Google Nexus One - Chapter I, A story of books, mobiles and the trackball

Long long ago, in a far far away place, signed up for entry to the kingdom of online technology books . . .  .

Well, this is not a fairy tale . . . not even a story . .  . Its a narrative of my experience, so I'll narrate in first person and terms of todays world ;)

If you know informIt's safaribooksonline.com, you will agree it is one of the best resource for tech books online. For the uninitiated, check it out. I signed up for a individual account few years back, but till date I have never managed to read even one complete book there. I use it mostly for reference as and when required, but when I like a book I to the bookshop and buy that book.

Reason:
1. To read the books online I need to be in front of my laptop and online, that means I have a lot of distraction and many other things that I can do, like write on this blog or write some code ;)
2. Amongst many of my bad habits, I have an habit of lying in my bed and reading, and I can't imagine reading from my laptop in bed, I prefer smaller easier to handle things called Books!

So as a proud owner of iPod Touch, around a year back I tried to use m.safaribooksonline.com, the mobile version. To be very clear, I have been a iPhone developer, I love my iPod touch, I have all my songs on it, I have lots of audio books on it, I have games, I have a few applications, but somehow I could never adjust to browsing on it. The browser is good and all, but the experience of reading the book was never comfortable . . . I couldn't think of an exact reason then, but now I know!

1. Whenever I was lying in bed and reading a book on a browser it would change the layout from portrait to landscape to portrait with every movement of my hand or lying position . . . result being I had to lie down very straight with the iPod held steadily in one position... that takes away all the fun of reading in bed.
2. The touch and swipe scroll is good for use in applications and to quickly browse through but becomes difficult when reading books.
3. I was always scared of damaging the screen with rough usage while scrolling.

So, I stopped reading books on the iPod and used it exclusively for music and audio books. I tried using it for blogging, but that never worked out.

  Last night, I just thought of trying it out on my Nexus One and I have completed reading the half of Grails in Action (Yes, you would be right to expect a grails blog soon).

What was different reading on nexus one you might ask. So here are the reasons.

1. Clarity and sharpness of the test was higher.
2. I could set the browser to always stay in landscape mode and read comfortably moving the mobile as I want.
3. The most important and useful thing was the trackball. It made scrolling really really easy, and to all my blackberry loving friends I concede. "Trackball is really useful and cannot be replaced by any other touch/trackpad interaction".

I have been a Google fanboy always (except for a few times, like launch of Buzz and Wave API limitations) and in this case I will go all out and say, Nexus One can easily be the iPhone killer everyone has been talking about. The only thing wrong with it is it's selling model and availability (or lack of it) outside US.

I copied my songs library to my Nexus One too and I like the audio quality, it may not be exactly what iPod has but a close match, many of us, not very particular about the perfect sound quality will easily get adjusted to it. So I think my affair with the iPod might soon be over. Will gift that of to a friend or cousin who are music fan, my new gadget is Nexus One!

Bonus:
Major part of this blog was dictated on Nexus One. Part of this blog was types on my Nexus One. Part of this blog was written on my laptop and posted from my laptop.

And I also wanted to tell you about this cool Compas application from Synaptic and Metal Detector app, but I guess I'll save it for my next blog!