Nexus One: I’ve had one for a couple weeks

I can finally announce it publicly: I’ve had a Nexus One for the past couple weeks. While I played with it a bit, I never used it extensively, as I didn’t want to put my iPhone’s SIM card in it, and I didn’t have any other SIM cards lying around.

The Nexus One is a perfectly solid offering in this touchscreen-smartphone space. Its interaction and interface design are quite good. I love the Maps app, which essentially can operate just like an in-car turn-by-turn GPS navigation device, with the added benefit of Google Street View, so you can be quite positive your turning at the right spot.

I’m very interested in leaving Apple and AT&T, and the Nexus One could very much be that new phone for me. I am not really reliant on any non-standard iPhone apps, so the transition shouldn’t be too hard. But, at this point, I’m not ready to make the change, for two primary reasons:

  1. Podcasts. The thing I do most with my iPhone is listen to podcasts. And I’ve become quite reliant on the “2x” playback feature of podcasts. Google’s Listen app does not offer double-speed playback. I suppose I could turn my iPhone into an iPod touch and use the Nexus One for other things, but having two glass bricks on me at all times seems unnecessary.
  2. Desktop software configuration. Or rather, the lack of it. With Nexus One, you have to do all your configuration on the phone, or within various Google Apps. There is no iTunes equivalent for the Nexus One. I believe this is a huge mistake. Anyone owning a Nexus One is likely to own a computer with a USB port. Why not let me use my computer, with it’s bigger screen, easier text entry, etc, etc, to configure my Nexus One? I’ve said it many times – iTunes was the secret of iPod’s success, and is quite significant in iPhone’s success. Having to do everything on the Nexus One’s screen is a pain and it kind of angers me that Google hasn’t seen fit to release software to make the configuration easier. (If you’re not beholden to Apple/iTunes the way I am, this might not be an issue. Or, if you’re an extensive Google tool user (Gmail. Google Calendar, etc.), it might not end up mattering to you, as you can get all that information onto the Nexus One pretty easily.)

All that said, if I could get a $60/mo plan on T-Mobile for the NexusOne (which is what I currently play AT&T, as I’m grandfathered in with my first-gen iPhone), I would have to seriously consider the switch. However, it looks like the minimum price of the necessary T-Mobile plan is $80/mo, which is kind of a non-starter for me. I would even consider $70/mo with unlimited SMS and data.

I am happy that there is now a legitimate competitor to iPhone/AT&T, and one that is not beholden to a particular carrier. I hope this finally leads to some competition in the pricing of service plans.

Book Review: The Book of Basketball

When I was a kid, I wore glasses (and looked something like this (second photo)), and when I played sports, I wore goggles. And when we put up a basketball hoop in my backyard, my friends and I prentended to be the Lakers (local team), and because I wore goggles, I pretended to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (with skyhooks and everything). Which is a little strange for a 10-or-so year-old white kid of average height, but there you go. (Somewhere in my life I have an autographed photo of Kareem, sky-hooking over Wilt. It’s awesome.)

As a child, basketball was my favorite sport to watch. I drifted away from sports when I went to college (I in fact could get quite self-righteous about how professional sports is a tool for narcotizing masses). About 4 or so years ago, I got back into watching sports. I tried out football for a season, but it didn’t really take. Basketball has, and, for better or worse, I root for the Warriors (local team).

One of the sad truths of my current life is that I don’t believe any of my friends are basketball devotees. Football, yes, even baseball, but the graceful game is lost on my companions. So, I’ve turned to the internet to get my fix when it comes to basketball discourse, and as part of that, I’ve become quite a follower of Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy, whose columns are the most reliably funny writing since vintage Dave Barry. It turns out that while Simmons follows all sports (including, it seems hockey and even a little international soccer), basketball stokes his passion most, and his latest tome, the 700-page The Book of Basketball, is his love letter to the NBA.

Though I’ve finished the book, I’ll admit I read about 80 or so percent of it. It’s crammed with stuff, including exegeses on players and teams from so long ago that I had trouble caring. But the bulk of the book engages, is funny, and informative. You do have to look past his Boston homer-ism (and his strange antipathy for Kareem, even though as a kid, Simmons wanted to change his name to Jabaal Abdul-Simmons), his needless porn, stripper, and Vegas references, and his inscrutable support for Allen Iverson, a player who violates pretty much everyone of his tenets for great basketball, and ranks extremely high in his Pyramid (Simmons’ suggestion for a new Hall of Fame). If you do, you’ll learn a lot about basketball, it’s history (pre-ABA, during ABA, and post-merger with the ABA), what players and coaches themselves have said about one another, and why, when you study it closely enough, Russell is simply better than Wilt. You’ll also laugh, as Simmons is nothing if not funny.

There’s no way I can recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t love basketball. Those who do have likely already heard about it. I don’t know if it’s worth the full price, but if you do check it out from a library, be prepared to renew it at least once if you plan to get through it all.

Book review: CHRONIC CITY

I don’t know if it’s related to fatherhood, but in the past year I’ve read a lot more fiction than had been my habit. My two favorite novels from this past year are China Mieville’s The City and the City and Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City. (I only just realized I never reviewed The City and The City, and as it has been a while since I read it, I won’t do a full review here. Rooted in the hard-boiled detective genre, it’s a tantalizing mindfuck of a book, involving a pair of Eastern European cities that actually overlap, and where the populace conducts a consensual hallucination to ignore the other city (and if they break the spell, they’re taken away). This construct allows Mieville to pursue ideas on urban existence, many revolving around the idea of “unseeing”, an act that citydwellers unconsciously do everyday.)

Chronic City is also a mindfuck, though in a different way. Set in a parallel-universe Manhattan (the 9/11 bombings have been replaced by a mysterious gray fog; The New York Times publishes a war-free edition; every character has a strange, but awesome name), our guide and narrator (the book is mostly first-person) is Chase Insteadman, a former child actor engaged to a marooned astronaut. In the opening chapter he meets Perkus Tooth, an apartment-bound pot-smoking contrarian intellectual driven by conspiratorial thoughts at the fringes of pop culture, and gets caught up in Tooth’s associations, both human and cognitive.

I really enjoyed the book. Mostly, it’s a lot of fun. Lethem constructs a oompelling simulacrum of Manhattan, and teasing it out provides endless amusement. The mind-trip is well executed. And Lethem has evolved into a remarkable prose stylist, a master of metaphoric language, someone who can really paint with words in a way I haven’t read in a very long time.

If you like trippy fiction; if you’re a pop culture and literati junkie; if you already find Manhattan otherworldly, Chronic City is definitely worth a shot.