Move your app update: we got our nexus one!

Last week, our award for 4th Place in the Move your app challange, a Nexus one has finally arrived. The shipping took 2 months, and we were surprised, that the phone came in without any damage.

I won't go into detail about unboxing, and reviewing all the little details, the gadget sites already tore the nexus one apart months ago anyway.
Lets take a look at it, from the developers point of view.

The first thing we did with it, was updating it to froyo (2.2), so I don't have any 2.1 experiences with it.

Speed
Froyo(and the 1ghz processor) brought speed to the android OS, now all our other phones feel sluggish(HTC Hero(1.5 and 2.1), T-mobile Pulse) next to the nexus.
Development speed got accelerated too, If you are a small development team, with only 1 real device, than I wouldn't recommend anything slower(cpu) than the nexus(or with less ram). If you have several devices, it still pays off to see the app run properly, even if it's sluggish on all your other phones.

Setup
We use windows(xp, 7) and ubuntu(9.10) for our pcs and laptops, and Eclipse for development. We did not have any problems, connecting the nexus to adb and Eclipse. Although I did have to manually add the vendor id to /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules on ubuntu.
Debugging is a lot faster than on any of our other phones, or the emulator.

The UI
Settings/Applications/Manage applications now actually loads without the UI grinding to halt. It was so slow, that I have only used it once. With froyo, selecting the app, and pressing the "clear data" button is now a viable option, I don't necessarily have to uninstall the whole app just to delete a database for example.

The dock:
It did not come with a dock, but that's not a problem, because the dock does not support data transfer. Does that make sense? Nay. It would have been great not having the need to pick up the device from the table every 5 minutes. Oh well, time to make another cardboard cutout duck taped dock.

Sync
Being able to sync several google accounts, and calendars is a very nice addition. I did not have any problems at all, it just works. Even my google apps account syncs perfectly. Shared calendars aren't a problem anymore.

The metal
The design of the phone is nice, build quality is great, but who cares about those, if the metal casing blocks the wireless signal reception. Radio(wifi/3g/etc) signal quality is sub par compared to the Hero or any of our phones. Of course it's still superior to the iphone's full metal case, but it's a disappointment. With the Hero I was constantly online (with occasional signal loss if I was on a train in the middle of nowhere), now with the Nexus, there are more dead zones, where I just can't use the phone properly.

The bad
What I found very annoying is the notification for debugging, which for us developers is of course always on:

The other very annoying thing for me is this:

This screen won't go away automatically, it does not go away even when I'm done with my file transfers, and I safely removed it from the pc, and pressed dismount on the device. I always have to press the home or back button, for it to disappear.
Anyone has a workaround? Is there an app for that?

Verdict
With the few annoying things, the nexus one is awesome phone, it is ideal for developers, and for the avarage user too.