Tim O'Reilly. A few thoughts on the Nexus One

I bring to your attention the translation of the review of the Nexus One from a recognized expert Tim O'Reilly. He compares it with the iPhone and talks about the future of Google and Apple.

Now we are waiting for a lot of information about the appearance of the Nexus One, about the sensations of working with it and so on, so I’ll talk with you about something else - what exactly is the latest Android feature changes in the structure of competition, which is also called the war for the web . This is the war, the most important front of which is the battle of Android and iPhone.

And here's the latest news from the front: a new era can begin for Android. I have long been a big fan of the iPhone, but after working for several weeks with the Nexus One, I almost decided to switch to Android on an ongoing basis. I have not yet made a final decision, and this uncertainty oppresses me.
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The main determining factor of the new era is not the grace of the Nexus One, not its subtlety and lightness. This is not at all packed to the eye of every conceivable and inconceivable functionality: here there are incredible sensor capabilities, noise-canceling headphones and voice control, various home screens, automatic mode switching depending on the position of the smartphone (in your pocket or in the car mount) . This is not the pleasant fact that you can buy a smartphone completely unlocked directly from Google, and who are accustomed to the old fashioned way, you can choose between Verizon, Vodaphone and T-Mobile. No, the real milestone is something completely different - this is Google’s aspiration to by all means make Nexus One as friendly as possible, native to the Web. As explained in today's press conference [January 5, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas - A. Ch.] Google’s vice president of management Mario Queiroz (Mario Queiroz), a nexus is a place where several worlds meet. Accordingly, "Nexus One is the place where the phone meets the web." This device is much more complete than anything before it, embodies the concept of continuous connectivity.

Thus, the main advantages of Nexus One is the simplicity and completeness of integration in the cloud. I explain:

• Android Market is something. Compared to the iPhone App Store, this is truly a “one-click job.” You liked some kind of application - you immediately put it on the phone. No intermediate synchronization. And there is something to choose from, and every day the choice is more and more. At some point, the process of finding and installing new applications captured me like never before with the iPhone. Very simple payment system. In general, I think that the Android Market should be the main driving force behind Google Checkout, increasing its customer base and turning it into a first-class and leading online payment system. Not to mention that even the phone itself can be bought on Google Checkout.

• I absolutely admire the system of security notifications - another interesting find. Before purchasing the application, this system shows which settings and functions of the system it can access. I really like the fact that the Market shows how many users have installed this or that application: it’s immediately obvious whether it is popular or not.

• Gmail on the phone works so well that for the first time I could completely do without a laptop.

• No need to synchronize your address book and calendar. Everything is always relevant.

• Multitasking brings the phone closer to the real computer.

• Maps and navigation work perfectly, however, the voice of the routing system is no good.

• In Android 2.1, you can enter information in any text field by voice, not just in search or navigation. Honestly, voice recognition does not work as well as I would like, but, as I already wrote, when recognition does not work on the device, but in the cloud, it gradually improves as more people use it.

• Google Goggles - the application is still damp, but promising. I understand why Google did not pre-install it on the phone, but I still consider it absolutely necessary and very important for strengthening Google’s position. I’m convinced that image recognition and voice recognition technologies are key to the future’s mobile interfaces, and I’m standing and applauding Google for doing it for so long and selflessly, even in the absence of quick results. When someone sends a camera at you and she says: “This is Tim O'Reilly” - this is, firstly, it looks absolutely unmatched, and secondly, it shows what a mobile device is capable of when there are powerful information devices behind it and algorithmic cloud platform resources. (Google removed face recognition from the serial version of Goggles, but a few months ago I was shown how it works, and believe me, this is the real smell of the future.) The iPhone also boasts new realities (Layar, Yelp Monocle, ShopSavvy are just a few examples), but Palm is still Google.

Now about the minuses (as without them). The main ones relate to the interface:

• The iPhone has always been very intuitive, with the gPhone you always have to master something. But the more I master it, the more satisfaction it brings me, unlike some devices where you fight, beat your head against the wall, but in the end you didn’t solve the problem and spoiled your mood.

• Visual voicemail is a real iPhone hit. After it is so unpleasant to manually dial again to listen to the message. Perhaps this is how our wonderful patenting system works, since it’s hard to believe that Google voluntarily did not want to borrow this function.

• A single-touch interface can never be compared in simplicity and efficiency to multi-touch. I know that there will be a multi-touch interface on Android too, but now it’s not there, and it’s badly missing. I really like to zoom in on pictures on the iPhone. Further, the sensitivity of the Nexus One screen also leaves much to be desired. Dragging works well, but sometimes you have to push the screen quite hard to get the effect.

