Make yourself happy and avoid the Nexus One

In the end, there are two reasons I cannot recommend this phone:

1. The display is unreadable in sunlight. If you like the outdoors, like I do, this is a deal breaker. (If you're a vampire, read #2)
   
2. The buttons along the bottom of the Nexus One do not work. Or rather, do not work all the time, which is actually worse from a usability standpoint.

Regarding the first point, it is astounding to me that anyone would sell an electronic device that completely fails in sunlight. The sun remains the world's most important light source, and to make something that doesn't work in the sun is outrageously stupid. Only those who never leave a building should consider this phone, and that includes using it in your car. And I don't like to disrespect the sun on general principle.

(I can't help but wonder what this implies about the Google culture and possible vitamin D deficiencies there.)

As for the second point, well, the buttons gotta work. Every time you hit a button and it doesn't work, your expectations are blown, and you cause feelings of fear and anxiety in the user. They are small feelings. But they add up. Eventually, the user is all but flinching before touching a key. They look for ways to avoid touching the offending keys. This is usability 101. But you have to stab, cajole, pray, and otherwise beg the shitty Nexus One buttons to register a tap.Absolutely unacceptable. Apple has shown how to do great touch UI with an absolute bare minimum of buttons. The back|menu|home|search buttons on the Nexus One are worse than useless: they actually eroded myexperience to the point where I just don't want to use the phone anymore.

And since point 1 rules out all users except vampires, that means point 2 is going to mean Google has to deal with a lot of pissed off vampires. Maybe someone can get Stephanie Meyer to chronicle the inevitable vampire assault on Mountain View. In the meantime, I'm selling my Google stock.

I'm sorely tempted to eat the $45 restocking fee and return the thing, but I need an Android device for a business project (which doesn't rely on the display, luckily). So I'm gonna keep it, but I'm not gonna like it.

(For the record, there are three good things about the Nexus One: Google Voice, Live wallpaper, and strong syncing tools. And, to be honest, when you turn the brightness all the way up the indoor display is quite fetching.)

Idea: Sun Widgets with JavaME

You know, I think Java may have a chance on the desktop. Konfabulator is a very nice development model. But it's a resource hog (10-20MB per widget). And I don't think people really know how to use these widget systems, yet.

Let me comment on that second part first. Widget systems should help people shrink down the information flow into the major pieces (e.g. summaries), and shrink down the type of interaction you have with programs (constrain the interface). And when you do this you also get an opportunity to make it pretty. Widgets should reduce clutter, not add to it. Widgets should always elide information. And yet, it seems like people think that widgets are for gathering even more information onto their desktop, usually crap they don't need. Indeed, even Yahoo seems to promote that idea by distributing all manner of useless widgets (who needs a weather widget?!) I actually believe that widgets would be hugely appealing to developers looking to control and manage their running services (think a Tomcat widget that allows for graphical start, stop, monitor of the server and all contexts, with pretty lights and sound effects.)

Widgets are small in every way. They are tiny programs that offer a subset of the functionality of their larger cousins. They have graphics, and maybe some vague interaction with the local system. What does that sound like? Sounds like JavaME to me.

So this hypothetical "Sun Widgets" (or how about "Solar Flares") product would be a JavaME VM - basically a Smart Phone on your desktop. On first principles, the overhead would be very small. I don't know much about JavaME development, but it seems to fit. I heard that Sun is working with OpenLaszlo on making a JavaME renderer - if that's true then OL would be the natural way to write graphically intense widgets.

Google's Android would also be a good fit for a widget host, come to think of it. I haven't looked at their Desktop SDK but I bet there are likenesses to Android.

Well, if Sun wants to make a play for mobile and the desktop at the same time, I think this is a way to do it.