Well, now Google claims to have figured out the social networking part. Whether this is due to their mobile Android experience and its constant battle against Facebook to lock users in, it remains an open question. But what does Google+ really has to offer?

1. User Interface: After going around tester reviews of Google+ as well as the Google+ interactive tours and presentations, one thing is clear: Google knows user interfaces! Google+ has an uncluttered, no-nonsense interface that is fun to play with. On the opposite corner, Facebook has a cluttered interface, where various basic options are nearly impossible to find. Compared to modern means of interaction, Facebook ranges from barely usable to overtly frustrating and it is only recently that it managed to clear out various old annoying bugs.

2. Applications: With loads of experience with application development, Google will be offering a strong API for Google+. It already has Google Docs integrated, a browser that is sure to pack social networking goodies ready to go. In fact, Google+ has working for it the ubiquity of Google as a whole (search, email, browser, mobile platform, operating system, etc) which even as the closed system as it is, doesn’t feel encroaching. Facebook on the other hand is very closed and has to struggle for interactivity. Its Facebook apps platform is messy and sufficiently difficult to use that more often than no developers prefer to build their apps outside of Facebook and throw an interface that simply accesses outside resources.

3. Video Conferencing: the Hangout place in Google+ is the real novelty. Here you can meet-up with friends in a virtual reality environment put together with a webcam and a microphone. Facebook offers nothing like that and though Microsoft will soon be offering Skype conferencing to Facebook, it’s a long way until there.

4. Interoperability: From Chrome and your Android smartphone/tablet to Google+ there is less than a step. It’s conceivable that Google+ will be closely interoperable with these. Considering Android, I can definitely see Google dropping Facebook support (as it dropped Twitter from the real-time Google service).

Personally, I do look forward to the UI improvements and the interoperability bid. After all, the most used Facebook features are the news stream (Wall), photo sharing and the profile itself. But will the fact that Google+ will offer them in a more accessible and easy to use way be enough to sway users? Will users really want to make another profile and start it all over anew? Does that mean Facebook will fall? The intuitive answer is a big NO. Google+ will easily draw the Google fanbois and those (like me) frustrated with Facebook’s messy and frustrating features. And the interoperability bid is definitely fun and useful.

Other than that, I know people who are always keen on trying social networks and who have a profile everywhere just for kicks. But how many people will actually use Google+? Let’s wait and see.

There is no question that today is about portability rather than performance. Computing power alone is a dead end. We have enough computing power on a mobile phone for everything we need: light gaming, multimedia, writing, reading and so on.

I can’t express how much I love the idea of a light (under 1 kilo) computing device. In this class, computing devices are easy to handle, light, they battery lasts way longer than the 3 to 7 hours of a classic notebook. For the weight, netbooks meet tablets and superslim notebooks, but what are the pro’s and con’s of each?

My observations will be largely made against my Acer Liquid experience, but might eventually include considerations against Apple’s iPhone 4 as well as Motoral Droid and Sony-Ericsson’s Xperia X10.

1. The display: is what one first notices about any phone. The Super AMOLED is the pinnacle of today’s mobile display technology. Great looking, responsive, easy on the battery, what more could one want? Samsung pioneers AMOLED into the consumer market, making a pretty giant leap in terms of quality. However, the technology is fairly expensive and with only one factory currently making AMOLEDs, Samsung Galaxy S has been having serious availability issues, underlying the great demand. The display is amazingly crisp, clear, beautiful colors. It is well on par with Apple’s iPhone, perhaps better on some accounts. However, the fact that AMOLED is much easier on the battery than Apple’s technology, makes the Samsung well superior (compare the 720 hours of standby on the Samsung Galaxy S with the 350 on Apple iPhone 4 – it’s a different galaxy, so to speak). Size isn’t everything but given that Galaxy S has 4 inches and iPhone 4 only 3.5, the fact that iPhone 4 spits its battery guts so soon is hardly good.

2. Performance: Google’s Android 2.2 dubbed Froyo has pushed in some performance updates that makes the system much easier on the resources. This finally makes Android competitive against Apple’s iOS which has been largely superior in responsiveness. Sure, one can blame this on the fact that there’s only one hardware platform the iOS needs to look at, but then again Android has been conceived as a hardware-independent system therefore this kind of optimization should’ve happened since day 1. Now, the game is a tie.

3. Connectivity: Samsung’s Galaxy S comes with several things over the iPhone 4. Among them, I will mention the presence of a radio, using Bluetooth v3 (instead of 2.1 on the iPhone), a micro SD card expansion slot, bringing the total maximum storage to 40Gb (more space for much cheaper over the iPhone).

4. Media: the camera doesn’t have flash. I repeat: the camera doesn’t have flash. Although good performance in poor lighting, a led wouldn’t have been the end of the world for Samsung. Oh well. However, the Samsung Galaxy S scores again with Picasa integration (and unlike with the Acer Liquid, this time geo-tagging actually works … and it’s so cool!) and with Flash support. Sure, you can have Flash on Apple iPhone, but you need to do a bit of hacking. The packed goodies include an Internet TV tuner (implementation depends on the market, I got one from Bouygues) which I haven’t tried yet and I don’t plan to do that soon (but it’s good to have the option).

