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Yes, it is that time again.

I am once again lusting after a new gadget. This time, it's the Nexus One cell phone, by Google.

Don't get me wrong, I love my iPhone. It's the best phone, and the best mp3 player, and the best mobile web browser I've ever had. But that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. Every now and then I think, "I wish it would just do this one little thing in this slightly different way…"

When the Motorola Droid came out, I was tempted to take a close look at it — and in a sense I did — but our contract with AT&T still had around a year remaining, and I didn't see any need to pay early termination fees. The "droid" also has its own problems.

For starters, its bigger and heavier than an iPhone. While I might enjoy a slightly larger screen, the droid was also thicker. One of the things I love about the iPhone is that it doesn't add a lot of bulk to my pocket, or necessitate a belt clip/holster (like my Treo did). Getting a big, heavy phone to replace a small light one would go in the "con's" column, not the "pro's".

While I do sort of miss the hardware keyboard of my previous Treo and Blackberry phones, I get by just fine with the "soft" (touch-screen) keyboard in the iPhone. It's not perfect, and having seen some of the replacement keyboards available on Android OS (the operating system used by the Droid and the Nexus One), it could be better. But that said, I never find myself cursing the iPhone's soft keyboard. Well, I take that back. I curse it when it gets in the way. Especially in landscape view, the keyboard and system bar at the top combined take up somewhere around 75% of the screen, by my estimates. That leaves just enough room for 1-2 lines of text. So while it's nice to be able to use the landscape keyboard when writing text messages, it makes scrolling up to read previous messages a bit painful.

Multi-touch (pinch-to-zoom, for example) was also not available on the Droid until recently. Updates are still being sent out to users, so there are still some Droid phones in the wild without multi-touch. Going forward, I can't imagine a new touch screen smartphone that doesn't use multi-touch being successful.

I also feel like there are some things the iPhone could do better, but don't have much to compare them with on Android (that I know of). For example, Apple added "push" notifications to the iPhone, so that new email, facebook, etc, can all do immediate notification when something happens. That's great, but I don't want to get woken up at 3am because the latest Snow Thrower Enthusiast Newsletter is out. The only time I want the phone to make noise between 10pm and 6am is for phone calls. Is that too much to ask? Apparently.

There are other things that tick me off about the iPhone, too. The lack of Flash Player support is an often cited case of Apple seemingly arbitrarily blocking applications from the phone. The reasoning is not truly known to the public, but there is speculation that it's because Flash support would lead to applications developed in Flash and available on the web, where Apple wouldn't get a cut of any revenue the application developer earns. The why isn't terribly important, but what is important is the fact that nearly every other smartphone platform supports Flash, including the Nexus One.

Another example of functionality blocked from Apple's "Walled Garden" is Google Voice. And yes, it's true that Google has figured out a way to make it work via the web, but it's not the same experience you get from a native application. And in my opinion, what I'm paying for is the experience.

Of course, no list of complaints about the iPhone would be complete without a gripe or two about AT&T's service. Dropped calls are ridiculously frequent, and they'll be charging extra for tethering (connecting my phone to my laptop to get the laptop online when away from WiFi — like on the train), when in reality the only thing that I would get for the extra money is the right to tether. Data won't come any faster or be much different from just using the browser on the phone, it's just got a full size screen and keyboard. Essentially, charging for nothing. I don't know what the tethering situation is for the Nexus One, but it couldn't be worse than the iPhone. The Nexus One will be available on Verizon in "Spring 2010".

Of course, the Nexus One isn't perfect. I don't have the slightest idea why the Blackberry-style track-ball was included. Even Blackberry isn't using it any more — the latest Curve uses a small trackpad, and the Storm only has a touch-screen, like the iPhone. That said, the Nexus One is the most powerful phone on the market today, with the fastest processor you can find in a cell phone. It has an expandable memory slot that supports Micro-SD cards twice the size of my iPhone's hard drive. It has a better camera, an LED flash, and a 2nd microphone used to cancel out ambient noise from phone calls.

So far, when weighing my options, I'm leaning heavily toward switching to the Nexus One and Verizon when our AT&T contract is up in October. Maybe — if I'm lucky — they'll have a new model out by then without the ridiculous track ball.

There's a quote from a commencement speech by scientist and astronomer Carl Sagan (one of my many idols), just a hair on the outside of 7 months before his death in 1996 wherein he famously referred to the Earth as a "Pale Blue Dot", with a composite photograph taken by the space craft Voyager1 in 1990 from 3.7 billion (with a B!) miles away for context. From time to time I re-read this portion of his speech and every time it evokes some powerful emotion inside me. It still makes me feel tiny; and along with me, it makes my problems, and in a way, my joys, feel tiny too.

Tonight I ran across a youtube video that emulates something similar, but on a much grander scale. I dare not embed it here, because the size and quality wouldn't do it justice. Go watch the video here: The Known Universe by AMNH.

