Everyone has quirks.  I have a ton of quirks.  (Do I ever… just ask John.)  The cats have quirks. (Merlin will purr while she bites you, and Percival likes to lick your feet when you have just gotten out of the shower.  Maybe he likes the taste of slightly soapy water?)

And a lot of my electronics and machines have quirks.

My (admittedly ancient) iPod will occasionally randomly wipe its entire hard drive.  So sometimes I will get into work, go to turn it on, and find that I have a completely empty MP3 player and no tunes to listen to as I code.

I always have to start IE twice on my work laptop before it will take.  99.9% of the time it encounters some kind of “fatal error” and crashes the first time that I try to start it.  I suspect that this is caused by the fact that I have about 6 different web browsers installed on my work computer (the better to test code with, my dear) and not all of the play well with each other.  However, out of all of them, IE is the only browser that has issues.

I always have to start iTunes twice on my home computer.  The first time I start it, it acts like it wants to go through the whole first-time-installed setup routine.  Which I always just cancel out of and double-click the shortcut again.  Whereupon it starts up like normal.

My HTC smartphone has a home screen display that shows the temperature and weather where I am (based presumably on GPS) and mostly this is Dayton.  Except for sometimes when the phone has a little spaz and decides to display the temperature and weather in Miami instead.  (Miami, Ohio?  Miami, Florida?  Who knows.)

The universal remote doesn’t always turn every component of the home entertainment center (TV, tuner, DVD player) on or off when it is supposed to.  (John says that this is because I have poor aim with the remote.)

But these are all just little things, and for the most part I just shrug and let them go.  I don’t think that any of them are indicative of a larger problem, and it just isn’t worth my time or effort to try and figure out how to make sure that all of the electronics in my life work the way that they are supposed to 100% of the time.

I suppose that I find it comforting that my electronics are just as quirky and imperfect as I am…

Does the Nexus One have a nice camera?  Yes, it does.  My current mobile (Pantech Duo) has a shitty camera.  Even the cheap clamshell phone that I had prior to this one took better pictures.

As one does when one (or at least me) has a new camera to play with I ran around taking a lot of photos.  The plants, the house, the cats… lots of photos of the cats.  Mostly because they can’t really complain about the paparazzi treatment, all they can do is ignore me or walk away.

Merlin sitting on my desk chair

Dogwood blossoms

Lilac

Merlin at the window

They aren’t great photos, but they are fun photos.

There are more at my flickr site.

Don’t think, however, that if I got a Nexus One that I would abandon the DSLR.  Because I wouldn’t.  But I probably would start to take and post more photos on a daily basis because the Nexus One makes it so easy and quick to do so.

So I have had the Nexus One for a few days and have played with it extensively.

The touch screen is very nice and quite sensitive.  There is a trackball underneath the screen for people who are anti-touchscreen, but I never needed to use it.  Actually the touchscreen was so  sensitive  that I occasionally accidentally selected things when I was only trying to “flick” the screen in order to scroll it.

There is some nice feedback  when you touch-select something one of the function buttons below the screen – a nice little buzz beneath your finger to let you know that you hit the target.

The screen does have multi-touch capability (standard now, I suppose) and you can use several fingers to pinch or spread whatever you are looking at to either shrink or expand it.

The touch screen keyboard which I was so concerned about (I felt that I would be much more comfortable with a physical keyboard, which is why I was looking initially at the Droid) was not a problem at all.  It took me less then five minutes to get used to it.  The predictive typing was also a nice feature, though it did take me a little while to get used to it.

The apps.  I liked the apps.  I could get very very used to using a lot of apps.  Some apps I especially liked (that I need to remember for when I get an app phone of my very own):

• FxCamera: All kinds of seriously cool camera filters that mimic classic polaroid, holga, and diana cameras and their effects
• Aldiko: eReader and access to all sorts of browsable/downloadable libraries of free and public domain books.  Free books!  That I can read on the phone!  Can it really get any better then that?
• ColorNote: It should not surprise anyone at all that I found an app for to-do lists
• flickr by pixelpipe: upload photos right from the phone to flickr

Honestly, my only complaint would be about the lifespan of the battery, which was woefully short.  I had to plug it in to recharge over night, and it needed to spend a long time during the day powering off of my laptop.  Of course, I was playing with it almost constantly, so I am not sure how loudly to complain about the limited battery life.

Oh, the screen… I also have a complaint about how the screen looks when you are out using the phone in bright sunlight.  Basically the glare reflected off of the shiny, shiny screen overwhelms everything and it is tough to see what you are doing.  This is not a unique problem… it is shared by pretty much everything with a screen (laptops, kindles, GameBoys, etc…) and the people who want to use them outdoors.

Verdict:  Yes, please!

Really, it has been a while since I got this excited about any kind of new tech gadget.  I looked at the iPhone and while I thought that it was really interesting, I didn’t feel any drive to go out and get one (of course, I also didn’t get a chance to play with one for several days either).  I liked the Kindle a lot (I did get to play with one of those for a few days) and I want a Kindle, and I know that I will get one eventually, but I never felt the urge to run out and grab one.  This phone?  I want to run out and get one.

I think that the Nexus One is a great multi-tasker, I think that the user experience is great, and that it is a very simple and intuititive device to use.  I think that I could use some of the camera apps to really invigorate my photography and that they will give me the opportunity (and excuse) to do a lot more of the playing around and exploring that I wouldn’t necessarily do with my DSLR, because the DSLR is so much more of a serious tool.  I think that if I had this phone I would never again need to look at a purse and think “but can I fit a book in it?”.

Do I really have to wait until my AT&T contract expires in late July?  I don’t know if I want to wait more then three more months.  If the penalty fee isn’t too high, I might look into breaking my contract early.