As far as the device itself goes, I’m extremely satisfied with it. The Android user interface is snappy on the Nexus One and the operating system itself is a huge improvement over Windows Mobile 6.5. But let’s not turn this into a review of the phone — that’s not really what I’ve been thinking about in terms of the Nexus One.

Last night I was reading an article posted on Wired about Google’s potential lessons learned from the Nexus One, and it made me think: OK, Google’s got this out the door, but what’s next?

And I guess that’s the point — I don’t think Google even really knows what’s next at this point. But there’s a few points of my own that I’d like include that Wired neglected to mention.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me though, is the speed at which wireless technology is coming at us. Google aimed quite high with the Nexus One, and the phone’s got some pretty killer hardware specs. But of course, the mainstream wireless providers have already come out with bigger and better hardware (like HTC Droid Incredible and HTC Evo). I think Google could have pushed the envelope a bit further with the Nexus One in terms of hardware, with a few simple upgrades like a forward-facing camera or more megapixels in the main camera.

I don’t care much about either feature — but it’s these small things that differentiate you from your competition. Otherwise, smartphones are pretty much all the same (and even all mobile operating systems are starting to look the same, especially with BlackBerry OS 6.0 around the corner).

So maybe I’m being a little hard on Google since I’m comparing phones that didn’t exist yet when the Nexus One launched to Google’s phone. But that’s my point, Google knew they’d be upstaged with new hardware — so setting the bar higher would’ve at least delayed the inevitable a little longer.

But once you’ve got that harder in the phone, then what? Well, to elaborate on Wired‘s second point, marketing really does matter. And not just some cheesy ad with people smiling and using your product, explain to me why your product is better (and in many ways, it is a great product, but no one knows unless you tell them).

And finally, my only really big complaint about the Nexus One — a lack of real corporate email support. To get all the security features and functionality you would expect from corporate email, you need to download TouchDown (a fantastic product by the way) for about twenty bucks.

Hey Google, ever think of just buying TouchDown and integrating it into Android?

Thinking back, my original decision to go with Windows Mobile was largely based on interoperability — I run Windows at home and at the office, and I wanted a phone that would work seamlessly with my work and home machines. Funny enough however, my Windows Mobile phone ended up having pretty much zero interaction with any of my machines, except occasionally moving some music from my home computer to my phone.

The services I did end up interacting with the most on my mobile were almost all Google services — I use Gmail, Google Maps and Google search by default, and ended up using pretty much nothing made my Microsoft (I access my work email through Outlook Web Access on my phone, since my firm doesn’t support non-BlackBerry mobile devices here in Canada).

I’m looking forward to the switch to Android, and I’m excited about the Nexus One. While a little pricey, I think it will be a substantial step up in user experience from my Windows Mobile 6.5 device (the HTC Diamond). I had also thought about waiting for the HTC Desire (mainly because of the integrated FM radio, which I use about once a year ), but after hearing that it wouldn’t work on 3G in North America, decided to just take the plunge and grab the Nexus One.

So while I’m off to the Android, I’m still curious to see where things are going to go with Microsoft’s foray into Windows Phone 7. I came across a post about Windows Phone 7 this morning on Slashgear, and while I have some deeper concerns about the upcoming mobile platform than the author does, I do agree wholeheartedly with the third bullet point at the bottom of his post, that Microsoft should:

Maximize the experience of product ownership. If owning a Windows PC is good, a Windows PC and Windows Phone should be better. Add in an Xbox and it should be an even better experience. And so on.

As I said earlier, this is what I had hoped for with a Microsoft-branded phone. And while I can certainly only speak for myself, I felt like I never really got what I was looking for with that experience. Now let’s see what Google and Android can do.

Microsoft has desperately needed to reinvent themselves in the mobile marketplace, and it looks like this may be exactly the sort of dramatic change they needed (and hopefully indicates the direction they’re heading in).

While I’m not crazy about the inability to install apps not sanctioned by Microsoft inside their Marketplace, the visual appeal and improved user experience of this new OS may still be enough to win some folks back to the Microsoft mobile platform.

Here’s a video from Engadget showcasing the Windows Phone 7 Series and some of its features.

