By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: December 16 2010 22:44 | Last updated: December 16 2010 22:44
Gingerbread man: the Nexus S is the first Android phone to have the 2.3 version of its operating system
William Gibson, the science fiction writer, could have been envisioning Google’s Mountain View headquarters when he said: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
The Googleplex is where a lot of the future is currently stacked up – from experiments with driverless cars to support for robots on the moon.
Google products have names inspired by sci-fi – the Nexus One phone using its Android operating system refers to the Nexus-6 androids in the film Blade Runner. A successor, the Nexus S, has just come out along with another piece of hardware – the CR-48 notebook, which sounds like a cross between R2-D2 and C-3PO, the robots in Star Wars. In fact, it stands for Chromium-48, an unstable isotope and an all too suitable name for a shaky prototype of its Chrome computing system, first announced in July last year.
Google has decided to distribute the future more evenly. Instead of concentrating on the bug-ridden and delayed product in its labs, it is offering 60,000 or so CR-48 notebooks to users in the US to help with its development.
Samsung Nexus S
Pros: Second-generation “Google phone” made to the company’s specification; light, vivid 4in screen; decent battery life; fast processor; good camera functions; first to feature improved Android Gingerbread operating system.
Cons: Pure Google phone, so lacks added layers and services offered by other handset makers and operators; handling of music, video, games inferior to iPhone.
..I gained a glimpse of what lies ahead with review units of the Nexus S and the CR-48 – and found that both contained intriguing possibilities.
The Nexus S is the first Android phone to have the 2.3 version of its operating system, codenamed Gingerbread. One new feature is support for near field communication technology: NFC can be used for contactless payments and exchanges of information such as sharing digital photos with a friend’s phone. Another use, previewed by the Nexus S in an app called Tags, allows users to hold their phones up to NFC-tagged objects and receive information from them such as text, pictures and links to websites.
Gingerbread also has a spiffier interface overall. Upgraded apps timed for its release include YouTube, which I found more responsive and fun to use than in my web browser. Settings for the 5Mp camera are more sophisticated and accessible, and there is better support for making internet calls and an improved on-screen keyboard experience.
Samsung Focus
Pros: Windows Phone 7 showcase smartphone; superb 4in Super Amoled screen; thin and light; excellent touch sensitivity; fast processor; enticing interface; HD video recording.
Cons: Limited number of apps; no Flash capability yet in Windows Phone 7.
..The Nexus S is made by Samsung – the original Nexus One was an HTC handset – and features the wonderful brightness of colours of its Super Amoled (active matrix organic light emitting diode) slightly curved 4in screen. It feels light for its size, has good battery life, excellent call quality and is very responsive with its fast 1Ghz processor. The Nexus S is on sale at Best Buy in the US ($529, $200 with a T-Mobile contract) and is available in Europe from Monday (free on a long-term contract, or for £550 without a contract, at Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy stores in the UK).
. . .
Like its predecessor, the Nexus S is “pure Google” – designed to Google’s specifications and as a showcase for its latest, greatest version of Android. It lacks the interface layers and features that handset makers and operators have added to Android on other handsets to make up for its shortcomings against the iPhone, which still handles music, video and games much better.
Apple iPhone 4
Pros: Retina screen has highest resolution of any smartphone; intuitive operating system with more than 200,000 apps; excellent music and gaming.
Cons: Browser not Flash-enabled; no capability to turn itself into a WiFi hotspot; screen looks small next to some Android rivals; still not available in white.
..This makes it hard to get excited about the Nexus S – it is an excellent smartphone, but it lacks a defining feature that would make it stand out from the growing Android crowd.
The same could be said of the CR-48 laptop – an ordinary black box of a notebook – but then it is meant to be a plain-looking machine for testing purposes only. However, the keyboard is one element of the design that is likely to appear in the two Chrome notebooks that Acer and Samsung are expected to launch in mid-2011.
The Caps Lock key has been replaced with a search magnifying glass and the usual F1, F2 etc function keys along the top instead are symbols representing brightness, volume and the forward, back, reload, full screen, next window functions associated with a browser. This is because the Chrome OS is modelled on Google’s Chrome browser, with the idea that the web can become the operating system and the browser its desktop interface.
CR-48 Chrome notebook
This prototype is being given to 60,000 testers in the US to iron out the kinks of Google’s ambitious project to move all our computing tasks from local PCs to the web.
Pros: Decluttered notebook, thanks to the web browser operating as the operating system; instant on and off functionality; cheap, low-powered machine that is long on battery life.
Cons: Abandonment of desktop concept is hard to adjust to; internet connectivity is essential; web alternatives to tasks done locally are incomplete; the Chrome OS struggles to deal with everyday peripherals such as printers and scanners.
..This took some getting used to. I kept wanting to minimise the browser to see a familiar desktop with program icons. Instead, my programs were web applications whose icons appeared on the otherwise blank page when I selected “New Tab” in the browser. Default programs included YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Scratchpad – for taking quick notes – and a couple of games, where I could hit the Full Screen button and play as if I was not inside a browser window.
Google’s argument is that we spend so much of our computing life inside browsers that we may as well float off into cloud computing land, where tasks from e-mail to word processing and editing photos can already be carried out. We will not need expensive computers and slow-loading operating systems because processing and storage can be handled in Google’s data centres. The CR-48 has long battery life with only a low-power Atom processor and a 16Gb flash drive for minimal storage.
However, printing, scanning, editing pictures and video, recording audio, accessing local files either failed to work, needed keystroke combinations or took much longer, and depended on the speed of my internet connection.
Such is the problem of dragging the future into the present – the web’s infrastructure and our own working habits are not equipped to deal with such a dramatic shift just yet, whereas a Blade Runner Nexus-6 android would probably cope very well.
chris.nuttall@ft.com
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