In the Android desktop shot of my Nexus One, you can see some cool Chinese written down the left side in a lovely glowing font. This is in fact the time written in Chinese, designed to be more aesthetic than practical. In order to do this I used three different components.

1. Minimal Text: A fantastic text widget that does some stuff like text-based clocks out of the box, but it’ll also accept locale variables.

2. SL4C and Python for Android: This is the actual script that generates the string of Chinese characters, writing it out as utf-8 to a file on the SD card.

3. Tasker: This fires every five minutes, runs the script and then reads two lines out of the file on SD card and loads them into variables. It then copies the variables to Locale variables.

The Tasker bit is a bit long winded but you can’t seem to write locale variables from SL4A. That said there’s a lot of possibilities to lash stuff up in Python and write things onto your Android screen in beautiful fonts. Note that the CJK font has been replaced with something much nicer than the Android stock font as I discussed in a previous post.

Incidentally the background is a live webcam of my back yard in the Dandenong ranges. The temperature display is from an external weather station and the light gadget toggles my wireless ‘infolights’, another project.

When I had a bit of a whinge about the font in the new Android Pleco beta (more on that in another post), Pleco’s Mike Love pointed out it was just the Android default font and asked if I thought to change it myself. Well, no, I didn’t. So I looked into it, found out it wasn’t that hard and switched the Chinese font on my phone to the Kaiti font from Windows. Here’s how…
First of all you’re going to need a rooted Android smartphone. No getting around this as far as I know. Once you have that, you just need to download an application called Type Fresh knocked up by Timothy Caraballo. It also wants another application for selecting font files called AndExplorer.

With these installed, next up we run Type Fresh and hit the backup fonts option. This will basically copy the Android fonts to /Fonts on your SD card. From here on all we need to do is select the font we want to change, in this case it’s DroidSansFallback.ttf, and select the new ttf file from our SD card. SIMKAI.TTF comes with Windows and is excellent if a little large. I’ll come back to the choice of font later.

There are some caveats here. If you are only replacing the DroidSansFallback font (which has the Chinese characters in it) then you are pretty safe. Your smartphone should always boot even if Android doesn’t like the font, which is sadly quite common. However if you change the DroidSans font, and the font doesn’t work, your handset isn’t going to boot. Obviously the right thing to do here is a Nandroid backup for such an eventuality.

Uses of custom ROMs like Cyanogen may find Fresh Face needs you to select ‘apply fonts’ several times before it works. I found it sometimes took up to four attempts. When it works, it’ll also talk about the need to reboot, offer to reboot but nothing happens. So I needed to do it manually.

On the choice of font, some may prefer a slightly thicker font because this action replaces the Chinese in SMS texts and they’re not as easy to read in the default SMS app. I find it fine though. Alternative SMS apps will allow you to bump up the font size also, which would be another solution. The other thing is the Windows SIMKAI font is 11MB. It’s entirely possible that a smaller font will work just as well. I found a couple of fonts that were suitable (typically all discussion around this comes from the old Windows Mobile where it was necessary to do this sort of thing to display Chinese at all) but Android didn’t like them.

Fortunately it just means you get little squares instead of Chinese so providing your phone isn’t set for a Chinese user interface, you can simply launch Fresh Face, change or restore the font and reboot. If you want to see what KaiTi looks like in Hanping and the Android Pleco beta, click through on the images for the full screen grabs.

The Chinese keyboard plug-in for Smartkeyboard Pro IME is almost as good as Google’s Pinyin IME so that’s what I’ve been using and that’s what TouchPal is going up against.

TouchPal’s motion touch, for want of a better phrase, is still deeply wonderful. The idea is that you are able to type capital letters with a quick gesture upwards starting from the letter you selected. If this seems familiar, it’s because Swype does it. TouchPal did it first. Even more usefully, you can flick down to select a symbol. Most useful symbols are on the standard full-qwerty keyboard. Not only that but there’s genuinely useful buttons to go to other pages such as a web tab which enables you to quickly whack on .com or whatever. Since Swype actually seemed to go from amazing to crap in just a few updates, I’ve gone back to the old style peck-and-predict keyboard but TouchPal is at the pinnacle of this sort of thing, particularly with ease of symbol typing.

There’s also a nice ‘edit’ button which enables cursors, copy and pasting (faster than long-press), deleting and so on and a button for voice input, something I don’t use but you always see people moaning about the lack of it on keyboards in the Marketplace comments. There’s a smiley button which is populated with stupid Japanese smileys so is pretty useless I found – it wasn’t apparent to me how to just add some normal smileys but you’d have to think you could?

