A few thoughts on the comparisons — I think I’m not adding much here that hasn’t already been written:

• The fit & finish of the hardware I like on the Nexus One a little better than on my iPhone — but you should take that with a grain of salt, since my iPhone is more than a year old.
• Nexus One is much faster than my 3G iPhone, which is getting slower and slower with higher latency all the time.
• The web is a much more legitimate first class citizen on Android than on the iPhone — should be no surprise. It’s just more integrated in dozens of ways. Not as totally web native as Palm, but still really good.
• Notifications on Android, and background processes that can fetch data and fire notifications, are much, much better than anything on iPhone. (Except for the inability to have app badges — seems like they should add those soon.)
• And I really like that there are indicator lights — the trackball and the charging light — on the Nexus One to tell you things without needing to unlock the phone.
• The virtual keyboard on Android has some good advances, but ultimately doesn’t enable the quick accuracy of the iPhone — I think the iPhone is messing with hit targets as you type, depending on the likelihood for each letter — and it helps tremendously.
• I’m no longer really worried about the lack of applications on Android — it seems very clear that everyone will start writing apps for both iPhone and Android as first tier platforms — but I am a little concerned about the quality of the app experience on Android — the apps just don’t feel like they’re put together nearly as well. It seems like they can access more of the operating system than iPhone apps can, so they should ultimately be more compelling, but the user experience just is very inconsistent at best, and really awful at worst. This is clearly due to the SDK for each OS — Apple’s SDK just seems to allow developers to put together applications that feel better overall. This is just one area where the battle feels a lot like we’re repeating history with an Apple platform versus a more open platform.
• Google Voice on the Nexus one is a fantastic experience. It’s very clear that traditional telephony is walking dead.

At the end of the day, though, my iPhone experience is just more intimate than my Android experience — it feels more like it has my life on it, while the Android just feels like a very good phone and mobile web device. It’s just easier to get more of what I care about — my pictures, my music, my movies, games I like, and all my books (via the Kindle app) on my iPhone. So it feels more like an integrated part of my life than the Android. As frustrated as I am with my current iPhone 3G because of battery life & sluggishness & general physical-falling-apart, I still feel better when I have it than an Android.

So I’m encouraged by the advances of Android & the Nexus One — and fully expect that the huge array of players in the ecosystem will push things forward more quickly now — ultimately, we as consumers really need a platform for our mobile lives that’s an alternative to Cupertino — not because of what Apple is per se, but because multiple choices means that everyone has to get better.

[disclosure: I'm on the board of directors of the non-profit Open Source Applications Foundation]

In a weird blast-from-the-past moment, TechCrunch reported yesterday that hot mail startup Xobni has licensed the IP from Zaplet (nee Firedrop, and most recently bought by MetricStream), a company we started from Reactivity nearly 10 years ago. TC has bits and pieces of the story, and gets most of the basics of the history right. Seems like both yesterday and an eternity ago when Mike Hanson and Brian Roddy and I were brainstorming about live HTML in e-mail and when Mike mocked up the first one — as we were searching for names, we started with Zimlet or Zaplet or Zammogram, among many other very bad names. Then Brian Axe took it and started to build a business case, recruited Dave Roberts, got some mad Firedrop namage & logo help from Gentry, and was away to the races. (And IIRC, the Reactivity Austin team of Lynn and Dave and others built the screenshots showing up on TC now.)

Anyway, it’s neat to see that another piece of Reactivity technology is still breathing — and hopefully will be put to good use at Xobni.

They’re running a funding drive now:

But this article is just a beautiful example of what’s possible. In the middle of a busy work day for me, I am undone.

1) i’ve been cool towards getting a first generation iPhone, not wanting my pants to catch on fire. that’s not fair, of course, as not every Rev A piece of Apple hardware catches on fire — it’s more like a 50% hit rate. but these commercials that i’m seeing every night on whatever it is that i’m watching — ESPN? FX? Comedy Central? I don’t know exactly, but i’m suspecting that maybe i’m precisely their target demographic. anyway, these commercials are fantastic. they show off user experience, they highlight UI innovation, and they really clearly, provocatively, show off the things that this phone can do. they’re amazing. i don’t care at all about the music & movies bit, but it’s still really compelling. anyway, i don’t know. i know i’m not willing to stand in line now, so that means an early one is out of the question, but maybe in the fall. we’ll see.

2) at starbucks this morning, probably half the people there were monkeying around with their blackberries/treos/windows mobile thingys. it felt to me like the weight had started to shift away from everyone bringing their laptops in towards working on mobile. it’s a bad sample set for a couple of reasons (1: it’s practically in the middle of the Googleplex, so nerd-friendly territory, and 2: morning time is “waiting for your meeting to show up by reading mail on your phone” time, at least for me & people like me), but still, feels like something is happening in the US now, in spite of our stupid, closed carrier system.

3) i have noticed that i really, really like it when other people are using wordpress for their blogs, because for every post, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of the comment stream. so if something interesting happens in a post, i can use what’s essentially a time-expiring single use feed to track the (often more interesting) comment threads. that’s a great use for feeds — throwaway sources of time-relevant information. they’re not like the other feeds that i track, but still really useful to throw into newsfire.

Anyway, fun book for letter & type nerds.

