The extra dialog is the "the phone will power off" after I press and hold the power button, then say yes I wanted to power off. Why the extra dialog? Why not just, well, power off? That's just a small detail that bugged me.

Projecting where it's headed is obviously impossible unless I was directing Android development, my comment was that in terms of a clean and consistent UI, it didn't start well and has only got worse with 2.0/2.1. iPhoneOS and WebOS started clean and elegant - underfeatured yes, but clean and elegant. For Android to get this elegance now requires a lot of stuff to get thrown out and re-done; in my experience that doesn't ever happen after 1.0 because of an ever-pressing release schedule and new feature demands.

Still, we'll see what happens. My guess as I said before is that HTC and others will re-do significant parts of the UI and extend the appeal of Android further - it won't help consistency or 3rd party apps, but individual phones will get nicer.

I do understand that a good gmail client can be critical, though. For any heavy lifting on the iPhone I end up using the mobile gmail web interface which is better than trying to do it all through IMAP...

Okay, that's fine, though I don't know why it's annoying. I guess they thought it was a good place to put the options for airplane mode and rebooting. I guess it's also so that you don't accidentally completely turn off the phone. Personally I don't see why it's such an annoyance, as I never completely power off my phone anyway. A single tap of the power button to go to standby is fine for me.

The rest of your points make sense, though. I guess it's a little like Windows, though, I put up with the rest of the stuff because I like what the rest of the platform gives me. In this case, GMail. I can't function without my lables, stars, and conversation view. If I had to use IMAP I think I'd go crazy.

I just read an interesting article on Google intending to separate applications from the OS, so that even if the carrier doesn't upgrade the OS itself, the basic applications will still be upgradable via the Market. Obviously, there are still some possible compatibility issues, but I think that gets the fracturing mostly in line.

The news is interesting and it demonstrates that Google is aware of and believes the issue is important.

But it's not likely to help customers of (other) existing handsets. The carrier branded phones aren't likely to see updates to the current OS version, let alone the next couple that will bring this separation of apps/features. Nexus One users are still about the only Android users sitting pretty. Most other handset owners are unfortunately going to need to upgrade to new handsets (which aren't yet available - with the exception of the Nexus One of course).

Hey Bitt and other N1 owners, it looks like this page leaked recently. Look for a car dock soon. [EDIT]Looks like soon is NOW![/EDIT]

Personally? This wouldn't be all that great for me. I don't want my phone there. I have handsfree bluetooth in my car already, and a nice 7" navigation screen, so I wouldn't be using the phone for that. Frankly, I just want the phone out of the way but near an outlet, charging. I recently gave up on those Belkin adapters and bought one of these. It's not a slick looking, and it feels like it could break at any moment, but it keeps the chord out of the way when not in use, and I like that. Even when it is in use, I like that I can only take as much slack as I need.

I found a dock a couple of weeks ago, but this is more like a regular car holder with charger. The holder I found, is made by Brodit.

Just ordered one today, so I can't say anything about the quality, and my phone should show up in a couple of days too. Yay!

Stig

Yeah, Brodit is sold in the US (and elsewhere?) as ProClip. I ordered one of their mount points for my car and it actually showed up just yesterday. I didn't get their holder, though. It looked kinda generic, so I got this N1 holder from Amzer, in hopes that I can modify it to fit on the ProClip/Brodit mount. No built-in charging; I'll wait for the official dock for that, and use a USB cable until then, when needed.

You don't have to wait for the official one, though. It's on sale now.

Typical.

I knew that they'd finally get around to releasing it when I relented and ordered something else.

Well, I got my car dock in today.

…

Sigh.

I'm considering returning it. If it weren't for the spring contact charging and the automatic car mode, I'd definitely be returning it.

First, the good stuff:

• The spring contact charging is still the way to go, and no third party dock, car or desktop, offers it.
• The dock actually has a speaker built into it that's a good bit louder than the one built into the phone, which is handy.
• The power input to the dock is on the base, which keeps cord from floating away from the dash too badly.
• It has a reasonably sized volume control on the dock itself.
• It's quite sturdy.

Now, the bad:

• It's suction-cup mount only. It is, given, a good suction cup, with an interesting mounting mechanism, but I had bought a mount for my car that I could screw into. Now I've just had to adhere the stupid suction cup disk to that mount.
• The retention mechanism is just a plastic clip that functions merely by the fact that plastic is bendy. Also, since there is a seam on the phone that the clip passes over, it does not insert easily, at least not while feeling you're not going to scratch the bejeezus out of it. I end up having to use two hands.
• The power jack on the dock is USB, which means that the 12V to 5V adapter is in the cigarette lighter adapter, which means that:
  1. The adapter is one of those 5 inch long monstrosities, and
  2. It makes it that much more difficult to wire permanently
• When making a phone call while the phone is in the dock, it doesn't automatically default to using the dock as a speakerphone. WTF, Google? At least that's a fixable issue.
• There is no visual feedback for the dock's volume control. I had assumed that it was controlling the phone's volume, but I guess it's really just controlling its own internal amplifier. (Actually, this might not be true; it might just be that it keeps forgetting to use the dock's speaker altogether.)
• There's no audio output or line to connect to the empeg's muting input

Now, the absolutely miserable:

• You cannot make the dock point in any arbitrary direction.
  
