I was thinking the other day about how I use the iPad, Nexus One, netbook, MacBook, desktop PC and so on together. I found it strange how I could accept iOS 3′s restrictions on the iPad, but when I tried to use an iPhone I found myself constantly annoyed about being unable to perform the various tasks I wanted to do.

iPad Unboxing

I suspect what it comes down to is the fact that I expect my mobile phone to perform a lot of tasks – and in many ways, I have been spoilt by the Nexus One allowing me to do pretty much anything I could ever want it to. However with the iPad, there is no precedent – there hasn’t really been a truly widespread tablet of this kind before, so coming in to it makes it a new experience.

Nexus One

Sure, it isn’t without its annoyances here and there when things go horribly wrong (and hopefully iOS 4 will go some way to address that); but I still think the iPad user experience is managed and what I would expect it to be.

Earlier this month Google announced App Inventor, an easy way for anyone to get started on building Android applications. Earlier this week I got myself an invite, and headed over to see what’s what.

App Inventor is in its very early stages. It’s a closed beta, with invites going out to people when Google have the capacity and find suitable people. This shows, as there are still some clunky parts and limitations that will have to be overcome before release, but other than that it seems like an excellent preview of what’s to come.

Remember that awesome demo done on-stage at Google IO’s day 2 keynote? (If not, I embedded it below).

They showed off Froyo’s data push system by having a Chrome extension, that when clicked, opened the same web page you were viewing on your Android phone.

Now, you can go download the application to your phone, and install the Chrome extension, and everything just works!

Well I managed to wedge the Froyo update on to my Nexus One, at last. I got a bit impatient waiting for it, so seeing as it was the official download I thought I’d take the opportunity to give it a go. I haven’t had much of a chance to play with it so far, but this is what I’ve made note of.

Nexus One

I’ve been playing around with getting started building Android (I’d like to get 2.0 working on my Joggler). To build Android under Linux, you need the sun-java5-jdk package.

This is due to a conflict in the @Override command, which means you can’t use the Java 6 JDK for this task.

Unfortunately the sun-java5-jdk package isn’t available by default in the Karmic or Lucid repositories, so you need to grab it from somewhere else. To save you searching, here’s the howto: