Some thoughts after moving to a Galaxy Nexus from an iPhone 4S over the weekend.
Hardware
The screen on my galaxy nexus has some notable problems. The worst is that it has a blue tint near the top, the guys on android forum were trying to tell me that it is a ghosting of the menu but it does not look like the menu. It's more of a blue shading on that end of the display that never goes away. After some back and forth and my posting a picture several agree that it is defective.
The other problem isn't so bad but basically the default brightness is way too low and seems to be a common issue on android. Indoors when the brightness is above a certain minimum level the colors and saturation look very good, below that level everything sort of fades out and the stock auto brightness controlls really want to keep you below that point. An app called Lux free totally resolved this issue though I am still trying to pick lower brightness levels to save battery, just not plain dark like stock wants to be. I'm not picky but I would like whites to show up as white instead of clearly being gray, especially annoying as they use grey to mark read email messages in the default mail clients. In the email I actually made the mistake of thinking some emails were read until I scrolled down and found some that really were read and the above ones just looked gray due to the screen, so a bad email UI design decision combined with a bad call on setting the auto brightness controlls leads to a real mistake. This is going to take some fiddling to get the level set right at the relevant light sensor level but I never really had to fiddle with the screen on the iPhone to make it look good as the default auto brightness at halfway just worked well all around with the excellent quality screen. On the other hand reading the Nexus screen in the daylight seems to be pretty good and it doesn't wash out as much as the LCD on the iPhone, that seems to be a simple ability of the two screen technologies.
Those two things were pretty depressing on a phone that I largely got for the screen in the first place, I was hoping the phone would be a dream to look at with the first glance but it looks like it will take some work and an RMA to get there. Those two things aside resolution and sharpness don't seem to be a problem, though the iphone display certainly has a much more crisp razor edge to objects and fonts. Simply having a nice big display on the phone is just a very nice thing, over the weekend reading books and browsing the web on this was very nice which is something I was hoping that the Nexus would nail and it does very good at it and would have been perfect if it wasn't for the above two things.
Really the only thing I flat out don't like about the phone is the memory, I'm not going to be able to fit my music on to it and I'm going to have to figure out what I want to carry with me. I would have much rather just spent some money and got this exact same phone with more memory. Why does google not put memory card slots on any of their flagship devices?
Battery life seems like it might be a problem with the stock battery. First day I had to charge it several times but I was using it a LOT. Will revisit this later but I recently discovered that when the phone is plugged in and you're using something like email browsing the web or reading a book it does not charge, the charger is not actually keeping up with the screen apparently. In settings, battery the screen is always listed as being over 70% of battery usage, usually higher. The charger that was included with the phone makes a very high pitched and annoying squealing noise, enough that in a quiet room I noticed it right away when plugging it in. Fortunately I have a selection of chargers that don't make noise like that. I would have preferred that Samsung include a decent charger rather than the apple iphone charger knockoff in black, minus the apple charger quality.
At home I am on the very edge of getting an AT&T HSPA+ signal and often I see my iphones drop to EDGE, cycle to no signal and then back to 3G and now the fake 4G indicator on the 4S if I am in one of my deep interior rooms. My 3GS struggled, the 4 was better and did exhibit the antennagate problem which was improved with a case and the 4S was better than both and rarely dropped out of coverage. The Nexus seems to be as bad as the 3GS was, most of the time it displays no or one bar of coverage at home but does show the H symbol showing HSPA+ when I have any signal at all. In settings under battery it has cell standby listed at 24% of the time without a signal and yesterday it was 30%. I didn't miss calls with the iphones as long as they were in one of the three rooms near the outside but I wonder if this will be a problem with the Nexus. It doesn't appear to be a problem with battery drain as it only lists it overall as being responsible for under 5% of the battery. Wifi reception also isn't as good as any of the apple devices I have. At first I tried the 5ghz N band because I thought that would be better than the 2.4ghz G band all my apple handhelds use. It really wasn't though, I had a couple instances of not being able to get reception in my bedroom. I changed the Nexus over to the 2.4ghz G band and it seemed a little better, though it was displaying only one or two bars the farthest I could get away from my time capsule in my home which is the bedroom. All of my apple devices display either top signal or down one bar in the same place, and I have not ever had them not be able to get a signal at home over wifi. Bluetooth seems to be the same story, with my iphones I could sit them on my desk charging and take my jambox into the kitchen and never have a problem. With the Nexus I was able to do the same but I had to be careful of where I put the jambox in the kitchen, in some orientations or places it would experience dropouts. I feel that across the board the Galaxy Nexus wireless performance isn't as good as the iphone 4S. Not sure if this is going to impact me in real life though, but if I start missing calls my SIM is going back into the iphone.