The prediction is extremely good, not just for English words but word-ahead in English and for full Chinese sentences. All in all, it’s a very functional, very polished, extremely effective bi-lingual keyboard which has usurped Smartkeyboard Pro for me.

That said it’s not without issues. The standard behaviour is to hit space to accept prediction entries. If you want another entry and click on it, it wont put a space after it, you need to do that yourself. This is counter-intuitive after so many keyboards will insert space after you make a prediction choice. There’s some odd stuff going on with updating. I grabbed the current version from the Marketplace and then clicked on the software update inside the app, at which point it grabbed a new version. Why isn’t the one on the Marketplace the newest?

Furthermore the new version looked substantially different keyboard wise than the one I installed from the Market and not particularly better. I also find tapping keys at the bottom of the keyboard sometimes ends up with undesirable results, closing the keyboard, backing out of the app. One can only assume because I’m touching the soft-keys on the Nexus One. I can’t really say, only that it’s a problem I’ve only really had on TouchPal.

You have a choice of where to download add-ons from, the Android market (which as we’ve seen is not the latest version), CooTek direct or something called the Hiapk market. I imagine these choices are necessitated by the need of providing access outside of the Android market. Some add-ons can be downloaded including a Chinese handwriting IME. I gave this a spin and it’s hands down the best one I’ve ever seen, it recognised my hanzi perfectly, has excellent prediction and is all-round pretty fabulous. It’s faster for me to type pinyin being a laowai but I will still find it useful in a dictionary by sketching a word I don’t know. Something I had to use the rather diabolical Android Hanzi Recogniser to do (or rather more likely pull out my iPod and Pleco).

The tutorial is quite focused on Chinese, the user manual is entirely in Chinese. It seems to have lost some of the complex motion touch features that the IME used to have on WinMo but likely to make it more usable, and I think it kind of works. Given it’s free and it’s actually my favourite Android keyboard, it’s pretty good going really. The focus on Chinese is welcome for me but probably a bit of a mistake in terms of marketability. The keyboard is good enough to go head to head with the best on the Marketplace English keyboards but likely people will be put off by the Asian focus. Oh well.

Anyway, welcome back CooTek. I’s nice to see an old friend return and that they’re still in excellent health.

First of all, Google has been updating their default Android English/European keyboard and the Chinese pinyin keyboard. Google pinyin has a button to fast switch to English but there’s no way of getting back. Fortunately Smart Keyboard Pro added Chinese recently. This has a simple iPhone-like button to switch between any languages you have enabled. Finally we have a one-button switch between English and Chinese.

The English keyboard is very good, at least as good as Android’s default keyboard although you may need to get in and change some settings like getting auto capitalisation and training full stops/spaces to work etc. The Chinese keyboard seemed as competent as Google pinyin although of course it doesn’t have the sync to cloud stuff.

Mark Carter, the guy behind the Hanping dictionary on Android, prompted me to take a fresh look at the handwriting IMEs. Now I don’t think these sorts of IMEs are useful for non-native speakers, as a rule, because we tend not to be super fast at sketching hanzi and quite experienced with pinyin.

However one app really surprised me, gPen. It’s available in traditional and simplified variants. When you run it you get a large qwerty keyboard with an animated advert on the top. Oh oh! And it makes horrific tones out of the box, so you hit the settings and they’re all in Chinese which is going to prove problematic for some.

However… once I turned the tones off and dialled up the time I had to write a character (increased the delay allowable before the IME goes with what I’ve written), I found it very good! What you do is sketch on top of the qwerty keyboard, it’s genius really. So you can tap out stuff in English if you want, or sketch out characters.

At first I was painstakingly drawing characters with limited success but later on I just scribbled them and it seemed to work better somehow, not sure why that is. It looks like it’s stroke order sensitive, which is fine if you’ve been religious about stroke order when you learned characters like I have been. Maybe that’s the extra information it needs to work so well even on messy scribbles?

Now I’m not sure I’d actually use gPen much because I find the Smart Keyboard Pro option much more useful for me. However the IME is so good that it’s absolutely useful in terms of sketching a character you don’t know into a dictionary.

