photo credit: owaief89

Firstly, some background. I’ve been an iPhone 3G user for almost 2 years, getting one almost immediately after they were released here in New Zealand. A great phone, no doubt. The app store was wide-ranging, easy to use with quality work for good prices.

As happy as I was with the iPhone, experiencing the “walled garden” when you wanted to escape wasn’t much fun. I wanted to store files, use non-App store applications, tether with more data-friendly networks – but I couldn’t.

A geek at heart, I kept a close eye on what was going on in the world of Android. For the longest time I remembered the worst of my days using Linux, and the reluctance of having that experience on my phone. That, coupled with the fact that the early Android handsets were woefully underpowered (much like the iPhone was) relegated me to the sideline for some time.

Hearing about all the fun my acquaintances were having with their Magic’s – rooting, flashing, tethering and all the other dirty-sounding verbs, I decided I wanted in to the Android world.

A friend of mine signed a contract with their carrier and got a subsidised HTC magic, which he sold to me. The phone was good, perhaps a little limited hardware-wise, but I loved the heavy Google integration and the apps were pretty good. About this time, my iPhone’s screen died – it must have been a sign! No turning back.

So I got myself a Nexus One. I won’t go over the specs, but will go over the subjective things I’ve come across with the phone.

Screen

The screen looks fantastic. The resolution is very high, photos and video’s look stunning. The touch side of things is also very good – sensitive and responsive. The only thing I noticed is that the colour can sometimes seem off – the more brighter colours apear blown out. Also, the phone is difficult to use in direct sunlight. Both these issues are side effects of the AMOLED screen chosen for the Nexus One.

Hardware

The phone is quick. No delays, no waiting, no keyboard lag. All things that were present with the iPhone and the Magic. Web pages render very quick and the radio used in the phone supports the very best connections available in Vodafone NZ’s network.

Operating System

The phone comes with Android 2.1. Android has travelled a long way since 1.x and is a very functional and usable system. Tight integration with Google, Exchange and Facebook brings your life to the phone. It now has multi-touch support in the browser & maps which should help kill the bugbear a lot of switchers worry about.

App store

The Android market has also grown a lot. There are many apps to choose from and most iPhone apps have an equivalent on the Android Market. Albiet a lot of Android apps aren’t as polished as their iPhone counterparts. Android has a lot of problems to solve for it’s developers – having to develop over dozens of different devices is going to start causing problems, and the time they spend on that is the time that Apple’s using to polish and add features to it’s SDK.

So overall, very impressed with the phone and I feel that I’ll be using it for some time – or at least until the new shiny comes along

Say you wanted to be notified when Mighty Ape makes the Transformers 2: Revenge Of the Fallen Blu-Ray available, here’s how you could go about doing it.

First, construct a Google query that narrows down what you’re after.

Since you’re interested in a product, make sure you add the keyword “site:mightyape.co.nz/product” to the query. That will restrict Google to search within that directory on our site.

We’re only interested in the Blu-Ray version so add that in there, too as “blu-ray“.

Now add some keywords that describe the product. Try and stay away from being too specific, filler words, numbers and punctuation. Something like “transformers revenge fallen“.

Now, using that might turn up some strange results, from other product’s descriptions or similar. Luckily, Mighty Ape stores the product name and format all in the page title, so we can direct Google to match only that by using the “allintitle:” keyword.

So put that all together and we have:
allintitle:transformers revenge fallen “blu-ray” site:mightyape.co.nz/product

Nice. Now all we need to do is put that into a new Google Alert and Google will let you know when new documents turn up matching your query in your E-Mail inbox, or RSS feed.

Enjoy! This can easily be adapted to other sites or other queries. Anybody got any other cool examples of useful Google Alerts?

Google has announced that it’s going to compete with Microsoft in the OS wars. Their long-denied Linux-based Google OS is due to be released next year.

Is 2010 the year of the Linux desktop?

TechCrunch has an analysis here and, as usual, quality work from Ars.Technica.

Some interesting tidbits:

Google says the software architecture will basically be the current Chrome browser running inside “a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.” So in other words, it basically is the web as an OS.

You may not remember… but Microsoft actually tried this with Active Desktop and IE4. You don’t need to be told that it failed miserably, but if anybody can make it work I think it’s Google. Also interesting to note that this is the way that Palm has gone with their WebOS based smartphone, the Palm Pre. The proof will be in the pudding.

I think what’s going to make all this possible is the standardisation of HTML5. HTML5 has fairly extensive provisions for offline work in web applications (Web Storage) which Google also has in Gears. They also say that any application developed for the new Chrome OS will work on any standards-compliant browser. Microsoft seriously better pull finger with their HTML5 support or they will run the very real risk of being left behind…

All and all, a great development. Lets see where it goes.