I’m in London this week, doing a series of team and community meetings. One of the fun things that have happen this week is the team all got brand-new Nexus One phones while we’re here.

I’m a pretty hardcore Blackberry user but when someone hands you a new, cool phone just begging to have a SIM card added to it, the Blackberry can wait. I’ve been using the Nexus for about a day now, and here’s some initial impressions:

Things I like about the Nexus One

The screen is gorgeous. The cameras is far better than the one on my Blackberry. The phone feels good when you hold it. Not too heavy, not too bulky.

Adding new apps – a breeze. There’s lots to choose from in the app store, including many popular apps like Urbanspoon, Shazam, Foursquare, and many others. I got a dozen apps onto the phone in short order. Definitely much closer to the iTunes Store experience than the pain of adding apps to my Blackberry.

And Flash Player 10.1 beta is looking pretty good.

Things I’m Not So Sure About

I’m spoiled by my Blackberry’s ability to go as much as three days without a charge, so having to charge more often is a bit of a bummer. Not a showstopper though.

The music client. I don’t see anything that will make me want to give up my iPod. (The Last.fm app is nice though)

Covering that gorgeous screen with very visible fingerprints.

The London weather hasn’t been very sunny today but even so using the screen in daylight is definitely a bit harder than using it indoors.

Given that this is is a Google product it’s probably inevitable, but the deep lock-in and integration with other Google products is annoying for those of us who are not hardcore Google users. I don’t use Picasa, gChat, or Google Contacts, for example, and if I want to really use the Nexus, they’re hard to avoid.

Things I Definitely Don’t Like

The built-in IMAP client is poor, making it tough for those of us who don’t run our email through Gmail. I expect there will be a third-party solution pretty soon though.

Comment spam in the app market reviews. Really annoying.

Trying to do the two-thumb typing I am used to on a real keyboard is really frustrating. My error rate is close to 100% when I try it on the Nexus. To be fair, though, this isn’t specific to the Nexus; I felt the same trying to use my iPod Touch’s keyboard as well. I’ve simply spent a lot of years using various Palm / Blackberry devices with real keyboards and it’s going to be very, very hard for me to let go of needing to feel real keys under my fingers and relearn how to type on a handheld. Typing with one finger, aided by the very nice auto complete feature, is much less painful. It’s just not very fast.

Things I Haven’t Figured Out Yet

The best way to synch data (contacts, etc) off either my desktop or my Blackberry. I need to research this some more. Being able to sync data from Facbook is interesting. Ideally I’d like to get my work info on it too, but Exchange support is a bit shaky so far.

All In All

I like the Nexus a lot more than I thought I would. I am not sure if I will be able to adjust to the lack of a real keyboard and I don’t love the Google-lock in, but other than that I’m pretty impressed.

And did I mention how nice the beta of Flash 10.1 looks on it? :p

I suppose I should start out by noting that I, like a very significant number of my colleagues at Adobe, am a big fan of OS X and Apple products. I am typing this on the Macbook Pro I purchased for personal use. The MBP for work is sitting on a table nearby. There’s two iPods and an iPod Touch in this room as well. The only thing I use Windows for is some HR stuff that doesn’t run well on the Mac. In short, I love OS X and I hope to keep using it for a long time.

So from the point of view of someone who’s a fan of both the Apple and Adobe platforms, it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around the vitriol lobbed against Flash by my fellow Mac users. And if you read the blogosphere these days, you might come away thinking Adobe is on the verge of a massive route, driven into irrelevance by a horde of iPad-wielding HTML5 developers. And some in the media, who always love a good “X is going to kill Y” story line, are following suit.

The reality is somewhat different.

One thing that frequently (but not always) goes overlooked is that as much as this is a technology battle, it’s also a business one. Pushing as much content through the App Store as possible is great business for Apple; and honestly, I don’t blame them for wanting to build their App Store into a massive (and massively profitable) content juggernaut. It’s far friendlier to their margins than the hardware business, even with their premium pricing, so why not go for a platform play?

Where I take exception — and developers should too — is with Apple’s “my way or the highway” approach to development. Adobe’s Flash is a very high-profile victim of this approach right now, but we’re not the first nor are we the only one. And I really don’t understand how a bunch of developers committed to embracing the “open web” can turn right around and accept the massively closed structure that is the Apple ecosystem. Is it cognitive dissonance, or just Stockholm Syndrome? Is this really the same company who so famously embraced the image of shattering Big Brother’s image? How did Apple lose its way?

When I think about why all this matters, I think about my 10 year old niece. She doesn’t know (or care) what Flash is. All she knows is that she loves playing Webkinz, and every time I come over to visit, she wants to play it with me on my laptop. If I handed her an iPad, she’d want to play it there too, and she wouldn’t understand why she couldn’t. Yes, of course, I can buy her a bunch of other games on the App Store, but that’s not the same thing to her, and anyone who says that it is has clearly never withstood the wrath of a pre-teen.

Apple needs a reality check. Once you get outside the San Francisco to San Jose corridor, you’ll find very few people who know or care what HTML5 is. Most people who don’t do technology for a living find our high-geek holy wars incomprehensible and boring. They don’t want to be locked out of content, and they don’t want to be told they should spend money in the App Store just to conform to Apple’s vision of the internet. They just want to use the sites, view the videos, and play the games they’re used to.

Oh, and 90% of them do not run OS X.

Go back and watch that famous “1984″ video again — because it seems to me that Apple has become the very thing they were fighting against back then.

Adobe had an all-hands meeting today and I was privileged enough to hear Adobe’s founders speak as part of the event. I was very much struck by John Warnock’s closing exhortation to us. Urging us not to be afraid of competition, he said:

“The future is yours. Invent it.”