It may also be worth mentioning an app called Hanzi Recognizer. This is a standalone full screen app which allows you to sketch out a character and get a list of candidates and CE-DICT entries for them. It’s free so I suppose I should try be nice, but it’s hard having been spoiled by Pleco’s recognizer. You need to finish writing something and then hit recognize. It also seems to put odd stroke labels on what you’re sketching, as if you’re certain about those on a character you don’t know… still anyway, it seems useful in light of no other Android apps like this.

I’ve tried out all the ones that are available: Swype, Shape Writer and SlideIT. The latter two can be simply downloaded from the Android Marketplace right now for free. Swype needs you to head to their site and sign up to the beta, at which point you can download an app which itself requires you to log in to your beta account on your phone, download the Swype keyboard and installs it. They had a bit of trouble with the various ROM cookers slapping Swype in their ROMs so they seem to have gone all medieval on their ass which is kind of understandable.

I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty that Swype is the best of the bunch. That’s not to say Shape Writer and SlideIT are bad, they’re both way better than using a tappity-tap qwerty keyboard but they are certainly less polished. The keyboard graphics are a bit on the naff side, or even weirdly blurrily resized, and ultimately they’re let down a little by deficiencies in being able to accurately and quickly deal with punctuation and capitalisation – as well as generally being more temperamental in getting the right word.  Ordinarily I’d say go download one of those since it’s just a tap in the marketplace, but I’m confident enough that anyone will love the input system enough – you may as well go and sign up for Swype and get a copy of that.

Eventually they’re going to charge, one presumes, and I really have no problem with that idea at all. I’ve paid for things which have given me a lot less utility than Swype has. I mean… I actually reply to fairly complicated emails in a reasonable length, with one hand while walking back to Melbourne Central from UniMelb… which is quite a way removed from what was possible with the old tappity-tap keyboards.

In other pretty exciting news, a chap I know on Google Buzz has just today kicked out a beta of his Han Writing app, a Chinese/Japanese/Korean/English handwriting IME. It’s kind of bewildering, very advanced stuff. Essentially you can draw squigs that look a bit like cursive Asian script and it will pick them up. Obviously this is most of use to people who are more at home squigging Asian characters than they are using a qwerty keyboard. This, sadly, is not me by any stretch. However if you’ve any interest in this sort of stuff you should definately search for Han Writing on the Marketplace and give it a spin. It’s impressive work.

Which brings me full circle to the area that most affects me with keyboards on Android and that is how to efficiently handle multi-lingual input. I type a lot more English than Chinese, but I type enough Chinese, and typically embedded within English, that it’s actually quite irritating the process of switching keyboards with the long-press system. Han Writing is quite interesting in this regard because it offers a qwerty tappity-tap keyboard mode where you can type pinyin and Chinese characters will appear for you to tap. Unfortunately at present the qwerty mode is really pretty basic for English, so it’s not really a solution, but it highlights this niche.

What I want is this: I want Swype to be able to process pinyin. I’ve thought about this a bit and I think it’s probably unreasonable to have Swype just operate in a mixed mode Chinese/English because lots of the pinyin is going to look like some sort of English. It would be better to have a simple mode button you press to switch. At which point the keyboard only looks at the very limited set of pinyin phonetics. Obviously the way prediction works with pinyin keyboards is slightly different, we break things down into words rather than individual characters. Since there’s like a bazillion different “shi” individual characters but not that many “shishi” ones.

If one restricts to writing actual words, the point you lift off sends a confirmation just like English. So when you squig out jingchang and lift off, pretty much it’s clear you mean 经常 and that should appear. I was also wondering about a further idea, taken from the way that Swype handles capitalisation. You can perform an additional gesture by scramming a finger to the top of the screen to indicate a capital. I wonder if you couldn’t add four gestures, maybe even the corners of the keyboard, to indicate a tone.

I have the sense that this wouldn’t be necessary a lot of the time, but sometimes it would make the difference between needing to select a character from a pop up list or inserting the correct one right off the bat. Particularly for, say, single character verbs and the like. Of course this is pipe dream stuff, it seems the IME guys working on English and the IME guys working on Asian languages are very distinctly different people. The only mixed-mode keyboards I’ve seen so far are the Chinese guys who often put in a sort of barely functional English keyboard. Interestingly the developers of the Android Sogou replied to me a couple of days ago about a list of suggestions to fix their English keyboard. Some four months after I sent them the email. I think that sort of thing summarises the priority this area is getting from people in either camp.