  The base of the dock is a shallow cone with a ball and socket joint at the tip. The ball is connected to a rod about two inches long, with a ball and socket joint into the phone holder itself. Seems reasonable, right?
  • The rod that comes out of the base can only be angled between about 20° and about 45° off of the cone's axis. Yeah, you read that right. The rod cannot protrude directly out of the base; it has to be at an angle, and a very limited span of angles at that.
  • The rod is able to point in different directions, obviously. Not 360°, though; what are you, nuts? In fact, it's not even close. It's more like 240°. That's not a big deal, though, right? You can just turn the whole base itself. Yep, unless you have an interest in the power cord protruding in a particular direction. The jack is on the base itself, remember?
  • The ball-and-socket joint on the phone holder angles between about 45° and -10°, which is reasonable, except that the angling is controlled by a slot in a rotating ring that the angling is only directly towards or away rom the dock. You can angle it from side to side slightly, but no more than maybe 5° in either direction. (I really need terminology for a conic coordinate system.)
  • And the holder can rotate, but again, limitedly. Its rotation is controlled by a ring, and it only rotates about 300°.
• All of this adds up to the fact that I basically can't get the phone to point at my face when mounted in the car. I can get it really close, but the cord is pointing off in a weird direction, and there's no play left at all.
  
  I recognize that if you're going to run power lines through the base itself, there have to be limitations on movement; you can't allow it to spin around a hundred times until the internal contacts snap off. But this seems beyond overly limited.

Again, sigh.

Honestly, I really want to disassemble it, throw away the mount and the rod, and just hang onto the holder itself, which I could then mount to my car mount with a much shallower and more useful tilt/rotation device. But I can't figure out how to do that yet.

And what was Apple's response to complaints about the iPhone 3G's poor 3G reception?

Do you mean the US-specific ATT issues?

I'm posting the news that's currently upsetting a lot of N1 owners. First that Google is not planning another OTA update as many were speculating (and some reporting). And that there appears to be a hardware issue with this and a number of other HTC handsets, including the new "Incredible" according to people in the Google group for the N1.

Would this be the case if this wasn't an HTC phone? Don't know for sure, but some others agree that Google needs their own handset, not some random HTC phone of the month.

Not sure why this is relevant in a Nexus One thread, anyhow... They fixed the power issue discovered in the initial firmware with 2.0.2, roughly a month after the 3G went on sale.


Outside of that, most of the 3G issues with the iPhone are due to AT&T overloading their network in cities like New York and San Francisco where high numbers of users are concentrated in small areas. 3G performance on the iPhone has generally been at the same levels as other phones on networks around the world.

I haven't dug too deeply into the Nexus One 3G issues to compare though, nor do I know if they are isolated to just the T-Mobile 3G units.

For me, the most important part is that it works fine. And it does.

My point is that Google has released a firmware update to deal with the 3G issues. People still complain about it. Google has said that they've done all they're doing.

If you replace "Google" with "Apple", that pretty much describes how the iPhone 3G saga fell out. Except Apple never said word one. Google is at least saying that the level of service, whatever the level and whatever the cause of that level, is in no way guaranteed to get any better, so return the phone if you're unhappy.

Notably, it doesn't say "we confirmed that there's a hardware issue that we're ignoring". Nor does it say "it's T-Mobile's fault". What it does seem to imply is: "There was a problem and we fixed it. We do not currently believe that there are still problems with the phone."

I have mine running on a network other than the one it's designed for, so I don't get 3G anyway. I have no way to confirm or deny any part of the story.

There is an endemic problem in corporate America today where companies feel that they have no reason to communicate with their customers. Both Apple and Google, among many, many others, are guilty of it. Google at least put out something.

I don't think a quote given to a single journalist that contained less information than the firmware release notes really constitutes communicating with your customers.

It's more then "Apple never said word one", and also was likely read by far more people then Google burying their response in one thread in a support forum somewhere.

Fine.

I was able to disassemble the car dock. It was all removable connectors (screws, etc.) except for one sticker that covered some screws, one rubber ring attached just above the suction cup, which obscured some screws, and the wire attached to the tiny PCB that held the microUSB port was soldered directly on. Oh, and standard plastic retention clips you see in everything. I had a spudger that made the disassembly of that much easier.