Exactly the same thing I was.

It was then that I had a sudden realization about productivity: while technology may enhance our productivity when compared to how productive we used to be without (or with a ‘lesser’) technology, I seldom think about how little my productivity actually increases compared to others.

In the 1950s, Pancho Gonzales was one of the best tennis players in the world, and was known to have a particularly fast serve. At a 1951 tournament, officials decided to measure the players’ serves to see whose was the fastest — and Pancho Gonzales beat everybody with a speed of about 214 km/h.

Gonzales’ serve is certainly much faster than mine will ever be. But consider that Andy Roddick, the player who currently has the fastest serve in tennis, has the recorded fastest serve with a speed of 249.5 km/h. Tennis serves have gotten faster in the past 60 years.

Much like there’s more to productivity than technology, there’s more to being a great tennis player than just having a fast serve. But having a faster serve certainly doesn’t hurt.

But let’s go back to Pancho Gonzales for a second. If we could enter Gonzales into a present-day tennis tournament, his once-astounding 214 km/h serve wouldn’t be that far above the average speed of the first serve — around 185 km/h.

So as individual players have gotten faster, other players have had to get faster too, or else face getting left behind by their colleagues. But the speed of your serve is only one aspect of tennis, and as other players get better at hitting returns or improve the accuracy of their serves, that individual player has to get better at all those elements as well.

This kind of evolutionary arms race is similar to the Red Queen effect:

“For an evolutionary system, continuing development is needed just in order to maintain its fitness relative to the systems it is co-evolving with.”

And in terms of technology, we really are evolving one technology within a broader, complex web of other technologies, where continued evolution is necessary just to stay afloat within that broader system.

So while I may be able to read and respond to email while sitting in that train, if everybody else has the same ability, then I’m not really much ahead of where I was before. And if there were some new device that allowed you to send email while the subway was underground, would I be falling behind if I couldn’t do that as well (and yes, the amount of email you send is probably the worst measure of productivity )?

I’ll try to remember to bring a magazine next time I take the subway.

While there have been a few mixed reviews about the phone, I’m fairly confident that the robust hardware (a 1GHz processor and 448 MB of RAM) would be enough to keep me happy for a while (I seem to only be able to keep a phone for just under a year these days).

I’ve had a good run with the Diamond, and can’t really say that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with it (besides a few peeling edges on the casing, which probably has more to do with my rough handling of the phone than anything else). As usual, I’m just interested in having the latest and greatest… but I’m really debating whether I pick up this device or wait for Windows Mobile 7 (supposedly coming out sometime soon in 2010). I don’t imagine that HTC or Microsoft is going to provide any ROM-update ability to Windows Mobile 7.

If you’re interested in reading a review of the HD2, GSMArena’s got a pretty good summary of the pros and cons of the phone, as well as a good outline (as usual) of the features and specs of the HD2.

And just for the record, I’d still rather have one of these than the Nexus One. EDIT: If you’re already dying to get your hands on the ‘Google Phone’, first make sure you know what you’re getting. PC World’s got a bit of a different take on why the ‘Google Phone’ may not be everything the world had hoped for.

According to Ari Balogh, Yahoo’s CTO, “I can guarantee you there will be some acquisitions, and we will do some stuff in-house.” Yahoo’s also not doing so hot financially. According to the article:

Yahoo’s profits are down, as are most search companies in the current economy. Yahoo earned $118 million in the first quarter of 2009, a drop of 13% year over year with sales totaling $1.58 billion.

While the article points out that Google has overtaken Yahoo as the destination of choice for people conducting web searches, one and a half billion dollars of sales still gives Yahoo quite a bit of weight in the search arena, right?

I’m not sure how a presence in the social networking sphere is going to help Yahoo at this point. While it may lend Yahoo some credibility in terms of social networking, there doesn’t seem to really be a real plan as to how that social networking presence is going to translate into increased profitability.

According to DailyTech, “Yahoo feels that its high number of users gives it an edge in social networking and that it can swiftly launch and build out a social networking backbone with ‘tuck-ins’ of interesting products that are being developed by other firms.”