The first difference is that this is a simulation, of course. By the time we could send a video camera that far out (or close to it — I guess you probably can't send a video camera outside the known boundaries of space and time) and back, our world could have been created and lived out its entire existence several times over.

But the other thing that struck me was just how much more there is than I was even considering in the context of Sagan's remarks. So yeah, we're a bunch of mites on "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." But even that seems big when you think that the sunbeam in question is a tiny fraction of our galaxy — more than 100,000 light-years across, which is a tiny fraction of our universe — about a million light-years across, which is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of current known limitations of space and time (which I don't claim to even begin to understand!) — more than 13 billion light years away from us.

Ok, ok, 13 billion light years away from us is a long, long time. How long, really, though? That means that light we see coming from the farthest edges of space and time started its journey more than 13 billion "years" ago. I quoted "years" because in this scale, it seems silly to me to use a unit of measure somewhat arbitrarily defined by us dust-mote-dwellers.

So there you go. Happy Friday. You're tiny. Maybe your problems don't seem so significant now, eh?

We had an incredibly busy weekend. On Saturday, I took Megan to Simon Pearce for lunch (as part of her birthday gift, delayed for an available weekend & babysitter to coincide) and while we had the babysitter (thanks again, Susan and Ed!) we were originally going to go to Longwood Gardens, but the weather forecast was pretty crumby so we decided to see Star Trek instead. The weather ended up being gorgeous on Saturday, but we had already bought the movie tickets, so we were committed. We went to Longwood Gardens on Sunday — we took Dylan with us — and took about 600 pictures. For comparison, we averaged about 200 a day when we went to Ireland.

Obviously, it's going to take some time to go through the Longwood pictures and get them posted. In the meantime, here's my Star Trek review.

We didn't get off to a great start. I originally wanted to see it in IMAX (still wouldn't mind), but by the time we were ready to buy tickets, all of the shows we could make it to were sold out; so we saw it in a normal theater instead. On the way there, we realized that I had purchased tickets for the wrong date. I blame the fact that we were talking about different dates, showtimes, and theaters, and I just got a little confused when finally making the purchase; but luckily they were kind enough to exchange the tickets for us at the box office. We also arrived about 10 minutes before the movie would start, and by that time, the only rows with 2 seats available were on the floor, down in front. (Believe me, I looked closely. If there was a row we could ask to compress so that we didn't have to sit up front, I would have.)

Thankfully, once we got seated everything went smoothly — I don't think I could have taken much more frustration.

One of the issues that Trek fans have complained about with previous Star Trek movies was that the camera work was a little too calm and steady. Even through big fight sequences, the camera was just stationary or would move around, but it felt awkwardly calm. I think J.J. Abrams overcompensated for this complaint. In Star Trek 2009, (A terrible name, by the way, as it doesn't give us a great way to reference this movie instead of others, or differentiate from the various TV Series' by the same name.) nearly every scene uses ShakyCam(TM). It's like they made the camera operators walk on beds of hot coals, or put ants in their pants.

I like the camera to have a little movement to it as much as the next guy, but not so much that you can barely recognize who's on screen during a fight scene, let alone comprehend what they are actually doing. Overall, not a horrible crime, but definitely something I noticed early and often while watching.

I'm guessing I'm about to out myself as "not the biggest trekkie anywhere" but what the heck was up with Uhura's roommate at Star Fleet Academy? Green skin? That's it? She just looks like a human in green paint. If this was some sort of throwback reference that I just didn't get, then I'll allow it. Otherwise, it was an obvious point of "well, we hit our special effects budget but we need to do something to make her not human…"

Then there were a few plot holes. I don't think I'm giving too much away, since this is all in the first 10 minutes of the movie. (But hey, if you want to avoid any and all spoilers, skip this paragraph.) What the heck was Pike doing in Iowa? Why had he read Kirk's file just before the bar brawl? And why does he know or care about the aptitude test scores of someone who hasn't even applied to Star Fleet? I talked to my dad briefly yesterday about the movie as well, so I won't steal his gripes and instead I'll encourage him to post them in the comments (or perhaps a blog post of his own?). But all of these things are just small holes in an otherwise well written and entertaining movie. I'm not saying that they couldn't be explained, just that they aren't.

Oh, I just remembered something else, later in the movie… so spoiler avoiders? Don't read this paragraph either. Having now seen this movie, I have had memories of a few shared moments between Uhura and Spock on the original TV Series and movies popping up in my head. I never really noticed it at the time (maybe I was just too young?), but they definitely had something going on behind closed doors! You really get to see how their relationship started in this movie, which I thought was a great addition. It doesn't take much time to show and it adds so much to the movie and the entire series. Well done on that one!

Ok, we're back to being spoiler-free. I think they really opened the door for a whole new series of movies from the endpoint of this one to the beginning of the TV Series, and I would love to see them. The characters were likeable, and if the dialog and plot writing stay up to par, it could be a great addition to the franchise.

Overall, I give the movie two strong thumbs up. Definitely go see it, even if you have no history with Star Trek, as it stands fine on its own.