• Trackball notification is a good idea, but it's hard for me to imagine what benefits I could get from it. I have different applications constantly sending notifications, and if I turned on this feature, the trackball would blink constantly. I think developers should be more subtly thinking through the colors for these notifications.

• I really miss my iTunes music collection and the ability to listen to audiobooks from Audible.com there. From this, I'm thinking about cloud music apps like Last.FM and Pandora. Rhapsody is also very lacking for me, since I subscribed to it through the Sonos Music Center. Google pre-installs its own music application, but it has a limited selection, and even worse, it takes control of the headset. At least now it is not available in other music applications: when you press the pause button in Last.FM, it starts playing the stream from the Google music application. Google should VERY seriously approach the issue of entering the music market, otherwise it would be better to give up your own application and work with third-party developers.

• Google is not as good as I would like; I solved the problem of integrating photos and videos from Picasa and YouTube. In words, Google claims that you can upload videos to YouTube with one click, but it seems to me that the wishful thinking is taking place. There is a hidden danger in Google’s attachment to its own services. Suppose I can decide to sync photos not on Picasa, but on Flickr. Question: What will prevail, the commitment of Google to open standards, or the desire to further bind users to their services? The question is still open.

• Somewhat annoying lack of fairly simple functions, such as the ability to take screenshots. E-my, to install software for screenshots from third-party developers even have to unlock the phone!

All in all, the Nexus One is good. He is so good that one can expect a repetition of the situation twenty-five years ago, when Apple computers had unconditional leadership, but in the end lost to a more mass platform, which, although it was not perfect, was aimed at the industry as a whole.

(Henry Blodget writes about the same thing in his article “Apple, wake up, the same thing again!” But Mark Sigal gives another historical analogy in the article “Novell vs. Microsoft”, asking a different question : whether suppliers will be deterred from the platform by the fact that Google has armed itself with its own official phone and has gone quite far from its core business. At today's press conference, Google emphasized the aspect of the openness of the Android platform, which shows that they also understand this danger. maybe it's worth working with a separate and partners, share responsibility with them in order to finally get a return in the form of a wide range of innovations that are accessible to all.)

It seems to me that Google’s success in promoting cloud-based, resource-dependent applications is due to long-standing traditions, which Apple simply does not have. The legacy of Apple is a fundamentally different paradigm, in the center of which stands the device. Yes, Apple is trying to catch up, trying to master the cloud infrastructure, building its own services, the same iTunes and the App Store, but this infrastructure is limited, especially in terms of algorithm-dependent applications, which I consider central to the computer technologies of the future. Google has so many information assets and so much experience in algorithmic applications that Apple will find it extremely difficult to compete with them even in the long run.

Or take the situation with the programs-hits. Apple's main programs, such as mail, calendar, and address book, are all rooted in the PC era. They live on a PC and require synchronization with the phone. Meanwhile, Google equivalents are native to the network and therefore always relevant, there is no synchronization there simply due to the fact that it runs constantly.

It’s good for Apple to play that Google will either have to open up some key resources for the iPhone, or give in to its competitors. For Google, it will be a serious blow if, on the iPhone, the default search is, say, Bing, and navigation is Google Maps. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which Apple and Microsoft will make an alliance in areas such as search, geolocation, voice recognition and images, and others that are key competitive advantages for Google.

But there are important third-party applications that can both contribute to and hinder the success of each platform. They may not be as critical as they were before Windows, when Adobe’s commitment to the Apple platform helped the latter to maintain unconditional design leadership, but they are nonetheless essential.

Google must aggressively form a partner ecosystem in a number of areas: music, e-books, etc., so that partners can compete on an equal footing with the iPhone.

Apple should either build capacity in resource-dependent applications, or also not be afraid to cooperate aggressively with companies with more experience in this area. Apple needs to translate its root applications, such as iPhoto and iMovie, onto cloud rails, turning them into a collective intelligence-based database. There is image recognition in both iPhoto and Picasa, but Google is actively teaching Picasa algorithms on billions of user photos, and Apple doesn’t move with its iPhoto. It must start the learning procedure on at least small samples. As Peter Norvig, Google’s chief scientist at Google, once told me: “We don’t have better algorithms, just more data.” Collective intelligence is a special sauce of Web 2.0 and the future of computer thought, and when Apple locks user data on individual devices, it cuts itself off from this future. Instead of offering MobileMe as a separate addon, Apple should link all of its applications to the Web by default so that they can learn from other users.

Today we are witnessing a clash of paradigms. Perhaps, in scale, it is comparable to the era of the transition from symbolic to graphic interfaces on Mac and Windows. We leave the old era, when the device was the basis, and the network - the addition, and enter the new one, when the device with all its applications is fundamentally connected with the Internet operating system, providing positioning, voice and image recognition, participation in social networks and other key services.

And this journey is extremely entertaining!