One little nice thing is it will allow me to turn on tethering, the Nexus apparantly doesn't listen to the carrier settings to lock that out if you aren't paying for it. Of course if I do use it I am sure Straight Talk will kill my SIM card straight away, but that's all part of being on a prepaid AT&T MVNO.
The case materials might not seem to be of nice quality at first glance because they are what appears to be painted plastic but honestly this thing with the curved back fits in the hand and pockets very well. I am of the opinion that the 3gs and lower was a better ergnomic design than the 4 or 4s and the Nexus is much more plesant to hold like a 3gs is. It feels like it might be lighter than the iPhone but I think that's more of an apparent issue because it is so much bigger, so in the hand and pocket it actually feels very light. Around the sides the plastic extends past the glass and is actually raised up a little bit so you have a bit of an edge around the glass protecting it. I think this is a very important step to protect this big screen from side/edge impacts and when the phone is on its face on the table it will protect it from scratches too. The bent screen seems like more of a gimmick than anything that could be said to be a feature but it is there and is very subtle, I suppose this will further protect the screen from scratches on a flat surface. On ebay most of the cracked screen Galaxy Nexus phones have a single crack across the middle, IMO this would be caused by having the phone facing some solid flat surface and something heavy pressed up against the back causing the curved screen to flatten and crack. This phone has a nice big piece of glass on front and it will need some respect but the screen does have a oleophobic coating just like the iphone and feels just as good to use.
The Galaxy Nexus I have is $350 + $10 shipping from google and the equivalent iphone I am comparing it to (same memory) is a $649 purchase from apple (free shipping). What you get from Google/Samsung for this phone is pretty impressive IMO but you can see where there were some cost decisions made.
Software
The phone shipped with 4.0 something and it updateed to 4.0.4 OTA shortly after taking it out of the box, connecting to wifi and hitting update. I had to stop the google framework services, clear cache and check for updates several more times before I got the jelly bean update to 4.1.1 OTA. It likely would have done it on its own within a couple of days but I wanted to start with it up to date. Once triggered the updates were rather small to download and happened quickly, I think the process was faster than the last couple OTAs on my iPhone but I didn't have to trick the iphone into getting them.
It seems like speech dictation accuracy is a toss up between google and siri. I thought google dictation was offline and done on the phone but it seems like that's not true because I've gotten the message several times now that it can't reach google services. I know I am struggling a little bit with the Google editing because I'm just not familiar with the interface but I think that's just me at the moment.
I really enjoy live widgets with their availible different sizes and actively showing content, hope more developers make them too. Already I have several apps that have really useful widgets and it adds so much to the experience. I really wish the iphone had something to compare to widgets, if you think about it the iphone does have one active icon that shows the date and none of the other icons actively show content. Even the stock clock icon on the iphone displays the same wrong time all the time, correct twice a day jokes aside. On the second home screen or whatever they call it where all your individual apps show up I like the default behavior that everything sorts alphabetically, I wish the iPhone would do that but then it would probably mess up your desktop and offensd people because it only has the one desktop that frandly is hard to organize. This only makes sense where you have another better desktop with the things that you actually commonly use like on the android. I'm liking the multi level desktop situation more than I thought i would and it pretty much comes down to the usefulness of widgets that make it.
It's also nice that I can finally reach my file share and pull files to the phone over wifi and drop them in an app, echoes of my using using win mobile 5/6 here. It is especially ironic is that it's an apple time capsule I'm pulling the files from. Something that just isn't possible on apple devices.
I found equivalents to most of my apps except for something to replace tomtom and give me decent offline gps maps. I would like to hear suggestions on this. Someone suggested Sygic GPS which looks very nice but a little pricey for a phone a I may not keep. Till then NAVfree USA sort of works, but finding addresses in it really sucks like the app store reviews say. Right away I stumbled on Moon+ reader and I was most impressed with it, it comes really close to Stanza reader on the iphone which is my favorite book reader but unfortunately sunseted by amazon and won't be updated ever again. I was thrilled to see My-Cast weather in the play store, my favorite weather app on iphone. It appears we won't be seeing the amazing rain/snow app Dark Sky in the play store anytime soon, it didn't appear to make the kickstarter goal the developer set which is a real shame. Dog Catcher appeared to be a really good equivalent to Instacast on the iphone, both are some pretty powerful podcast apps. Glance Note pretty much sucks in the way it auto saves (as in there is none) and with too large font with no ability to change it, but it at least gets me into my Simplenotes. Teamspeak is availible for both platforms. 1password has a poor showing on the play store, the password manager is read only on android but had no problems reading my encrypted files in dropbox.
Extended comparisons
My corporate blackberry Bold 9650 with OS 6 continues to shame itself daily with laggyness and being hard to do anything on it. Compared to either of the two above phones this is just a feature phone with some email capability and it doesn't do that particularly well. This device is a pretty good reminder of how well apple and android devices really are.
