So, the Nexus has bombed, apparently - with Flurry reporting only 20,000 new Nexus owners.

Hold on though - this handset launched publicly just 7 days ago! Surely it's a bit apples-and-oranges to compare sales figures for the Droid, launched 2 months ago (and before Christmas), with a device which may not even have reached all the people who've purchased it yet...? Drawing any conclusions by comparing estimated sales figures at this stage seems almost negligent, journalistically...

Update: I really ought to learn how to read. The comparison is more like-for-like than I made out - looking at week 1 sales. However, I still don't think it's a fair comparison. Droid was sold through traditional channels (online, physical stores, etc.), and I'm guessing that there wasn't - for many Droid owners - a 4-day lag between ordering and getting the handset.

Here's a little something for all you people making lovely apps for Android. If you use a pencil before you start to take your app to the digital realm, then we've made some templates to help you design for some of the Android handsets out there.

There are a whole variety of devices to choose from, with different screen resolutions, and hard or virtual keyboards. We find these help give our sketches a little context when we're presenting them internally or to clients.

The PDF is Letter size (8.5 inches by 11 inches) and the handsets are to scale, so you can use these quite happily for paper prototyping and get a realistic sense of scale. There's a subtle 10x10 grid on the screens to help you with your pencil based needs. If you're short on Letter paper, you can get away with printing them on A4.

If you have any suggestions, comments or improvements, feel free to suggest them here.

All that's left is to snack down on cupcake, donut or eclair, or if you're feeling greedy - all three. Enjoy - and click here for the templates.

These templates were designed and lavishly tooled by Ali Driver, Senior Designer at Future Platforms.

2009 was a bad year for me - not without some amazing highs, but the lows won out. I'm not going to write about that, as most of it isn't suitable for public consumption. Instead I'll share a quote which stuck with me through the last 12 months; it's from the Qu'ran, and it's the most wonderful expression of optimism I've ever heard.

"At the end of the world, plant a tree"

I've got a set of things I want to do in 2010. Again, not all are suitable for public consumption, but a couple of them I'd like to publish in an attempt to egg myself into doing them:

1. I want to make things again. I've not done much of it over the last year, I miss doing it and the further I get from building software, the less able I feel to influence how we do it at FP. So I'm going to spend at least a day a week working in one of our two production teams.
2. I've ended every year for the last 10 being fitter than the previous one. This year I upped my running from about 40km per month to 100-120km. I want this trend to continue. I am never going to die.

I'm rubbish at predictions; in 1993 I thought the WWW was a waste of time, and that the future belonged to gopher. Nevertheless I've managed to contribute a few thoughts on where mobile is going in the next 10 years to this presentation which Rudy de Waele put together over the new year break.

Mine are pithy cop-outs, in general - of course there'll be more bandwidth, of course more of our internet access will be mobile, and it's hard to predict the complex societal effects of technology. We didn't get it right with SMS (who'd have thought 160-character messages crowbarred into the GSM spec would alter our habits around social rendezvousing?), so our chances of getting it right with the likes of augmented reality and mass access to the internet are pretty low. Never mind, best if we all just inspect and adapt, eh?

I do think that power and battery is an underexamined topic: screens, connectivity and location technologies all need energy from somewhere, and I'm convinced that a revolution in this area will change a whole load of deep assumptions that we make as an industry over what's possible in the land of untethered mobile devices.

Go check out the presentation, there's a pile of great stuff in there. David Wood has a nice summary of it.

I love this interview with Jon French of HTC. Not because of what he reveals about their approach to the Sense UI; not because after 10 years of Nokia and Sony Ericsson loyalty, I'm a happy HTC user myself; but because of this quote:

Plenty of previously agnostic OEMs have now launched app stores. Where’s yours?
We have no plans for an app store. HTC is not in that business. For us, it’s all about how you integrate the app store – whether Windows Marketplace or Android Market – into the experience of using the device.

How refreshing; a large player in mobile with no plans to open yet another app store!