Google Nexus One, Great Hardware but What About the Developer Experience

It is so great to see iPhone having a real competition. Google Nexus One
which was released yesterday (Jan 5,2009) is being marketed by Google
as "Web Meets Phone". To me, bringing web experience is all about
carrying a really great web-browser (preferably WebKit based) around.
But then, web-browser does not really require a powerful hardware. But,
Google Nexus One has a pretty decent hardware. Specially with 1 GHz
processor, 512 MB RAM and an OpenGL ES 2.0 based graphic chip.

It has some amazing features for end users too. But there is one place
where Nexus One badly lacks or for that matter any Andorid device
lacks, and that is the developer experience. I just cannot tolerate
laziness of tech companies in building good Integrated Development
Environment and using Eclipse as their pathetic excuse everywhere.
Every tom dic and harry is coming with their Eclipse based IDEs, that
just really sucks. Eclipse is good for Java and thats it.

Andorid IDE is a Eclipse with Android Development Tools (ADT) plugin. That gives you nothing special but Eclipse with very dumb android support.

There is another product called IntelliJ IDEA . IDEA is also a Java IDE, but does way a better job than eclipse.

It has lot of amazing features like seamless SDK integration, Code
Completion and Navigation, Android Manifest editor and Deployment from
IDE.

Nevertheless, it is nothing when compared to the development environment for for my iPhone (Xcode) and Windows Mobile (Visual Studio). (Screenshots Below)

So until Google really comes up with a really great developer experience for Android (which hardly seems possible, by looking at Google's philosophy ultra simplicity) it will only be a great consumer device and less device to develop for.

There are other problems with Android as well. (From a developer angle):

1. Android does not let users install application on secondary memory (like memory cards). So you are always limited with the ROM memory. Nexus one has 512 MB.
2. Even though Android is using Java it cannot run standard Java or J2ME programs. It has its own set of Java philosphy that is not standard in any possible way.
3. Highly googlish, thinks web is everything. I like having native apps. I dont mind
   connecting to web services but I would like to have native applications.

Visual Studio (For Windows Mobile)

Xcode (For iPhone)

Eclipse (Android)

Hardware specs (From Wikipedia)

Manufacturer	HTC (Designed and branded by Google)
Type	Candybar smartphone
Release date	January 5, 2010
Introductory price	$529 unlocked $179 with 2 year contract[1]
Operating system	Android 2.1 (Eclair)
Power	3.7 V 1400 mAh Rechargeable lithium-ion polymer battery[2] Audio - 20 hours Video - 7 hours Talk time - 10 hours (2G) or 7 hours (3G)
CPU	1 GHz Qualcomm QSD 8250 Snapdragon
Storage capacity	Flash memory: 512 MB microSD (Class 2) slot: 4 GB included, expandable up to 32 GB
Memory	512 MB DRAM
Display	480 x 800 px, 3.7 in (94 mm), 3:5 aspect ratio, WVGA, AMOLED with 100,000:1 contrast ratio and 1ms response rate [3]
Input	Capacitive touchscreen display, trackball, headset controls, proximity and ambient light sensors, 3-axis accelerometer, digital compass
Camera	5.0 megapixel with video (720 x 480 px at 20 fps or higher), geotagging, LED flash and auto focus [4]
Connectivity	Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n), Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, Micro-USB, A-GPS Quad band GSM 850 900 1800 1900 MHz GPRS/EDGE and Tri band UMTS 900 1700 2100 MHz HSDPA/HSUPA[3] [5]
Online services	Android Market