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.

So I took the plunge and ordered and iPad and I swore me an oath in the blood of unborn swans that I would not, ever be a pain about it.

Sorry, swans.

Basically, look, here’s the thing: it’s bloody stupendous.For those of you who care, the OS is a slightly tweaked version of the iPhone OS, with an infinitely more fluid feel. The landscape format version of Mail looks like the one on your Mac, the portrait one has a dropdown inbox which is rather stylish. Games are hugely addictive. iBooks is great and Kindle for iPad is nicer than Kindle for Kindle. TV and movies are lovely. I find the keyboard perfectly acceptable; there’s a period of learning as you adjust to the smaller size and a slight oddness in hand position you need to adopt to let the pads of your fingers absorb the hardness of the screen. I’ve already written a thousand words of my next novel on it. Or you can use a remote keyboard if you can be bothered. This is something I can carry instead of a laptop and be okay most of the time.

Yes, there are problems, and no, they don’t really matter very much. What it adds is still vastly more impressive than what it cannot do, and as we know from experience with Apple, they tend to come along later and fix the things we whinge about. In this respect it is identical to my iPhone experience: everything you have heard which is bad is true up to a point, and all those things are simply eclipsed by the other things you have heard about which are better than you’ve been told.

From a writing perspective…

Well, as I say, I’ve already started using it for work. It’s interesting to me to be working on the paired down version of Pages (which works fine, by the way) because I’ve recently been using Scrivener and WriteRoom. The lack of whistles and bells doesn’t bug me – in fact it’s rather welcome. I don’t need software suggesting grammar modifications. I don’t want a multitude of fonts. I want a screen and a keyboard and somewhere they serve tea. The fact that the iPad doesn’t multitask (much) means I don’t either, and that’s all to the good. I actually rather prefer this version of Pages to the main one, which somehow honks me off because it always seems to be telling me I could be doing more with my life.

My evil masterplan: travel with a portable projector and a bluetooth keyboard and project my book twelve by nine onto my hotel room wall. Eat that, Minority Report!

Battery life? So far, so good, although I will confess first that I haven’t been using 3G – I wanted to try living without it, and I found that quite acceptable – and perhaps more relevant: I’m used to nurturing the battery of my iPhone, so I automatically switch the iPad over to Airplane Mode whenever I’m not using it. And why not?

More profoundly, the touchscreen thing is a powerful change to the way we work. It is physical in a way our interactions with data conventionally are not. I do quite want a stylus option, actually, but perhaps that will come. The sense of being able to point at stuff with your actual hand, move your finger and feel that you’re affecting the electronic world directly, is very pleasing and primal. The only frustration is that I want more. I want to be able to reach through the screen. I want to feel the depth, not just the surface. I want, basically, a TARDIS-like fishtank full of warm District 9 goo which will take my instructions. I want to be able to stammer out my story ideas and have them come back nicely typeset… but look, this will do in the mean time.

Verdict: this is a dinosaur killer. It takes a bite out of laptops and netbooks and looms menacingly over the Kindle. It doesn’t even stop to wipe its feet on Sony’s Reader, which is the e-reader device with the greatest market penetration in the UK – or, probably, was until last week. It sets the bar. Yes, there will be later versions. Yes, there will be competitors. Yes, it’s an Apple device, with all the lock-in attendant thereunto. Yes, it is a shiny, stylised bit of techno-nonsense which you do not really need because actually all anyone needs is a strip of green land to farm, a couple of goats and a supply of clean water.

But assuming that we’re not in Subsistenceville: this is a lifestyle device with teeth.

First blood: Apple…

I know that not everyone who reads this blog will know what happened a few days ago between Amazon and Macmillan, so I’ll just recap quickly. The rest of you can keep trying to work out what TGF stands for (hint: it’s not one of these).

Basically, the conversation went a bit like this:

Macmillan: Whoa! Dude! This new Apple thing is totally awesome! Hey, Amazon, we want to sell our books on their pricing model!

Amazon: [sulking] You can’t.

Mac: Well, uh, we want to.

Amazon: Not talking about it. Fingers in ears. Lalalala.

Mac: We really want to. Uh, dude? That’s how we’re doing it from now on, if you don’t mind. Because, you know, it preserves our business model and stuff?

Amazon: Fine. Be that way, you insensitive jerks.

And then Amazon did something which in retrospect was utterly insane. It must have looked like corporate hardball when they did it, and a month ago it would have been fine. They’ve had this kind of fight before occasionally, and it was fine. But things have changed.

Amazon pulled Macmillan’s books from sale. Not just digital ones; paper ones as well.

This time, it didn’t work out so well.

John Scalzi and Charlie Stross have written angrily and gorgeously about it – as Scalzi points out, the danger with pissing off a bunch of writers is that they will write about you, and they know how to make that hurt – and several sites have removed Amazon links from their pages. Overall, the whole thing has not been a publicity success for Amazon.

Now, I’ve always tried to preserve a balance, in linking to people’s books, between honouring the majors – Amazon, Waterstones, B&N and so on – and linking to small bookshops. There’s no getting around the fact that the big stores are useful and shift a lot of books, and they’re very welcome. That said, a good indie bookshop is a jewel. In the US, you can go to the Indiebound site and find one near you. Here in the UK, that hasn’t happened yet – although it’s coming – so I’ll continue to pimp small stores like Primrose Hill Books (who can order things so fast it’s actually very like dealing with Amazon, only you talk to a real human being and they’re nice to you) and Goldsboro Books, whose book club is one of the really awesome things which can happen to a writer. I will also mention Lutyens & Rubinstein, although their website has not reached the giddying heights to which it no doubt aspires…

About those acronyms; FTW is an internetz thing – it means ‘for the win’, or in more analogue language ‘is an excellent tool or strategy for achieving positive outcomes’. TGF is a little more earthy. One might even say it was obscene. Still no idea?

Well, coming back to my main point to finish, Amazon appear to have handed Macmillan – and Apple, of all things – a huge advertising and PR coup. Ouch. Not the only game in town any more.

TGF, man.