My first hand-on comparison between Nexus S and N900
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:date: 2011-09-29T18:12:08
:category: computer
:tags: android, review

I was for a year more or less happy owner of the Nokia N900. Then a week
or more ago, it suddenly stopped charging the phone. One day it was
running on battery although the cable was plugged in and in the evening
it just went down because the battery was completely depleted. I took
the phone to the shop only to find out that they will ask me over 1800
CZK (over $100) for the repair.

In this situation I started to think. I had some complaints about N900
already and I started to think about jumping the boat anyway. The
biggest one being that the hardware was apparently not powerful enough
to run applications I wanted to run. 256MB is just not enough for Python
applications (e.g., an excellent gpodder which I sorely miss now) not
mentioning Firefox (which is for many reasons *condition sine qua non*
for me). When I run these two together, whole machine changed into
something unbelievable. Of course, I was also worried about the future
of the platform, now when the mission of Nokia is to sacrifice itself on
the altar of saving Microsoft phone OS (or whole Microsoft?).

So, I have asked my contact person with my phone carrier and I was
offered subsidised Samsung Nexus S for around 4,000 CZK ($225). I have
agreed and week later I got it by mail. The first impression was great …
comparing to the N900’s brick-like design (and weight ;)), I got a slim
gorgeous curved beauty. Given my FLOSS fascism I was decided to put
CyanogenMod on it asap, which I managed to do in less than an hour or
two. Which given I had absolutely no knowledge about unlocking, rooting
etc. of phones (a witty remark about honest phones having nothing to
hide to be inserted here), and some troubles between udev and USB cable
seems like pretty decent time to me.

Whole phone and Android seem comparing with N900 like a finished
end-user product, comparing to sometimes hairy and hackish N900. There
are no obvious gaps in the basic applications (who in the world thought
that the Maemo calendar is supposed to be taken seriously?) and I was
nicely surprised that the lock-in to Google Apps could be avoided and
connecting to my own server (Zarafa 7.0.1 via Activesync) was completely
painless (switching to open protocols, i.e., IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV,
to be resolved later, but currently I have a working setup).

Also, Firefox on my phone works quite well and I can happily use it as
my default browser (so far, I am on Aurora, and contemplating switch to
Nightly).

So, that's a good part. Now for the bad. It is like going through the
beautiful meadows and from time to time fall into deep whole with mud
and other junk. I heard in the past couple of years many complaints
about Pulseaudio. Well, I have to say there are worse things than
Pulseaudio. For example, not having Pulseaudio at all, which is the case
with Android. So, suddenly instead of the integrated experience, I had
to learn about HFP and HSP, A2DP and similar magic (and see bugs like
`this one`_, or `another one`_; I am encouraged that these are most
likely duplicates, because apparently bug triage at the Android issue
tracker is even worse than in the Red Hat bugzilla ;)). So, now I have
to battle with silly applications like BTmono_ while with N900 whole
listening over BT headset Just Worked™ (needless to say, that free
BTmono is just a crippleware made to induce users to buy a better one;
those things didn’t happen with my Maemo repos either). And even BTmono
doesn’t work correctly, so when I listen to the podcast, I cannot
telephone.

Second thing where N900 is clearly better than Android is the core
function of the phone. Telepathy just rocks. Apparently Gingerbread made
a breakthrough and it integrates at least a SIP client, however,
surprisingly Google’s phone doesn’t include native support for Jingle
over GTalk. I won’t mention for friends of free software native support
for Skype at N900. Whenever I heard on some TWiT podcast how they
discussed whether it would be possible to add Skype application to
iPhone/Android/something I was amused because of course it was always
included and well integrated in my previous phone (it is just a bit in
the Maemo’s Addressbook which decides which protocol is used). The same
goes for instant messages, and after a year of using N900 you will have
a hard time to explain me why in the world I should I care about the
difference between ICQ messages, IRC, Jabber, or even SMS message.

The third sad story are FLOSS programs for Android. I thought that given
the huge number of users and developers working on Android the situation
should be same or better as on almost abandoned (or actually completely
abandoned) Maemo. And yet, it is not so. Relation between free software
and Android seems to me like a hopeless effort to reinvent the wheel.
Software repositories, packaging community, isue trackers are in the
Linux world all invented, working, and boring. I am not sure if I found
everything but it seems to me that the biggest free Android repository
f-droid_ is just a Wordpress blog. Feels embarrassing. There is no
community of package managers, no issue tracker, nothing. I guess
backtraces from the apps also go to nowhere, right?

Moreover, I have a deep suspicion about the quality of FLOSS apps for
Android. The second most important activity for me to do with my phone
(or even the most important one, measured by the time I spend with it)
is listening to podcasts. I know there are some paid-for apps which are
probably pretty good, there is Google Listen (which is non-free and even
more binding to the advertising agency, aka AA, ecosystem) which seems
to work pretty well, and there are … as far as I was able to find so far
two FLOSS apps (I don’t count `PonyExpress`_, because AFAIK it is just
one-producer tool; LazyWeb, can you suggest me other application?):
`SwallowCatcher`_ and `Car Cast`_. Testing of the second one was fast …
podcatcher which doesn’t support import of OPML file with my current
podcasts is out. So, now I have SwallowCatcher and I hate every moment I
have to deal with it. I have to be fair, this is quite obviously
pre-alpha release thing, so I shouldn’t be too harsh on its author, but
given it is the only app I found, it makes me really sad. Is it just
problem of the underlying libraries or the author’s problem it is not
able to restart interrupted download? Combined with the fact that
exactly during the download the app crashes constantly (so I have to try
download of one show three times on average)? And yes, my wi-fi
connection is quite crappy on my home network, but that’t probably just
because Nokia can do much better hardware than Samsung, which was
expected, and I won’t hold it against Android.

I understand that multitasking on Android is
broken\ :sup:`H`\ H\ :sup:`H`\ Hlimited, but playing of the long podcast
just to happen in background. When I send SwallowCatcher to background
(by pressing Home key) playback stops. Fortunately it stores the
downloaded files so that Google’s Music is able to find them, and that
works correctly, but I shouldn’t have to do it manually (e.g., gpodder
just doesn’t pretend and uses a system music player for the actual
playback).

Talking about an embarrassment, this post is way too long and I should
stop it, and it structure is awful. Oh well. I will rather send it out
now and not keep it in the Drafts folder anymore.

.. _`this one`:
    https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=7906
.. _`another one`:
    https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5527
.. _BTmono:
    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bedoig.BTmono
.. _f-droid:
    https://f-droid.org
.. _PonyExpress:
    https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.sixgun.ponyexpress
.. _SwallowCatcher:
    https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=com.webworxshop.swallowcatcher
.. _Car Cast:
    http://jadn.com/carcast/