Unfortunately you can’t actually use it… That’s because if you try and draw it will just scroll the browser window around. Which is something so obvious you would have thought they’d have inserted some sort of UI control to stop this from happening. If they have, I haven’t found it.  Presumably this is an easy fix though. The only thing that’s now required is for the Skritter guys to craft a mobile web page with an appropriate sized flash app, probably the text will need to go on the top or the bottom rather than on the side like the current desktop version.

Still, the holy grail of mobile hanzi cramming might just be upon us. Sometimes I don’t even care if I’m getting old.

I still long for Android to grow some mechanism to switch IMEs quickly rather than the protracted long-press pop-up box, or for the Google China guys to add English word prediction from the regular Android keyboard in which case I wouldn’t even need to switch (presently if you switch it to English you don’t get prediction which makes it slower for typing English).

It’s kind of curious that it’s grown a massive array of built in smileys too. Which is a little annoying because I quite liked the way the simple regular smiley was just a simple button on the front page rather than needing to go to the smiley page… Still, this seems to be a theme in Chinese software. Spend any time in any Chinese chat room and you’ll see a massive variety of smiley graphics and custom images, often a lot more than any actual Chinese.

I’m particularly on the look out for a good IME which can be used for English as well because the IME switching process on Android (long press and select from box) is laborious to switch between languages.

Sogou

Mirroring the PC IME, SoGou is a pretty advanced context sensitive pinyin IME. Installing is a breeze (just remember to go into your phone settings and language/keyboard and tick the box next to any new IMEs you have installed) and as is normal on Android, a settings entry appears under the enable/disable tickbox when you’ve installed it. The first thing you’ll want to do is go in and turn off the stupid keyboard sounds, no really who actually wants that crap?

The IME has two keyboard layouts, a phone-like grouped letter/key arrangement which like most of these keyboards relies on being context sensitive to figure out what you mean. For pinyin that means it can be horrific when there’s ambiguity requiring you to clarify what character you meant first up but the upside of these sort of keyboards is that they’re very easy to click – which is kind of important on capacitive touch-screen devices like android phones where it’s very easy to press a wrong key on a QWERTY layout in portrait. SouGou allows you to select which layout you want to use with the phone in portrait and landscape modes, usefully defaulting to the phone pad layout in portrait and QWERTY in landscape. Right away the first drawback I saw is that on the high resolution display of the Nexus One, the phone pad layout has blurry text, the UI has obviously been upscaled to work on these displays but it hasn’t been specifically worked to look nice.

I couldn’t really fault the pinyin IME, although it failed to pick up a couple of chengyu I typed in. The criticism about blurry fonts on the phone pad layout doesn’t apply in any way to the hanzi themselves, these are rendered just peachy and very clear on the N1. Switching between English and Chinese is very easy. In English I found that I had to go into the settings and enable auto capitalisation which is off by default. Unfortunately the auto space is brain dead and wont get rid of a space it’s inserted after a word if you press full-stop. That’s pretty annoying and also the predictive text doesn’t seem to be sorted in terms of likelihood for English, meaning that things you should just be able to hit space (to accept) need you to select the third word on the list of choices for example.

For English there’s no auto spelling correction and not even suggestions with apostrophes. No, sadly you’d switch back to the regular excellent Android keyboard for English. However as a Chinese IME SoGou is great. It’s also the only Chinese IME that does predictive text in English and maybe for some people it would be good enough to stick with it permanently. Not for me though.

Google Pinyin IME

This uses a regular Android-style QWERTY keyboard. The hanzi bar that appears when typing pinyin is much bigger than SoGou and therefore easier to read and easier to click. This is a serious thumbs up for Chinese student like me. The way the prediction works is very intuitive also. I began typing out a phrase but selected part of it earlier to try reset the prediction, it carried on 100% correct but then buggered the last character. It’s obvious what you press on screen to select a number of characters which are correct so you can scoot to the last character and see a list of options. I really like it.

There are no other keyboard layouts so if you think QWERTY in portrait is too cramped then it’s possibly not ideal. That said the layout it does use makes maximum use of space without any extraneous punctuation marks or the like also in the layout, I find it pretty easy to type on in portrait. Like SoGou you can connect up to the cloud and sync your dictionary.

The drawback is that there’s no predictive text for English mode. With punctuation, even comma and full-stop, being on a shift page even in landscape mode (same minimalist keyboard layout is used), it’s really a bit of a pain to type decent English using the Google pinyin IME. Again you’d switch to the default Android keyboard.

