I have come to the real­iza­tion that I am the nerd amongst my set of friends. I shot out a sta­tus update last night on Twit­ter and Face­book ask­ing who else would be watch­ing the big Google/Samsung event. The resound­ing response, to quote my good friend Jeniene, was “**crick­ets.** I had to laugh. Nev­er­the­less, I sol­diered on, joined on GoogleTalk by my tech partner-in-crime, Fran­cis. In a nut­shell, last night Google rolled out it’s lat­est ver­sion of the Android Oper­at­ing Sys­tem, known as Ice Cream Sand­wich. In tan­dem with that announce­ment, Sam­sung revealed the not-so-secret Galaxy Nexus. The Galaxy Nexus, though a bit larger, looks like a beau­ti­ful piece of hard­ware. The focus, how­ever, really was on the improve­ments to the oper­at­ing sys­tem. I titled this piece “Good Gets Bet­ter” because I feel that Android, at this point, is good, but needs improve­ment. What I saw in the pre­sen­ta­tion last night has thor­oughly intrigued me, and may just keep me from a pos­si­ble move to the iPhone. Though I am prone to, some­times exhaus­tive, long-form posts, I’ll let the folks at Google explain the what’s new.

If you really want to get your hands dirty, and get an insider’s per­spec­tive on the direc­tion Google is tak­ing Android, check out this great inter­view of Matias Duarte by Joshua Topol­sky for This Is My Next (soon to be The Verge).

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t give a nod to Apple’s pre­sen­ta­tion of the improved, though not entirely new, iPhone 4S

Kudos to Apple. They truly know how to do a slick presentation.

On an aside, I won­der if Apple’s peo­ple know that their keynotes would be just as suc­cess­ful with­out so many superla­tives. Apple is quite fond of the word “amazing!”

I, along with many oth­ers, was dis­ap­pointed that a com­pletely new iPhone 5 was not intro­duced. All the rumors and spec­u­la­tion about a new body had me going. It should be noted that my friend Brian nailed nearly every fea­ture of the iPhone 4S sev­eral weeks before the announce­ment. Irre­spec­tive of my let down over a new shiny body, the iPhone form fac­tor is still very attrac­tive. There are a num­ber of inter­est­ing enhance­ments com­ing with iOS 5 that really don’t have any­thing to do with the new 4S itself, but if I were going to move to the iPhone, I would get the 4S over the 4. The improve­ments to the cam­era, which was already a solid per­former, look really impres­sive. Sev­eral of my friends who are pho­tog­ra­phers have been rav­ing about the cam­era. For what it’s worth, Siri, the per­sonal assis­tant soft­ware, is cute but not some­thing that blows me away. In all can­dor, all the post-announcement blather and gig­gles about how “neat” Siri is causes a slight amount of gas­tric juice to bub­ble up into my mouth. Look..I have a sense of humor, but come on!

The iPhone 4S has risen near the top of the list, right behind the Galaxy Nesus, as a replace­ment for my Droid X. I haven’t given up on Win­dows Phone 7…yet. If only Nokia would release that beau­ti­ful N9 here in the States with the Win­dows Phone 7 oper­at­ing system.