Flash is very strong; there’s no doubt of that — it’s on something like 95% of the Internet-connected computers in the world — and the success of YouTube & other video sites has really cemented its place on the Web. But it’s not open or standard — it’s owned by one company here on the left coast of the US — not such a different situation than Java was in a decade or so ago. And we all know how how that story played out (when’s the last time you ran a Java applet? Don’t know? Right.)

And so Microsoft looks around at what they’ve got, and their Studio.Net tools are one of their absolute strongest franchises. Combine that with the new religion that they’ve got about services (instead of software), and they start to think they need to build yet another proprietary platform to compete head on with Flash, but leveraging their tool set. They know ubiquity is important, so in their version of “ubiquity” they build for PC & Mac, for IE, Firefox & Safari. Which looks a lot like ubiquitous, but it actually isn’t, and that’s telling.

But here’s the mistake I think they’re making: they’re gunning at Flash alone, with their own proprietary, closed stack — Mix07 hype notwithstanding, they’re not going to get any real help from anyone outside of Redmond.

And so if they really believe that Flash is the #1 threat to them on the web (I mean, aside from those cute & cuddly googlers in Mountain View), and if they really believe that services are the bulk of their future business, then they should line up with the open web. Build tools that emit not some weird stuff for yet another balkanized browser plugin. (Ever tried Windows Media Player on a Mac?) But instead use their huge tools franchise to create apps for the Web, using standards like SVG & Canvas & DHTML & Javascript.

Then, suddenly, they’re on the side of the web, on the side of a billion Internet users, on the side of everybody who’s not Adobe. But I think they can’t see it because of their history, even with a new guy at the helm.

So now it’s Adobe v Microsoft v the Web. I don’t see how they can really win this one.

[As an aside, I think a ton of stuff that Adobe has done lately shows that they're thinking much further down this path than Microsoft is, and my hat's off to them for that.]

Anyway, fun book for letter & type nerds.

one small thing: i’ve gotten my bluetooth mouse & keyboard to work, but it wasn’t enabled by default. or, rather, i had to go into properties for each one after i set them up & let Vista know that i wanted my mouse to “use mouse capabilities”. sigh.

on the font stuff in my blog, the reason that it’s showing as significantly more readable in Firefox is that there’s a css setting called moz-opacity that’s set to 40%, but that’s not supported by Safari. matters less on Windows because the font backs up to be Lucida, instead of Futura, which is installed on Macs by default. need to figure out a different styling to make it work better on Safari, otherwise might need to go to dark text against a light background again.

but the phone is great. pondering iTV still.

Keeps track of all sorts of information — the particular view above shows my run totals week-by-week since the end of October, when we started. (One beef I have with the site is that it’s all in Flash — not web native.) You can see that some weeks I did better than others — like the week before Christmas, when things were pretty quiet around the office, as opposed to the week of Christmas, when Mom was here and Sam was a little under the weather.

What I find particularly useful, though, is goal setting. Here’s a goal that I set a couple of weeks ago, to run 75 miles in 4 weeks:

I’m behind a bit — because of the aforementioned Christmas week. I’ll catch up a bunch today, but with my trip to China coming up, I’m betting I’m not quite going to get this one done. It’s okay, though, as I find that the nike+ipod makes me want to run more, to run faster, to perform better. And my runs are getting longer & faster as a result, in measurable ways. (There is a funny counter-effect — the times when I forget to bring your ipod, I’m much less motivated to run hard or far, as I don’t get “credit” — Kathy’s noticed the same thing for her. A related effect, I think, is that I’ve been doing more running compared to lifting weights than previously — again, I think it’s the psychological issue of getting credit.) I also find myself, once I’ve set a goal (of, say 8 miles or a 10K), that even if I’m tired, I generally power through and finish. The other day I mis-entered a run of 2 miles longer than I wanted to run — but instead of stopping when I had intended, I took it as a challenge to run a little bit further.

Anyway, this is turning out to be an extremely useful & fulfilling thing for both Kathy & me. Makes me start thinking about what other parts of our lives will start/continue to be metered. (Kathy & I used something like this called a SportBrain a few years ago, but this is a lot lot better.)

That’s a graph that’s linked in one of the spreadsheets that I just created in Zoho Office. Seeing how useful sharing is. Think it’s pretty neat so far — this is one thing that I wish that Google office did.

so i’m finally getting around to cleaning up some old files that have been accumulating — just wondering what the hell to do with it all. for example, my eudora folder from 1997 – 2004 (roughly my Reactivity time) is 577 MB (with no attachments). sort of ridiculous. should i keep it around? delete it? i don’t know. it’s not like books & letters — doesn’t take all that much space & isn’t that heavy to carry around — but it’s not useful, for sure.

although, looking through the oldest file i could find in that bunch cracked me up — my brother’s resume from when he was in college and included: "Summer 1994   FRANK AND HENRY’S FAJITA HUT  Rockwall, TX". too funny. reminds me of so many ridiculous jobs i’ve had. fastfood cook at Quick Wok; ride operator at Jungle Jim’s Jamboree.

i guess the occassional humor value is maybe worth toting around gigabytes worth of stuff. (question to ponder: would i rather have all this stuff just archived at google forever & ever? quick response: ick. no. 2nd response: maybe. 3rd response: i’m not sure i care.)