Hardware
The screen on my galaxy nexus has some notable problems. The worst is that it has a blue tint near the top, the guys on android forum were trying to tell me that it is a ghosting of the menu but it does not look like the menu. It's more of a blue shading on that end of the display that never goes away. After some back and forth and my posting a picture several agree that it is defective.
The other problem isn't so bad but basically the default brightness is way too low and seems to be a common issue on android. Indoors when the brightness is above a certain minimum level the colors and saturation look very good, below that level everything sort of fades out and the stock auto brightness controlls really want to keep you below that point. An app called Lux free totally resolved this issue though I am still trying to pick lower brightness levels to save battery, just not plain dark like stock wants to be. I'm not picky but I would like whites to show up as white instead of clearly being gray, especially annoying as they use grey to mark read email messages in the default mail clients. In the email I actually made the mistake of thinking some emails were read until I scrolled down and found some that really were read and the above ones just looked gray due to the screen, so a bad email UI design decision combined with a bad call on setting the auto brightness controlls leads to a real mistake. This is going to take some fiddling to get the level set right at the relevant light sensor level but I never really had to fiddle with the screen on the iPhone to make it look good as the default auto brightness at halfway just worked well all around with the excellent quality screen. On the other hand reading the Nexus screen in the daylight seems to be pretty good and it doesn't wash out as much as the LCD on the iPhone, that seems to be a simple ability of the two screen technologies.
Those two things were pretty depressing on a phone that I largely got for the screen in the first place, I was hoping the phone would be a dream to look at with the first glance but it looks like it will take some work and an RMA to get there. Those two things aside resolution and sharpness don't seem to be a problem, though the iphone display certainly has a much more crisp razor edge to objects and fonts. Simply having a nice big display on the phone is just a very nice thing, over the weekend reading books and browsing the web on this was very nice which is something I was hoping that the Nexus would nail and it does very good at it and would have been perfect if it wasn't for the above two things.
Really the only thing I flat out don't like about the phone is the memory, I'm not going to be able to fit my music on to it and I'm going to have to figure out what I want to carry with me. I would have much rather just spent some money and got this exact same phone with more memory. Why does google not put memory card slots on any of their flagship devices?
Battery life seems like it might be a problem with the stock battery. First day I had to charge it several times but I was using it a LOT. Will revisit this later but I recently discovered that when the phone is plugged in and you're using something like email browsing the web or reading a book it does not charge, the charger is not actually keeping up with the screen apparently. In settings, battery the screen is always listed as being over 70% of battery usage, usually higher. The charger that was included with the phone makes a very high pitched and annoying squealing noise, enough that in a quiet room I noticed it right away when plugging it in. Fortunately I have a selection of chargers that don't make noise like that. I would have preferred that Samsung include a decent charger rather than the apple iphone charger knockoff in black, minus the apple charger quality.
At home I am on the very edge of getting an AT&T HSPA+ signal and often I see my iphones drop to EDGE, cycle to no signal and then back to 3G and now the fake 4G indicator on the 4S if I am in one of my deep interior rooms. My 3GS struggled, the 4 was better and did exhibit the antennagate problem which was improved with a case and the 4S was better than both and rarely dropped out of coverage. The Nexus seems to be as bad as the 3GS was, most of the time it displays no or one bar of coverage at home but does show the H symbol showing HSPA+ when I have any signal at all. In settings under battery it has cell standby listed at 24% of the time without a signal and yesterday it was 30%. I didn't miss calls with the iphones as long as they were in one of the three rooms near the outside but I wonder if this will be a problem with the Nexus. It doesn't appear to be a problem with battery drain as it only lists it overall as being responsible for under 5% of the battery. Wifi reception also isn't as good as any of the apple devices I have. At first I tried the 5ghz N band because I thought that would be better than the 2.4ghz G band all my apple handhelds use. It really wasn't though, I had a couple instances of not being able to get reception in my bedroom. I changed the Nexus over to the 2.4ghz G band and it seemed a little better, though it was displaying only one or two bars the farthest I could get away from my time capsule in my home which is the bedroom. All of my apple devices display either top signal or down one bar in the same place, and I have not ever had them not be able to get a signal at home over wifi. Bluetooth seems to be the same story, with my iphones I could sit them on my desk charging and take my jambox into the kitchen and never have a problem. With the Nexus I was able to do the same but I had to be careful of where I put the jambox in the kitchen, in some orientations or places it would experience dropouts. I feel that across the board the Galaxy Nexus wireless performance isn't as good as the iphone 4S. Not sure if this is going to impact me in real life though, but if I start missing calls my SIM is going back into the iphone.
