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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

As this is a product page and not a comparison matrix, why does it specifically call out the omission of some features like infrared and physical keyboard? Not that I don't appreciate Google being forthcoming about what they chose to leave out (though who expects IR anyway?), but it seems an odd marketing choice.

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IR is used a lot in japan to exchange contacts with people you meet. For English speakers it's not that hard to punch in someone's email, but since email addresses have to be roman characters, it's actually a pain for non-english speakers. Thus IR. A new Sharp Android phone was just released on Au that I think is the first android phone with this feature.

But you can just share your contact card as a QR code, which is easily recognized by even the cheapest Japanese phone.

It's Contacts -> <Contact> -> Menu -> Share -> Barcode Scanner.

Or NFC! ;)

Or just bump ;)

Unfortunately Android (2.2) doesn't list my contact info in my contacts.

You can add yourself to your address book.

> but since email addresses have to be roman characters, it's actually a pain for non-english speakers.

Er, no, not at all (well, possibly for the very old?). Roman characters are everywhere in Japan, no-one has any problem dealing with them (pronouncing the words they form? different story).

It's more that exchanging contact details is a lot more work in Japan - number, mail address, name in kanji, name readings (yes, you need these, even if you're Japanese/a native level speaker). Mail addresses are frequently really long and sprinkled with non-alphanumerics. Name kanji are a pain too - there's lots of homophones, so if someone tells you their name you often need to check with them which kanji it is.

Basically: it's almost impossible to convey your contact details verbally, so without IR, you usually wind up just swapping phones for a few minutes (luckily, in Japan you can be pretty carefree about handing your multiple-hundred-dollar phone to a stranger).

Contrast with the situation until recently in the west, where it was usually just a person's name (that you probably knew how to spell already) and a number, and you can kind of see how IR would be a big deal in Japan and not elsewhere.

iPhones have seriously broken contact exchange for young people in Japan, since almost everyone has one, and thus no-one has IR anymore. There's probably money to be made fixing it but so far the only solution I've seen other people actually have on their phones is Bump, and it's never really worked well for me.

Because it's built on a standard format that allows you to compare the Nexus S alongside all the other Android phones that you can browse from that same interface. Eg, compare the Nexus S to the T-Mobile G2 and you will see that one has a physical keyboard and the other does not.

It is supposed to be a "neutral" page for comparison, e.g.

http://www.google.com/phone/detail/sony-ericsson-xperia-x10

If it is a marketing page, it is marketing for Android as a whole, not specifically for Google branded Android phones.

The marketing page for this particular phone is here:

http://www.google.com/nexus/

The tech spec there doesn't list missing features

http://www.google.com/nexus/#!/tech-specs

> As this is a product page and not a comparison matrix, why ...

Because you're wrong. It is a comparison matrix, and not a product page. http://www.google.com/phone lists many different android phones, by many different manufacturers, and offers comparisons.

The Nexus S product page is http://www.google.com/nexus

One of the reasons it might make a point of saying no keyboard is that the rest of the Samsung family of phones the Nexus S has come from do have keyboards.

The Nexus S looks identical to my girlfriend's Sprint Samsung Galaxy S but hers has a flip out keyboard and this doesn't, but the dimensions are pretty similar. I was expecting this to have that too when I first saw a picture.

The only Galaxy S phone with a keyboard is the Epic on Sprint. The others (Vibrant, Fascinate, Captivate, and the I9000) do not have keyboards at all.

I've never owned a cell phone so I may be ignorant, but isn't IR used all over the place for apps that want to scan barcodes or those fancy encrypted images to download an app off a webpage?

No, those use the camera.

No, the camera is used for that. IR was used for what bluetooth is used for now.

Not in every situation. Still waiting for TVs to migrate to bluetooth ;)

I for one sure am not holding my breath on that one. You have any idea how much faster the batteries in your remote would die? And it'd never work, because you'd always have to re-pair it.

Wiimotes don't always have to be re-paired with the Wii.

They re-pair after you press a button, and their password is always 1234. It's not secure at all.

I would never complain about the security of my TV remote, so I still don't see that as an issue.

What if your neighbor ducked right outside your window and constantly set your TV to <undesirable TV network here>? Then you might care. With IR, the signal would be iffy and probably not work at all from the window outside and your neighbor would have to have line-of-sight with the sensor on your TV which means popping the remote up from under his hiding place. With Bluetooth, neighbor-interference is much less complex.

In the case of the Wii, your remote has to be paired with the Wii. You accomplish this by setting the Wii to pairing mode (press the red button inside the Wii) and set the remote to pair (red button under the battery cover of the Wiimode). Other remotes do nothing to a Wii unless paired. So really, the possibility of neighbor-interference with Bluetooth would be much less.

They connect when you press a button, but pairing is a more involved operation.

IRDA was using for serial communications and the frequency are not compatible with TV remotes. the IPAQ pocket pc had wider range of frequency but most phones would not allow you to control your tv

Funnily enough, I can control my TV with my N900.

But you can't send and receive files with it. The N900 has consumer IR and not IRDA, indeed.

That's right.

I'm still not convinced that you couldn't drive an IRDA diode with TV remote data and have it work, though, at least on consumer units running at 870nm.

You're getting that confused with the QR barcode format.

Because it is a comparison matrix. The page you're looking at is there standard template in the Android Phone Gallery. If you just look at the special Nexus Tech Specs page, it doesn't highlite its missing features.

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