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.

Sometimes, when someone really doesn’t like your work, they can get a little carried away…

Getting your reviews is always weird. Rarely are you depicted as a human being doing a thing you do. Usually you’re something extreme: a genius, a confidence trickster, a reincarnation of Shakespeare, or a talentless hack to make an entire nation ashamed. And that’s fine. It’s the nature of the beast, and you take what comes, good and bad. The bad is usually more instructive, the good gives you a warm fuzzy.

Occasionally, however, someone so loathes what you’ve done that they feel the urge to behave as if you came into their house and peed on the carpet in front of their mom. And that is also, in its own way, fine. It’s weird and a bit alarming, but it’s sort of what happens and you roll with it. Controversy is good, you say. All comment is good. And that is true.

And very, very occasionally, someone does what some guy in the French press has done to me over the release of TGAW in France: they say something so cutting, so desperately unkind, that it somehow turns itself inside out and comes out quite nice.

The dude says:

this book is shit. It is total crap. It is so bad, the pages should be cut up and used for insulation in the houses of the poor, and when the poor are elevated to wealth and status and the houses are no longer necessary they should be burned and the ashes shot into the heart of the sun so that the earth is not contaminated with the badness of Nick Harkaway’s literary spewings! Harkaway himself should be tied to a stone the size of Manhattan and dropped from a great height into the pit of an active undersea volcano, there to dwell in adamantine chains and penal fire for daring to defy the gods with his shocking narrative incompetence!

It is distantly possible that I am being a bit free with my translation. But this is the burden of his song, the heart of his rede.

Which in and of itself is pretty solidly negative, and you have to admire the strength of feeling. And I was, I will confess to you, a mite saddened and contrite.

And then he says:

This book is so lousy, it is only slightly less lousy than the work of that titan of novelistic shit, that ghastly intellectual slime mold whose merest written utterance is so crusty and pustulant that it could infect you with cooties of badness if you so much as breath near a bookshop with stocks it, that louse of literature, his father! Oh, yes! It is only a wafer less rubbish than that!

Yes. I am so totally caned! I have been pwn3d! I am only a bit less bad than my father. I must go now and…

Wait…

I am less bad than he is? So, like, better?

Muuuhahahahaha.

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[Edit: It has been delicately suggested to me that I might point out that the reviews were, by and large, raves. Just so that no one gets the wrong idea in France. :) ]

I don’t review.

I’m bad at it, I think engaging with something as a reviewer is fundamentally different from engaging with it as a reader or a viewer, and in any case I never go and see anything until someone tells me I should. So. All that said, this is what I think of the new Sherlock Holmes movie…

Before we begin: there are spoilers here, sort of. I’m going to talk about the main plot, which as far as I’m concerned isn’t really a spoiler because it’s gaspingly obvious from the start what’s going on. I will avoid the good stuff, which is mostly incident-based.

Anyway, it’s really not bad at all. I don’t like the central premise – evil Satanist plots to take over the world – because there is absolutely no way, once you have chosen that route, that you can avoid the Hammer House of Horror problem. You will have a booby bird in a white dress writhing on a stone table, you will have silly robes and that shot from Amadeus where everyone’s wearing a mask, and you will end up with something which Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee might have been in, back when no one giggled at the line ” I do not drink…. wine.”

So right there, poor Mark Strong has a problem persuading me that he’s scary. He does a really good job with the villain, and I’m the bastard in the back row snorting into my popcorn and thinking that he looks like Draco Malfoy all grown up and still trying really hard to make the other kids think he’s badass. (As an aside: weirdest thing – I swear Draco was in my parents’ road the other day with a bunch of other young’uns, following a schoolbus-type effort which was stuck in the snow. My mother reports that he fell over on his face immediately after very politely wishing me good morning and being nice about my hat. There’s no justice in the world, if so; he was sweet and didn’t deserve to fall over, and worse yet I didn’t get a picture. Yes, yes, I am indeed that very bastard I mentioned earlier.)

The notional theme is respectable, of course – Conan Doyle was very into scientific investigation of the occult, and Holmes frequently encounters what appear to be ghostly goings-on in the course of his cases, and of course he debunks them and all is well – but I can’t help it: for me, it’s a no-no. So scratch that. I ignored the central plot when I could, which was most of the time.

Where this movie kicks six kinds of arse is the character of Holmes, which is, in the end, what it’s all about. This new Holmes is a powerfully familiar one with a less stilted way of being in the world. The old Holmes mentioned that he practised Asian methods of hand-to-hand combat, but never really showed them off, because gentlemen don’t make a spectacle of themselves. This one fights in the ring, half-pissed and sociopathically, coldly effective. He has dysfunctional relationships – well, that’s familiar, too – and an utter, smart-mouthed contempt for those with less intelligence than himself. He’s obsessive, manic-depressive, sexually rapacious yet chaste… (Irene Adler getting a new lease of life at last.) It somehow isn’t a brave new world, it’s the old one with surround sound. Robert Downey Jnr – superb choice, and for my money the only American who should ever be allowed to play Doctor Who. Well, maybe apart from Lawrence Fishburne. Or Lauren Bacall. Or… well, all right, never mind. By the way, can someone give me the number for Downey’s personal trainer? Holy cow…

And then to cap it all off, there’s Watson; long-suffering, at the top of his own field and handy in a fight, conventional to a fault, loyal unto death. The friendship sizzles with unresolved man-man attraction, brotherhood, and a struggle for dominance. Above all, it works. I believe in them both. Oh, and they’re funny together. Jude Law‘s dry, exasperated doctor is more than a sidekick, he’s a companion in adversity and a necessary other half. (Damn, that’s annoying; he’s a month younger than I am.)

And steampunk? Just a whiff. The ethos of wicked Lord Blackwood’s contraptions is decidedly modern-made-with-brass-tubes, and the Victorian London we meet is a place of experimentation and science. There’s a gorgeous shot of Tower Bridge mid-construction.

So – don’t be afraid. It’s much less silly than many of the other Sherlock Holmes movies which have been made, and I enjoyed it. Deliciously, the film sets up a sequel with Holmes’ arch-nemesis, Moriarty, at least tangentially involved in the action. Potentially fabulous if they can craft a sufficiently evil scheme and hold the line on the villain, whether it’s Moriarty himself or someone under him. Mycroft is also absent from this one – huge fun for someone, though Charles Grey is a hard act to follow in that regard. Since this flick did well at the box office, we might even get to see the next one. I’ll be booking seats early.