One little nice thing is it will allow me to turn on tethering, the Nexus apparantly doesn't listen to the carrier settings to lock that out if you aren't paying for it. Of course if I do use it I am sure Straight Talk will kill my SIM card straight away, but that's all part of being on a prepaid AT&T MVNO.
The case materials might not seem to be of nice quality at first glance because they are what appears to be painted plastic but honestly this thing with the curved back fits in the hand and pockets very well. I am of the opinion that the 3gs and lower was a better ergnomic design than the 4 or 4s and the Nexus is much more plesant to hold like a 3gs is. It feels like it might be lighter than the iPhone but I think that's more of an apparent issue because it is so much bigger, so in the hand and pocket it actually feels very light. Around the sides the plastic extends past the glass and is actually raised up a little bit so you have a bit of an edge around the glass protecting it. I think this is a very important step to protect this big screen from side/edge impacts and when the phone is on its face on the table it will protect it from scratches too. The bent screen seems like more of a gimmick than anything that could be said to be a feature but it is there and is very subtle, I suppose this will further protect the screen from scratches on a flat surface. On ebay most of the cracked screen Galaxy Nexus phones have a single crack across the middle, IMO this would be caused by having the phone facing some solid flat surface and something heavy pressed up against the back causing the curved screen to flatten and crack. This phone has a nice big piece of glass on front and it will need some respect but the screen does have a oleophobic coating just like the iphone and feels just as good to use.
The Galaxy Nexus I have is $350 + $10 shipping from google and the equivalent iphone I am comparing it to (same memory) is a $649 purchase from apple (free shipping). What you get from Google/Samsung for this phone is pretty impressive IMO but you can see where there were some cost decisions made.
Software
The phone shipped with 4.0 something and it updateed to 4.0.4 OTA shortly after taking it out of the box, connecting to wifi and hitting update. I had to stop the google framework services, clear cache and check for updates several more times before I got the jelly bean update to 4.1.1 OTA. It likely would have done it on its own within a couple of days but I wanted to start with it up to date. Once triggered the updates were rather small to download and happened quickly, I think the process was faster than the last couple OTAs on my iPhone but I didn't have to trick the iphone into getting them.
It seems like speech dictation accuracy is a toss up between google and siri. I thought google dictation was offline and done on the phone but it seems like that's not true because I've gotten the message several times now that it can't reach google services. I know I am struggling a little bit with the Google editing because I'm just not familiar with the interface but I think that's just me at the moment.
I really enjoy live widgets with their availible different sizes and actively showing content, hope more developers make them too. Already I have several apps that have really useful widgets and it adds so much to the experience. I really wish the iphone had something to compare to widgets, if you think about it the iphone does have one active icon that shows the date and none of the other icons actively show content. Even the stock clock icon on the iphone displays the same wrong time all the time, correct twice a day jokes aside. On the second home screen or whatever they call it where all your individual apps show up I like the default behavior that everything sorts alphabetically, I wish the iPhone would do that but then it would probably mess up your desktop and offensd people because it only has the one desktop that frandly is hard to organize. This only makes sense where you have another better desktop with the things that you actually commonly use like on the android. I'm liking the multi level desktop situation more than I thought i would and it pretty much comes down to the usefulness of widgets that make it.
It's also nice that I can finally reach my file share and pull files to the phone over wifi and drop them in an app, echoes of my using using win mobile 5/6 here. It is especially ironic is that it's an apple time capsule I'm pulling the files from. Something that just isn't possible on apple devices.
I found equivalents to most of my apps except for something to replace tomtom and give me decent offline gps maps. I would like to hear suggestions on this. Someone suggested Sygic GPS which looks very nice but a little pricey for a phone a I may not keep. Till then NAVfree USA sort of works, but finding addresses in it really sucks like the app store reviews say. Right away I stumbled on Moon+ reader and I was most impressed with it, it comes really close to Stanza reader on the iphone which is my favorite book reader but unfortunately sunseted by amazon and won't be updated ever again. I was thrilled to see My-Cast weather in the play store, my favorite weather app on iphone. It appears we won't be seeing the amazing rain/snow app Dark Sky in the play store anytime soon, it didn't appear to make the kickstarter goal the developer set which is a real shame. Dog Catcher appeared to be a really good equivalent to Instacast on the iphone, both are some pretty powerful podcast apps. Glance Note pretty much sucks in the way it auto saves (as in there is none) and with too large font with no ability to change it, but it at least gets me into my Simplenotes. Teamspeak is availible for both platforms. 1password has a poor showing on the play store, the password manager is read only on android but had no problems reading my encrypted files in dropbox.
Extended comparisons
My corporate blackberry Bold 9650 with OS 6 continues to shame itself daily with laggyness and being hard to do anything on it. Compared to either of the two above phones this is just a feature phone with some email capability and it doesn't do that particularly well. This device is a pretty good reminder of how well apple and android devices really are.
