrano on a Joyent Shared Accelerator, and the Ruby environment there is still on 1.8.6 and RubyGems is pretty old. I bit off too much by converting Serrano to use Bundler instead of the default gem handling in Rails 2.3 and also installed RVM on the shared host to allow me to run it in a newer Ruby. Turns out that OpenSolaris has some ugly issues when compiling the rubies I wanted to try, 1.8.7 and 1.9.2. So, after wrangling and changing my gem installations and all the RVM stuff, I had to go back to what I had originally. Ah, well. Hopefully the Accelerators offer a newer environment soon. It also turned out that there are some issues with 2.3.10 and Mongrel, but Google had an answer that got me past them.

I also have been using RubyMine as my editor of choice. 3.0 has nice support for all the new toys: Rails 3, RVM, Bundler, RSpec 2 and friends. It's really gotten a lot more useful and has some really nice tools. Again, if you are interested in an IDE for Ruby/Rails, I recommend taking a look--it's a lot better than it was just a year ago. I just renewed my license, and think the 3.0 RC, which is the current version, is great.

Jeffrey Friedl has a good blog post comparing the various e-reader apps available on the iPad.