Admittedly, building a user base is a tough thing to do — but is Yahoo’s user base really going to be interested in social networking (I’m not saying they’re not, it just seems to be a fairly tenuous assumption)? Usually, when companies act with the intention of monetizing their user base instead of acting with the desire to provide a useful service (and as we all know, social networking sites are a dime a dozen), spectacular failures result.

Balogh goes further to say that “for how many incredible applications we could have and should have, for all the experience on Yahoo, we are terribly under-represented.”

That’s a pretty bold statement, when you’re essentially talking about vaporware — couldn’t any company say they are under-represented in terms of what they could have? Yahoo’s starting to come off as a bit desperate here — and looking to cash in on your user base with applications you could have starts to sound like a company that’s already reached its high water mark, rather than one who’s trying to build a social networking presence.

It’s not that FaceBook isn’t useful or doesn’t allow me to keep up with people — it’s actually been quite useful for that. I’ve reconnected with people that I would have never had the chance to meet up with again otherwise, which has been fun. It’s also fun to check out people’s pictures and connections and see who knows who.

My problem with FaceBook is that I can’t really keep up with the messages and notifications. A long time ago I just assigned all FaceBook messages a particular priority in my email (which essentially is ‘I will never actually look at this’). Instead, I occasionally log in to FaceBook to see if I have any messages — which I often do. I then have a ton of non-personal invites to things (like associations’ groups I belong to on FaceBook, don’t ask me why), which I try to ignore.

Mingled in with these are messages from actual people that I’d like to hear from. Unfortunately, there are sometimes actual, real, time-sensitive (think invitations to real things, not ‘association’ auto-invites) things that I’ve missed. I then sit around pondering why I have FaceBook at all if I’m never going to actually log in.

I suppose having a FaceBook account provides people I know with a reasonable expectation that I’ll log in regularly and check my messages. So I’m going to give this FaceBook thing another shot — I’m going to try to respond more regularly to FaceBook messages. And to anyone I’ve ever not responded to on FaceBook — it’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, I’m just terrible at actually logging in.

And if that doesn’t work, I may have to seriously consider just unFaceBooking.

One of the most interesting things about this demo is that the device she talks about is really just assembled from a bunch of technologies that already exist. It’s a good reminder that innovation and invention are not always the same thing, but are still sometimes tough to tell apart.

I was upgrading from the HTC Touch — and in many ways the Diamond is just a (very) upgraded HTC Diamond. There are quite a few improvements in Windows Mobile 6.1 as well (the Touch had 6.0), as well as some great new features on the Diamond that the Touch didn’t have (GPS is a nice touch, as is 4 gigs of internal storage, a much better browser etc.).

I always end up loading a bunch of games and DVD movie backups onto my phone to play or watch during those mandatory down-time moments (waiting at the doctor’s office, taking the bus, those kinds of things), and as I was loading up a copy of an old version of SimCity, I realized that this was the same version of the game that I once played on the PC about 10 years ago.

While the interface had been slightly adapted for Windows Mobile, the game was exactly the same as it had been on the PC (and yes, 10 years later, sending rioters through the streets of your SimCity is still just as fun). The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my mobile phone now did everything that my PC did 10 years ago, and a whole lot more (global positioning, Google Maps, taking photos, touch screen, to name just a few). Pretty amazing really.

Even while I had the HTC Touch, I still never really felt as if the interface and features could be defined as ‘mobile computing’. While I could send email, play some games, watch movies, listen to music and do a bunch of other things, the whole experience just felt clunky and awkward.

The Diamond just feels, well, different. The only persistent issue is with Microsoft Office applications — it’s still pretty tough to type out and format a document in Word in Windows Mobile. Maybe if I had the HTC Touch Pro (just a Diamond with a keyboard really), this would be easier?

I’m hoping Rogers will eventually include an extremely cutting edge Windows Mobile phone in its line-up like the HTC Max 4G — yes, I’m a big fan of HTC products, and no, they’re not paying me to promote their stuff. Rogers (as is the rest of the world), is still pretty focused on the iPhone however, so I don’t think Windows Mobile products are at the top of their list. But HTC, if you feel like sending me a 4G to try out, I’m all ears.