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…!