Easy Finger Chinese (逸指拼音输入法)

This was brand new at time of writing. I’m struggling to see why the author bothered. It’s substantially worse than I could have possibly anticipated. It’s a standard small Android QWERTY keyboard. It fails to pick up on just about any sort of phrase I typed in making it effectively one character at a time. The settings are entirely in Chinese, ignoring the location settings on the phone. There’s no predictive text or anything like that for English. Bizarrely this is also the only paid app in the roundup. It’s not a patch on Sogou or Google.

It’s entirely possible I’m missing something here but at any rate it doesn’t seem to be useful for a student of Chinese.

91 (91拼音输入法）

Just plain broken, force closes repeatedly and makes immediate uninstall necessary. Ouch.

Conclusion

So far switching between the regular Android keyboard for English and Google Pinyin IME for Chinese is the best option out there. Sougou is perfectly decent but I find the largest Chinese of Google’s IME the dealbreaker over all. There are a number of other IMEs related to other input mechanisms but I figure those are only really of interest to people who live in China, Taiwan etc. Really all I need to be very happy with the state of things on Android is a utility which will do a quick switch between the Android keyboard and Google Pinyin…

Much of this has changed with the introduction of Google’s own handset, the Nexus One. First off it’s got a display that leaves the Touch HD in the dirt. The same 800 x 480 resolution but a magnificently sharp OLED display which is simply a joy to behold. Secondly the rest of the specs are pretty knock out including the 1GHz snapdragon chipset. Software wise the fact it’s a Google phone also solved another emerging issue I was tracking with Android handsets, that of old revisions of the OS due to OEMs being quite slow to update their legacy handsets. Clearly that’s not a problem with the Nexus One, it ships with the latest Android 2.1 and you can be damn sure it will be on the vanguard of Android releases.

So what is the Nexus One like if you’re interested in Chinese?

There’s really several ways you’d look at a Nexus One depending on what you’re familiar with. I think this is important enough that I’ll make a list:

1. Previous Windows Mobile handset owner: You will be blown away. The speed, functionality and of course having a simple fast and well-stocked market place will be a revelation. If you’re a Google services aficionado then you will find the Nexus One is a borderline religious experience.
2. iPhone owner: Having a nicely polished decently performing handset isn’t new to you. You’d notice the incredible screen on the Android and probably how customizable the nuts and bolts of the software is, such as how your home pages look with the addition of live backgrounds, custom ‘gadgets’ and so on. You’d also notice multi-tasking depending on what sort of person you are. If you’re someone who likes to run background clients doing things like IRC chat for example, you’ll find this a huge improvement. Many/most iPhone users would probably lament the relative lack of games on the Android platform however.
3. Previous Android handset owner: You’d be familiar with Android and so that really only leaves the speed and the screen resolution to impress you. The additions to recent Android OS revisions might not be a revelation, but if you’re stuck on a much older revision you might get jealous of Google’s latest fancy apps like ‘Googles’ and so on.

For me the Google services (and Facebook) integration is absolutely awesome. I found it easy enough to consolidate my Google contacts with my Facebook ones, fully populating my contacts list without referring to my old phone. Each contact has a Facebook profile piccy on it too, which is fantastic. Everything seems to connect well, Calendar, synced contacts with email and so on. The push email seems to be instant and I really enjoy the Android gmail client in exactly the way I didn’t enjoy having to use a web interface on WinMo.

Obviously the phone is a fully finger-powered unit unlike WinMo, that too is seriously magnificent for me. I was ecstatic to be able to simply download the Google pinyin IME off the market place and be greeted with a very high quality very easy to read Chinese IME system. The little track ball makes it fantastic just to scoot back and forth editing sentences too, which is something that’s a pain in inaccurate touch-screen devices normally, requiring you to often use touch cursors. Chinese apps on the Android Marketplace aren’t anywhere near as prevalent as the iPhone. So I would say that really the Nexus One is a great phone to use if you want to use it as a communication device that can do Chinese, but really if you want high quality Chinese apps you want an iPhone or an iPod.

That might deserve some clarification since the situation is quickly changing. The Apple App Store has a truly vast number of Chinese language reference/education applications. It is, however, hampered by diabolical search and much of them are pay-jobs and if you buy, that’s it. The Android Marketplace by contrast has less applications at present by some margin, however they are easier to find, ratings are more prevalent and even if it’s a paid app you can download and install and simply uninstall it if you don’t like it and get a refund. That’s really important. I spent a lot of money on a whole load of absolutely terrible iPhone apps. No more!