I was able to remove the stalk and suction-cup mount completely. Now I just have to figure out how to fabricate a more basic mount, and probably construct a small 12V to 5V DC/DC regulator circuit.

Bitt, what Google has said is that they know there are still problems (the reply is in the middle of giant mess of problem reports) but that they are not going to work any further on remedying the situation. They attempted a fix that doesn't seem to have worked for a large number of people globally on many different networks. Maybe HTC needs to step in here to work on the issue from their end. After all it's their phone. This is no more a Google phone than any other HTC handset, is it? Is it not HTC that controls the baseband code?

Google's comment is the equivalent of "3G problems? Too bad, buy a different handset."

What Apple did was fix the problem and then tell people it was fixed. Then people tested and continued using the problem and verified it was fixed.

Anyway, this is a Google thread and a Google/HTC issue. Not at all comparable to any existing or previous Apple issue I'm afraid. Not that I mentioned the news to try and make any comparison to Apple in the first place.

So all problem reports are valid and accurate? Apple had no problem reports after they fixed their issue?

You know what? Fuck it. I just don't care.

What are you on about, seriously? I'm not making this stuff up. I'm not passing judgement. Google wrote that message. Google obviously believes the problems to be real otherwise they wouldn't have spent any time working on them initially.

Why do you keep bringing up Apple? Actually, why am I writing a reply... I don't even own the phone but I seem to care more about Android than most of the people that do. Sheesh.

In closing... Bitt, not everything needs to be a debate.

If I'm being honest, it sounds like the most boring software update I've ever heard of. It even puts some of Apple's snore-fests to shame. Are people shipping scripts as apps? WTF.

Personally (from a completely subjective and personal (business) use case), I want to see more power management updates. Otherwise the OS alrready looks like a decent platform to build off (on top) of. I have some ideas that have been sitting on the back-burner for at least 5 years that should fit nicely with Android, so as a platform, I'm really glad it's moving along. 5 years ago I couldn't imagine that someone would create something like this and license it freely.

For handset owners, this update seems totally passable compared to previous and it's just another milestone to mark how out-dated so many devices will be - or become.

Anyway, overjoyed Android exists and that Google is sinking energy into it. I just don't think handset makers are really exploiting what they're basically being given for free, but that's not really much of a concern for me since I doubt I'd ever buy into the platform for use on a mobile phone. At least not one I wasn't designing myself.

Any non-native app on android is executed by the Dalvik VM. JIT for this is huge in terms of app performance of anything not running natively (= pretty much every android app that exists).

Sounds splendid. *cough*

Anyone else notice Google are now recommending the HTC Incredible to customers of Verizon? Also announced no Nexus One for Verizon, which isn't terribly surprising. The Incredible does spec out better, including with regards to multi-touch screen.

Meh, kind of boring, but who cares? It's a .1 update.

Bitt: you'd mentioned the Nav on your Nexus One before. Well, I'm in Phoenix this week, I have no idea where anything is, and the rental car doesn't have GPS in it. Every time we go somewhere, I simply look it up on Google Maps (which is way easier do than with any GPS system I've ever used), and tell it to navigate me there. Then I put it behind the wheel (in a way that it doesn't cover the speedometer).

Holy cow! It's so freaking good! First off, the refresh rate is at least 3 times faster than the best I've seen, which was on a Lexus. It's easily 5 times faster than my Toyota or Honda systems. I also love how, when driving on highways, when you get close to the exit you're supposed to take, it smoothly zooms in to the perfect level.

Just today, we were going to a local Phoenix dive restaurant for lunch. When we got to the place, there was a sign on the road, but it was between two buildings. Neither building had any signs indicating what they were. Helpfully, when we reached our destination, the Google Streetview showed us which building we wanted. Very neat.

Garmin is now making Android phones. That's the only way I can conceive that they'll survive.

Perhaps Google's removal of the Nexus One on Verizon is them finally admitting that they can't handle end-user retail. Letting Verizon stores handle sales will benefit the spread of Android.

I'll be at my local Verizon Thursday evening to check out the Droid Incredible and most likely buy one for my sister (for whom the Motorola Droid was unacceptable due to its terrible ear-piece proximity sensor). I may even upgrade my ancient Treo 650 for an Incredible. That or a Palm Pre Plus.

Bitt, I haven't read this thread, but when I see "car dock", I recommend ProClip. They have a few Nexus One docks that look pretty solid. The wired one looks crappy, but that's a given. I'm also considering A2DP-to-RCA converters for car installs to avoid audio wires. Avoid power wires? Get a Palm Pre and a touchstone.