Yesterday, I nearly made my Nexus S walk the plank.

I had a little tiny pirate ship and some sharks and everything. I was debating whether to make the phone wear a blindfold or just push it in. By the time I’d finished the post, I calmed down a bit, located the Market app, and at least that much was right with the world. Although for some ungodly reason Amazon have coded their Android Kindle app to indent everything towards the right hand side of the page. Or maybe that’s just the formatting on the book I was trying it out with.

Lots of people, incidentally, wrote helpfully or wrathfully to correct my misinterpretations and blunders. So Android has some sort of constituency, at least.

My blunders:

1. The Market doesn’t work through the web browser, as I’d assumed when I couldn’t find a Market app. It works through a Market app, which I couldn’t find because it looks a great deal like all the other pre-installed apps and is called Market rather than App Market or what have you. Yes, you’re right, making this mistake requires the problem-solving abilities and attention span of an ADHD gadfly. Guess what the mental profile of a mobile phone user exploring a new gadget generally looks like?

More interestingly, using the web version of the Market doesn’t ring any alarm bells with the phone or the website. Do the same thing with Apple – well, you can’t. Links to iTunes open the app. Now, on the one hand that is oddly pleasing. I’m a big fan of not catering to absolute incompetence; one of my favourite places is Geysir in Iceland.

[Geysir, by Dieter Schweizer under GNU license.]

Note how there are no safety railings. If you’re stupid enough to stand in the way of the super-hot geothermal eruption, Iceland says you’re really not needed on this planet.

So not activating the Market app has my theoretical admiration. On the other hand, I’m just not sure it serves any purpose to make it that way, and for sure my life would have been easier and simpler if trying to use the website to get apps on the Nexus S woke the app. (Which is interesting in itself, because ‘easier’ and ‘simpler’ access to information and services is the Google credo.)

2. I searched for help in the ‘apps’ tab of the Google search page.

Oops. Doh.

However….

What I wasn’t wrong about was blaming Google for the tedious amount of time I spent in the Vodafone store. Google took a decision to sell the phone through conventional channels. The iPhone experience is simpler; you buy one, go home, and activate it online. Someone pointed out in the comments to the last post that you have to have iTunes installed. This is true. Since the phone is absolutely tied to the iTunes system that sort of went without saying for me, and I use iTunes already, so I don’t care, but I can see it’s potentially irksome. On the other hand, once that’s done, the experience becomes seamless.

The tethering discussion is interesting – I haven’t tried that yet. To the Googleville Express…!

In which your intrepid correspondent visits the land of Nexus S.

Some people talk about Android as being an iOS killer. I can only assume they are on heavy medication. Or Mars.

Let’s start at the beginning.

I got the Nexus S as a free upgrade to my work phone. (I can’t have multiple landlines in my house because when the house was last wired for telephony, Nixon was in power in the US and Britain was the land of Patrick Macnee. The giant gerbil turbines which generate electrical power for Harkaway Towers take up too much space in the cellar to allow for extra copper cables, and my internet connection is actually a special pneumatic-to-fiber-optic interface designed for me by John Percival Hackworth.) I was deeply divided about whether to bother with this, because unlike Stephen Fry, I do feel there is a physical and psychological limit to the number of gadgets I need at any one time. This limit is very high, but an additional smartphone which will communicate only fairly well with the rest of my gear is it.

However.

People talk about Android as a contender.

They speak of the Android Market in hushed tones as the free-spirited equivalent to Apple’s bowdlerised App Store. And it’s true, to a point: the App Store is somewhat shackled by Jobs’ no porn promise, with the weird result that many apps feature violence but no sex, and that downloading a 3rd party browser entails accepting a warning that there may be adult stuffz one them interweb thingies.

Yes, dude, we know.

Anyway, given that, and the forthcoming Android/Amazon tablets, I figured I should get to know Android a bit, and since it was free – except for my time – I should just go ahead and do it. (I usually use a Samsung Extreme with this account. It has an endless battery and can be mistreated in ways I have not yet thought of. It can be dropped, immersed, and will probably protect you from stabbings. It is a very, very boring, very, very solid handset. I am missing it already.)

First experience: sitting in the Vodafone store.

God, I remember this – I used to do it all the time, before Apple came along and rescued me. It’s like a nightmare. Nasty, uncomfortable chairs, slightly weird ‘deals’ regarding minutes, bloke in ill-fitting shirt trying to be helpful while behind me someone yells at his colleague because they were promised X by the guy on the phone and now they’re being told Y and blah blah blah.

40 minutes of my life on a free upgrade, and I have to walk out with not only the Nexus S itself, but a free, low end Nokia for which I have no use, which will cease to be free in two months unless I opt out, but I have to take it to get the upgrade. What? People, seriously?

40. Of. Your. Earth. Minutes. Compare and contrast with: walk into Apple Store. Ask for model & colour. Pay. Leave. Total elapsed time: 8 minutes?

Second experience: the Android Market looks like WHAT?

What’s that you say, Lassie? Old Man Harkaway has given himself a near-fatal eyestrain trying to read the words on the screen?! Oh, noes!

Is it just me, or is that a design which looks really nice on, er, a 27 inch desktop screen rather than a smartphone? Oh, wait, maybe this is the wrong Android Market? Or the wrong… I have no idea.

Third experience: “no Nexus S is associated with that account”

I was tempted to call this section “Appless in Seattle”, but not many people would get that joke any more, what with me being old and stuff, and also: I’m not in Seattle. So.

Downloading an app. From the Market. The thing which will, essentially, define whether or not the phone (which has a nice, clear speaker and decent reception, by the way) can blow the iPhone away with its massive Googleness.