5. Battery: even with the optimizations in Froyo, Samsung Galaxy S fails to beat my Acer Liquid (this bears note since my Acer Liquid only has 1350 mAh on its battery while Galaxy S has 1500 mAh). My good ol’ Acer Liquid took at least three days to discharge under average use, while the Samsung Galaxy S coughs at three. Sure, I wasn’t using 3G on my Acer Liquid, but I was talking on it (something I haven’t done much of on Galaxy). Granted, Acer Liquid greatly benefits from Liquid Community ROM, a Froyo modification which doesn’t have the visual appeal of the original Froyo but adds a lot of goodies and removes a lot of garbage (the battery-draining kind). Apple iPhone 4 is well below on this chapter, despite a competitive 1420 mAh charge.

I’m not going to make this a Samsung vs Apple fight, although if any smartphone out there deserves to be called an Apple-killer, then it must be the Samsung Galaxy S. In the Android world, The Samsung Galaxy S is the new king and it will reign alongside Google Nexus S for a while. HTC loses across the board while Sony Ericsson seems content with a spot in the average shady zone.

There is a lot to like about the Galaxy S. The Touch UI is great, the multitouch is usable, it is speedy and responsive, it has WiFi N as well as bluetooth 3, HD video, decent camera (a lot of megapixels aren’t always good). Most importantly, not onlt does it have a good battery, but you can also get spares (something Apple fans can’t do). Since smartphones should be mobile, this counts a lot while traveling.

Given today’s galaxy of smartphones, giving Samsung 5 stars is an understatement. Nitpickers will poke Samsung for more originality in design and UI but the bits under the hood and the bits over the hood pack a punch that while it doesn’t make Apple KO, the Android family and the Symbian family are left bleeding profusely.

I have only tested it for a day so I cannot speak about battery life much. The talk in the Acer Liquid circles is inconclusive as the opinion of those who have tested is very divergent. Some say the new eye candy is very consuming while others praise the new speed improvements which should also help conserve battery life. Regardless, don’t forget the few common sense battery life optimization techniques for Android!

Moving on, I found a rehauled interface which is a bit annoying. The out-of-the-box (so to speak) Froyo interface for Acer moves the notification bar to the bottom, while keeping a box for commonly used programs up all the time. The box is backgrounded to it diminishes the clean interface feeling giving the impression the screen is smaller. In addition, the 6 programs there are always displayed. When opening the menu, they move to the top, making room for another 6 spots for applications to be scrolled through. Sadly, all the useless apps are still there (uFooz, OfficeToGo trial, Acer registration and several new ones).

On the good side, tethering is now a standard option (Liquid Community ROM LCR by Malez introduced it since LCR version 1.7 if I remember correctly). Moreover, the image renderer’s quality has improved substantialy. Personally I found much more vivid colors even on my older images. The Bluetooth connection seems more stable (my Nokia Bluetooth were dropped every now and then, but not anymore).

All in all, Android Froyo on Acer Liquid is a fair upgrade, but I will wait for Malez to release a new LCR version before holding on to it.

PS: For Android fans, here is a list of Acer Liquid ROM for your attention!

The lasted Android goodie is the Acer Liquid 0.010.00 EMEA GEN1 (as well as its AAP counterpart), which upgrades the Android OS to 2.1-update1 and to the 2.6.29 kernel version. The benefits of upgrading your Android are numerous and being able to run the latest applications is just the tip of the iceberg.

I would like to note that when dealing with the Acer Liquid family, you can flash your ROM regardless of the previous version (just make sure you download the full ROM *.bin file, not an upgrade – in which case there will obviously be requirements). For example, I flashed my 1.001.05-AAP-CSL (Android 1.6) first to 0.008.06 AAP (Android 2.1) and today I switched world zones, going to 0.010.00 EMEA (Android 2.1-update1).

I tried a couple of other combinations and I can say for certain that as long as your device ISN’T ROOTED (!! – if your device is rooted, in 65% of the cases flashing between AAP and EMEA as well as between various ROM versions will fail!). If your device isn’t rooted and you’re thinking about switching to 0.010.00, here are a few quick observations:

• The new word completion/suggestions system is below abysmal!!! (for some reason it gives priority to names over common words – among the suggestions when I wanted to type “in”, it favored “Ion”, a Romanian common name, which is weird first because there’s no Romanian language for Acer Liquid, I have no Romanian add-on and secondly, I have no “Ion” in my word list, contacts or elsewhere)
• the main application menu looks nicer, but it’s slower
• battery life seems slightly improved (this might’ve been since the previous ROM though)

If you’re interested, here’s the firmware download link. However, from experience I would suggest you to use dr Evil’s customized firmware based on 0.008.06.bin (you will need the original bin before installing dr Evil’s mod, which gets rid of many nuisances such as uFooz).