Android 2.3 Gingerbread and my Nexus One

My phone updated to Gingerbread the other day, so here are some thoughts.

Positive improvements.

• Battery. Battery life feels better. It's probably just my imagination. It does come with more detailed power usage information, though.
• Keyboard. Typing seems more accurate with the new keyboard. Individual keys appear smaller, but I think that just leads to having better defined targets for my fingers, increasing accuracy.
• Display off. There's a pretty transition when going to stand-by. The display flattens the image as an old CRT television would.
• Translucence. More buttons and other UI widgets are translucent, which is nice.
• Flat buttons. A lot of buttons and UI widgets are now flat! It's great. Before a lot of them had a greater gradient. I prefer the look of flat, rectangular, 90°-corner buttons.
• Downloads. A Downloads app which just shows you the content of your Downloads folder. Before, it was possible for a user to waste a lot of space with downloaded files and not know how to remove them, as they'd have to get a third-party application to browse their file system.
• Application management. You can more easily see how much space they take up, and whether they're present on your phone or your SD card. Since my phone has a fixed amount of internal space, and since the file system on my SD card allows for smaller sizes, I try to keep as many apps on my SD card as possible.

• Selecting text. Better selection support for copying and pasting. It was quite painful to do this before. Now they have grips for each edge of a selection that you can drag apart or near.

Questionable improvements.

• Colours. The colour scheme changed. Before, there was a lot of soft greys for widgets and backgrounds, which was nice. Now, it's white on black, with some green elements an orange highlights. It's a palette I've seen before, but it's a weird one. It isn't necessary comfortable; it reminds me of Autumn nights.
• Inconsistent look-and-feel. The new light on black doesn't apply to everything. A lot of Google apps are still the old dark on light, so that feels inconsistent. Less beautiful and integrated.
• Readability in the sun. The idea with the black backgrounds is in part to help things like the menu bar be more innocuous and allow me to focus on things I care about, like a web page's content. However, it's now made it much harder to read the screen under sunlight.
• Power? But perhaps the increased amount of black space is cheaper energy-wise to display, resulting in my feeling of longer battery life?

Recent application fun.

• Androidify. This let's us create Android's version of Miis. It's kind of cute. Liv joined our Androids together for this:
  
  
• Blogger. I missed this when it came out the other month, I guess, but I'm glad I found it. It has a very simple interface. I don't like typing long things on my phone, but it's very convenient for posting an image quickly :)
• Google Reader. This I caught when it came out a couple months ago. I've been very happy with it.
• LED Flash as a Flashlight. Google Goggles has a button added solely for using the camera's flash as a flash light. It's incredibly bright. I fear I'll burn out the light prematurely if I over use it. That, or Liv's eyes.
• Google Maps. Google Maps has been a continual source of delightful new features. Recent additions include checking in with Google Latitude, reviewing places with Hotpot (which I actually enjoy using), vector graphs (for arbitrary zooming and offline caching).

Like

Most Android users may not be affected as much by the new colour scheme, since they probably use a version customised by HTC, Motorola, Samsung, et al. I actually like the colour scheme, but I'm not sure if it's something I want to live with for a long while, especially when Google's own applications don't feel consistent. I assume more will adapt over time.

Overall, I'm enjoying it a good deal.