Not like this, it won’t: no Nexus S is associated with that account. Dude, I am here, on a Nexus S, which has my googlemail account set up on it, and I cannot get so much as a Kindle free app…

Oh, I know: I’ll just Google the answer!

Fourth Experience: Nexus S on the go

“Download cancelled: cannot make a secure connection to the Market”.

Dude. I will tear you a new speakerhole. I really will. My old phone can be dropped onto concrete from my own headheight and it bounces back and calls me a weakling. Can you take that kind of pressure, you monstrous glossy plastic Windows-resembling snarky user-unfriendly bastard?

….

More news as and when we have it…

But my first reaction: this is not an iPhone Killer. It’s not even an iPhone Worrier. The prime directive of Google has been broken here: the Nexus S and its infrastructure do not make information easier to access. They do not improve the user experience. The soft aspects of the design are ghastly. I will, I suspect, get to the point of enjoying this phone’s features. But I am part author, part geek, and I love fiddling with tech at a non-scary level. Although I’ve been putting off configuring my wireless IR webcam for my daughter’s nursery because it’s clunky to set up. For the rest of the world, Android as it stands is not a serious competitor for Apple’s integrated media experience crown. It’s too much like hard work.

Science Fiction Causes Terrorism!!!

The splendid Cheryl Morgan pointed me in the direction of this rather curious piece in the Guardian. I somehow missed it, owing to the outbreak of royal weddings and actual news. However, I think it’s sufficiently weird to deserve comment.

The contention of the piece is that the name Al Qaeda is derived from the Arabic translation of the Isaac Asimov novel Foundation and that therefore the movement owes part of itself to SF. [There's also a side discussion about whether an organisation called Al Qaeda actually exists at all in the sense people use the term. My perception is that there is a distributed bank of knowledge and support, planning and inception, which functions a lot like a movie studio or occasionally like Kickstarter. If it's not called Al Qaeda, then everything I'm objecting to is weakened, but my objections are still relatively interesting points about the history of bin Ladenist thinking. See how that works out well for me either way? :)]

Granting that, while it sounds weird on the face of it, it may be partly true – after all, some members of the Red Army Faction supposedly derived their desire to blow things up from a curious reading of the Frankfurt School’s desire to explode the myth of capitalism and demonstrate the transience of material things, and various torture techniques at Guántanamo may owe some of their origins to a curious and gentle document about the First Earth Battalion in which soldiers would among other things have performed animal rescue missions – there’s a lot wrong with this picture.

In the first place, the justification for the attempt at genealogical analysis lies in the notion that Al Qaeda as a usage does not appear in Arabic political discourse until bin Laden began to create his organisation. It doesn’t seem impossible to me that he just had a moment of inspiration – whether or not he knew exactly what he was doing, he created one of the most 21st Century organisations yet; a viral terrorist meme. You don’t exactly join Al Qaeda, you just decide that you have – or the press assigns the label to you. Should we understand that this strategy was based on Ken MacLeod’s viral oath of citizenship in The Star Fraction? Or that MacLeod correctly analysed Al Qaeda’s structure in 1994-5 and put it in the book? Or is it more plausible that the growing discourse in distributed networks and the Six Degrees concept meshed with the cell system in common use among covert organisations and this was a concept which was ready to be instantiated around then and it happened all over the place?

Moreover, the analysis goes a certain distance and then stops. It looks to Asimov, but not past him. Bin Laden and other fundamentalist chiefs, we know, were influenced by Sayidd Qutb. As John Gray pointed out in Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern, Qutb himself was influenced by a hotchpotch of political and cultural experiences. Even a cursory examination of his writing points strongly towards a Marxian analysis of the world in which the evils of Capital are replaced by the evils of Godlessness, and Proletarian Revolution is replaced by Sharia, but there are also strands of revolutionary anarchism and half a dozen other sources including, of course, plenty of Islamic ones.

So Al Qaeda’s genesis was not only ancient but also modern, and owed much to ideas from western philosophical strands on which Asimov was also drawing. A well-educated, politically astute Russian-born Jewish American, Asimov swam in a sea of political discussion. He could not but be aware – even if he never actually read Adorno or Marcuse – of the work of the Frankfurt School, who were in residence at Columbia while he was teaching at BU. Certainly, his fiction is sociological and philosophical as much as it is technological. The notion of ‘psychohistory’ would seem to draw on Historical Materialism. Asimov was himself an exponent of the art of imaginative social re-envisioning.

In other words, it would be just as plausible to say that Asimov and bin Laden were working an overlapping conceptual framework and engaged in a project of designing the future. That there is some crossover, then, is not surprising but inevitable. To be a little softer, it’s hardly unlikely that bin Laden read Asimov and felt that Foundation chimed with what he was already thinking in some way. But until we see the annotated copy – as happened in the 90s with Stalin‘s copy of the Nihilistic writings of Nechayev – I think it’s a rather odd speculation.

That said, there’s another faintly obnoxious underlying notion here: that it’s surprising that SF should be an influence on someone who shapes the world – something bin Laden, surely, did achieve, however much one despises his method. But that contention is ridiculous. SF is among other things an attempt to look at the world we have and rework it in a given direction. It is the envisioning of the future or the alternative. Since mainstream literature is apparently defined by not looking forward – literary fiction and its fellows in the UK seem to be determined to avoid discussions of hard and soft technology, to the point of becoming a fiction of the recent-yet-curiously-extended-past, as if we’d never developed the cellphone or cracked the human genome – SF is the only place where possible futures are discussed. People trying to contemplate long-term projects of radical change will likely come to it, one way or another.