It appears that even monolithic companies fail when they start dipping their hands into unknown territory.  According to PCWorld, Google’s new phone, the Nexus One, is falling subject to bad reviews for Customer Service – and the fact that it basically doesn’t exist.  Users having problems with the phone are either being tossed back and forth between their carrier and HTC (the hardware vendor), both of which don’t know the answers to the problem, or being forced to write Google’s support by email, which leaves them waiting for an answer for one or two days.  There’s no direct support line they can call to get help with their new phone.

In case you weren’t aware, Google’s new phone has been marketed and built by HTC, sold directly by Google as “Google’s phone”, and then of course serviced by a wireless company of your choice – sort of an interesting chain of events which makes it difficult to make the call on who should be supporting the phone.  I think Google should have gone the route of supporting the phone themselves, just as Apple urged its wireless partners to direct customer support to themselves.  I think all eyes are on Google at this point to come up with answers – not HTC or the wireless carriers.

The user experience of the phone boils down into a couple high level categories – those that can use it, and those that can’t.  To those that can use the phone, customer service is probably about 15% of the experience – they call when they need it.  To those that can’t use the phone, customer service is probably about 50% of the experience – if you can’t use the phone AT ALL then customer service is about your last hope, and if customer service doesn’t work… well… you can’t use your phone.

Get it together Google.

Every feature of the platform was obviously thought through.  The whole time I’ve been watching the video (I’m still watching it right now) I’ve been thinking “why didn’t we all think of that before?”

This is a video from the Google Wave Developer Preview presentation, during the second day of the Google I/O 2009 conference.

Without further ado… watch this:

You’ll also be able to follow all of these users at once by downloading this ruby script (originally provided for the iPhone developer Twitter list by David Clement – thanks David!) and running it using the following instructions (feel free to skip steps 2 through 5 if you know you already have the updated Ruby version, twitter gem, and google spreadsheet gem):

1. Open Terminal
2. Update Ruby by typing: gem update --system
3. Install the Twitter gem: sudo gem install Twitter
4. Add the google spreadsheet gem source location: gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
5. Install the google spreadsheet gem: sudo gem install gimite-google-spreadsheet-ruby
6. Open up the .rb file you downloaded from here in TextEdit
7. Enter your google and twitter usernames and passwords (it’s safe, look at the code!)
8. Save the file!
9. In Terminal, navigate to the .rb file you downloaded from here and type: ruby follow_wpf_sl_devs.rb

Let me know if you have any questions. Happy tweeting!  Special thanks to the original iPhone developer twitter list and David Clement for the ruby script.

It also works great on the iPhone in MobileSafari for news on the go.

Sample of my Google Reader

Now, I don’t want to downplay the fact that Google actually provides a more tangible cloud computing experience than anybody right now, but I just don’t think Google is in the right spot.  They’re too focused on Javascript.  The world of the future is not going to run on Javascript – sorry.

The Silverlight vs. Flash showdown is much more interesting, as they both provide a much richer experience.  I have yet to see any large application type experience with Flash, but I know they have a lot going on for them with AIR and Flex.

Silverlight is going to win the battle though.  Microsoft has put themselves in a good position. They started Silverlight and Live Mesh completely separately in the community, but now they are merging into the same accomplishment. They have a cloud computing foundation already set up (Live Mesh, Azure), and it can already run Silverlight Applications.  This is a great start and puts them ahead of the competition.  Live Mesh is still in its very early stages, but we’ll soon see some very exciting stuff.

When I see an iPhone running Silverlight connected to Live Mesh running a real application I’ll know we’re “there”.

The video is unnecessarily long, but it shows how simple the unlock process is.

UPDATE: The G1 is painfully slow on AT&T’s network because the 3G network for AT&T runs on a different frequency than the 3G network for T-Mobile.  The G1 will still work with AT&T, but only on their EDGE network.

I was able to get it up and running in about an hour (including the download time for all required software).  Better yet, I was able to get this running on my Vista machine (I didn’t need a Mac!), and it can also be easily set up on some flavors of Linux.  The instructions to get things started was rather simple.  I just followed what I found on Google’s Android site.  I’m using Eclipse with the Android Plugin, which seems to work great.  The emulator for the phone is also functional and looks polished.

All I’ve really done is inspected the SDK and elaborated on the “Hello, Android” application that Google walks you through. What’s great about it is the fact that it was so easy to get up and running, and it uses a language that I’m more familiar with (Java as compared to say… Objective C 2.0 . I think that language familiarity alone will steer more people towards Android over the iPhone. Heck, I remember programming Java in highschool…

More to come as I start diving into the SDK.