That includes the more expensive apps like the Chinese Collins Dictionary. Download it, try it and if you uninstall within a day you aren’t charged for it. Overall though there’s definately more and better dictionaries, flash card apps and character drawing/learning applications on the App Store than Android Marketplace and that’s before you consider the alpha and the omega of Chinese apps, Pleco. Pleco wont be Android because the author Mike Love is wedded to C and Android is Java. I can understand his point alright but still take the opportunity to give him a hard time on the Pleco forums

The Android is getting better as the marketplace is really picking up developers quickly particularly since you don’t need a Mac to make an app, and is is already easier to find good Chinese applications, but until Pleco arrives on Android all Chinese students pretty much require an iPod at the very least. At least in my view. On the other hand a fully loaded Pleco with dictionaries etc is kind of expensive and add an iPod as well… if you want to do stuff on the cheap… there might be an argument for Nexus One only. I’d have said iPhone but I think you’ll end up spending more money on bad apps before you find the good ones…

I can, I think, officially cross WinMo off any list of desirability because Pleco is now on iPhone/iPod and will shortly gain flashcard support making it functionally equivalent of the WinMo version. At present I’m carrying around a HTC Touch HD as an expensive PDA (radios turned off), just to run Pleco. I plan to migrate my use to the iPhone/iPod version when that’s up to speed. I don’t think it is by any means a showstopper to have a separate device to run something like Pleco if you’re learning Chinese. On the contrary I find it quite useful to be writing, for example, an email in Chinese and have Pleco open so I can check dictionary results etc.

Curiously one great app on WinMo, CooTek’s TouchPal the seriously awesome software keyboard with Chinese support, has been a non-starter on Android despite a lot of noise promising an Android version. The app appeared on the store for awhile, now it’s gone and CooTek’s uncommunicative support made noises about needing to wait until some OEM version appears (a handset operator presumably licensed it off them). That’s a bit of a shame but the Google Pinyin IME is excellent and Sogou (another huge IME on desktop PC in China) is also available and seemingly more appearing by the day. That’s pretty awesome given how easy it is to one-click install, try and uninstall if they’re crap. In fact… I think I need to install all of the Android Chinese IMEs and do a mini round up!

Any things I didn’t like about the Nexus One? A few small niggles. The buttons under the screen seem a bit hard to push, particularly noticeable with the menu/properties button. I’ve also experienced some battery draining events due to apps running in the background. Android doesn’t habitually let you actually close apps, you just switch between them. So there’s a market in apps which do actually close applications so you can free memory and CPU. Theoretically this shouldn’t be necessary but evidently it sometimes is as my battery draining event proves. I think this ought to be addressed at the OS level. If Google were smart they’d collect CPU cycle statistics anonymously somehow and feed those back to the market place and display a figure for each app so you can judge what a hog it is. This is important these days because the Nexus One has a huge amount of CPU grunt. This is handy (fastest phone I have ever used by some margin!) but it means that a bad app can quickly consume a lot of battery also.

Finally, Google being somewhat less evil than most, the boot loader can be simply unlocked to enable loading your own stuff. They give you a warning about warranty but there’s no exploits necessary. I performed this task very easily and then applied a simple patch to give me root access and to enable tethering support (something my WinMo phone did out of the box to be fair). I’m not anticipating needing to hack the bejesus out of my phone like I did on WinMo just to obtain a satisfactory appearance, but so long as there are advantages to being able to patch the OS (apps that need root, tethering etc) then it’s great that this isn’t difficult to do. I would say in general there’s less need to hack the Nexus One than this is either an iPhone or a WinMo – because generally Android is more open is isn’t about stopping you from wanting to do what you want to do because you just arbitrarily decided people should do those things (Apple) or you’re fundamentally an incompetent mobile OS provider (Microsoft). Android is absolutely awesome in almost every way right out of the box.

Overall for me, the Nexus One is the pick of the bunch as far as smart phones go. It’s been awhile since I had a phone that I actually enjoyed using. However that should be tempered with the knowledge that I walk around with a WinMo and an iPod as well, I like to own the best tool for everything rather than the best tool which is a compromise of being able to do everything in one unit.

If you’re a student of Chinese I think a Nexus One and an iPod is the best combination in 2010.