It’s hard to write about that now, though, when as I type this images of devastation in Haiti are rolling across my TV screen. I’ve been through a couple of earthquakes since moving to California, though nothing as big as a 7.0. I can only dimly imagine the terror of living though one that bad, much less to live through it in a land where there is no real infrastructure nor strong building codes.

We here in the US are very privileged in so many ways. In times like this we need to remember how good we have it and help the ones who are in need. There are a huge number of charities and NGOs collecting funds to help aid Haiti right now. Please pick one (or more) and make a donation if you can possibly do so. We have.

Haiti will need to invent its own future now. We all need to help.

Seen tonight on Facebook.

A good reminder that no matter how rough you think you have it, someone else generally has it much worse.

As the sun sets on this last day of 2009, I thought I’d take a few minutes to put up an “end of year” post. There’s a lot of “End of Decade” stuff out there on the blogs this week, but for me, it’s hard to think of 1999 / 2000 as 10 years ago. The cataclysm of 9/11 and the yawning gap of the “nuclear winter” of 2002-2004 makes the time before that seem like another age, almost something that happened to another person.

When I think of pivotal moments in the last 10 years, the first one that comes to mind is the one that set in motion much of what came afterwards. And it happened here:

In the spring of 2004, I sat on a bench looking up at the oculus of the Pantheon in Rome and decided that I was not going to accept what had happened to my life — which at the time involved living in a crappy (yet cheap) apartment in a remote corner of SF, working a low-wage survival job with no heath insurance. It sucked. It was what I needed to do to keep a roof over my head during the bad times, but it was not going to define the rest of my life.

Sitting in a masterpiece of Roman architecture, I decided I would go back to school for the MBA I should have gotten much sooner and get my career back on track. And despite having no money and a less-than-stellar math GMAT score, I did. And then while in grad school, I decided I wanted to work for a big brand — I was tired of working for companies that nobody had ever heard of before. And despite a gaping hole in my work history, I did.

Looking back now, I don’t know if it was pure luck, or hard work, or just persistence that got me through. It seems like a small miracle, especially considering much of that happened during two recessions. Probably a little of all. But however it happened, here I am.

A lot has changed over these past 10 years; mostly for the better but not all. Some family members have passed on. Some friends have moved onto diverging paths and grown distant. More pounds and grey hairs. But on balance, despite the really bad years in the middle, this decade ends with pretty much everything in my life, finally, heading in what feels like the right direction.

2010 should be quite a year. At work, I’m looking at some new challenges that will force me to get out of my comfort zone, learn, and hopefully grow. That was a theme for 2008 as well (although I didn’t know exactly how much so when last New Year rolled around, I never expected to get promoted so soon for one thing). Outside of work, I have much less free time than I used to but I hope to keep working on my photography. Who knows, it might actually get decent one of these days.

So as 2010 dawns, that’s where things are for me. I know 2009 has been a crappy year for a lot of people so my main wish is that we all have a better 2010.

This has got me really steamed — as the news unfolds after this latest air terrorism attempt, it turns out that the guy who is accused of trying to blow up a jet over Detroit was actually ON a US Terrorism Watch List. His own father even contacted authorities with concerns about his son’s activities — and he was still allowed onto an airplane without hassle.

Alrighty them. What exactly is the watch list there for if we don’t use it?!?

Even better, the TSA seems to think that punishing the entire traveling public with laughably stupid yet very annoying in-flight restrictions is the correct response to this massive cock-up.

The solution to this issue is not a mystery. You need to screen people better BEFORE they get on the plane. Yes, it’s hard. But it’s the right thing to do. Telling people they will be safe if they cannot use their iPod for the last hour of a flight is utterly pathetic.

It’s like the guy who, on noticing he’s lost his wallet, starts looking for it under the next streetlamp because that’s where the light is. You need to go where the real problem is, not where the easy fix is.

This week sees the launch of a new technology website & podcast, run by my old college classmate Sunshine Mugrabi: TechnoGirlTalk.

Yours truly was one of the panelists on the initial podcast and it’s a doozy — we dive into the James Chartrand controversy, as well as dissect a controversial Droid vs iPhone ad and discuss what it’s like to be a woman in technology.

Recording the episode was a ton of fun and I hope you’ll take advantage of the slow holiday season to download it and listen.

But frankly, not at all surprised.

http://www.copyblogger.com/james-chartrand-underpants/

In a perfect world, things wouldn’t be this way but (no surprise) we don’t live in a perfect world.

Updated (after reading the full comment thread over at Copyblogger): And to be clear I’m not at all angry at “James”. I admire her guts. I am angry that someone with talent and skills needed to become someone else in order to make a living in her chosen career. it’s a thoroughly sad commentary on how screwed up our society still is.

Happy Hanukkah!

This is a neat way to embed a series of photographs in a page!

Photos are from my rail trip earlier this year.

This shot (from a weekend sunset shoot at Half Moon Bay) turned out pretty well, I think.

I didn’t go to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade every year when I lived in NYC — it’s pretty cold to be outside in November in NYC, so unless we had friends holding a viewing party I often skipped it. Still, it was always fun to wander by the balloons being inflated the night before.

The first year I was in California I was so homesick that the parade on TV made me cry. Not anymore though. These days, I still love to see NYC on TV, but I find the parade overproduced, overcommercial, and annoying. It’s more of a 3-hour commercial for NBC than a celebration of Thanksgiving or even of Macy’s. (The Rockettes are still fun to watch though).

Parade aside, this is going to be a great Thanksgiving. The family is gathering at my cousin’s and I’ll be headed over there a little later. I have a lot to be thankful for this year and it should be a great day.

I hope you’re having a good one too!