Goodbye Nokia, Hello Android and Nexus S

These are my thoughts as I'm waiting for my shiny new Nexus S, which I ordered from US a few days ago, to land in Israel.

I've been a Nokia kind of guy for many years now, since my first mobile phone. Nokia phones had a simple button layout, consistent user interface and menus which made it easy to use whatever model you had. When I looked for my first smartphone a couple of years ago - I eagerly waited for the Nokia 5800. It's a great phone which served me well despite a few quirks, but now is showing its age and not in a way that some next model can fix.

What I mean is that as years went by, smartphones became more and more our mobile personal computers, where most important are not just the original hardware and software but the apps you install later. And the Symbian OS Nokia uses is rather old and hard to develop for, so almost none of the apps developed in the last year or two that I wanted could be installed on my phone. And even though I don't know much about Meego, the mobile OS Nokia will using for future smartphones - I think it will be too late. All apps today are developed for iPhone and Android first due to their market share, and it's hard for me to imagine what technical advantages might the Linux-based Meego have over Andorid, which is undergoing such fast development and improvement.

My parents are still using the simpler Nokia "feature-phones", since they are much more comfortable with the ordinary keys rather than a touchscreen, and there Nokia might hold its dominance for some time. This is a low margin market which addresses the much larger world population that can't afford the luxury of a smartphone. Yet as all technology goes, this will also get cheaper in a very short period, and soon enough I think there will be cheap Android based smartphones available for this large market.

So I say goodbye to Nokia and hello to Android. What would you suggest for the eager owner of a fresh Android phone? What are the must-have apps or settings I should start with?