google g1 android (first impressions, review)

I got my first android device about a week ago and I haven't yet got the time to fully explore it but here are my first impressions:

i love...

• the display (very clear, bright, sharp, fantastic...)
• the touchscreen (works nicely, althought multitouch for zooming would be appreciated)
• mail, instant messaging, notifications
• dialer (voice/numeric/log/contacts/favs)
• contacts manager (synced with google contacts)
• some great apps (shazam, wiki, book reader)
• android ui (scrolling, status bar, stability, simplicity)
• youtube video player
• marketplace

i hate...

• short battery life (counts in hours when on wifi/edge)
• absence of profiles (street,home,browsing,powersaving,gps,silent...)
• web bookmarks not synchronized with google notebook's bookmarks?
• absence of native clients for google notebook, reader...
• keyboard ergonomy (the keyboard is somewhat hard to use, typing is obstructed by phones cable and lower part of the phone, keys hard to locate in dark...maybe adding a usable virtual keyboard would be an option)
• no gps tracking/user maps?

my overall impressions are very positive as i believe most of the issues will be solved by software updates soon.

links: t-Mobile g1 - a guide to the world’s first android powered mobile phone

google chrome (review)

google chrome is a next generation, user-friendly web browser. currently it's not available for linux, but i had to do some work under windoze so i used the opportunity to try it out.

i love...

• the simplicity
• the speed
• the search bar (which is a universal bar for keywords, shortcuts, urls, config..., enhanced by very smooth auto suggest)
• the new tab (where you can choose from many options what page you want to open - bookmarks, most visited with previews, history, recently closed, history search...)
• the hideable bookmark toolbar (ctrl+b)
• history manager (ctrl+h)
• the automatic and smooth import of my firefox profile
• memory usage stats (about:memory)
• dom inspector (right click, inspect element)

i hate...

• absence of linux version
• lack of integration into google services (bookmarks, notebook...)
• lack of support for atom, rss feeds
• absence of bookmark shortcuts (even if i type full name of bookmark, chrome offers to search the web first
• no option of master password, instant incremental search...

overall, i had very good feeling using chrome. i believe most of my complaints will be addressed in the future versions.

Knol - google's social knowledge base

Google launched Knol, a social knowledge base similar to wikipedia. The idea looks very promising so I immediately jumped in to check it out.

The interface is (as usual with google) very simple and straightforward, it is very easy to write your own article in a minute.

pros

• great idea
• simple (usable, easy to learn, easy to use)
• google-integrated
• colaboration (each article has clearly defined owners, authors and reviewers)
• licensable (for now you can choose from (cc-attribution, cc-attrib-non-commercial, all-rights-reserved)
• revisioning (versioning)
• commenting
• article summary
• reviews (you can post reviews on anything and link to your review will show up on the original page)
• referencing
• adsense integration

cons

• no tagging? ...oh wait, there's an alternative titles field, but I think this is a bit confusing, the tagging should work more like what we're used to from other google products, e.g. mail, notebook...
• too long and confusing urls (e.g.http://knol.google.com/k/jazzy-junggle/tagging-best-practice/8d1khziecqie/2#edit - maybe its just me and there's a way to view the article url, but i believe the addressing of the articles should be more clear to the user and/or simpler)
• lack of semantics (defining meta tags, relations to other articles, etc.)
• limited presentation options (styling, css, page layout, templating...)

I think Knol is on the right track but still needs a lot of work to become the only and ultimate knowledge base.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine is a free webapp hosting service that allows you to create and run web applications on google's infrastructure.

Features

• free
• hosted on google's infrastructure
• easy to get started
• 500 mb of space
• Python support (more languages to come)
• enough CPU and bandwidth for 5 million pageviews/month
• Datastores as data persistence layer (limited SQL databases)
• user authentication via Google's Users API (Google accounts)
• Django web framework with templating support

More info

• Developing and deploying an application on Google App Engine - video tutorial

Web predictions for 2008

What will be popular on web in 2008?

• semantic apps (ish ?)
• mobile web, mobile office, mobile web apps, services
• behavior monitoring, better personalised ad targeting
• OpenID
• content recommendation
• facebook platform
• distributed social networks
• open platforms?

source: various and 2008 Web Predictions - ReadWriteWeb