Thoughts after moving to Nexus from iPhone

maxburn

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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 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.
 
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Sniper1087

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google dictation works perfectly for me now google dictation doesnt mean google now try to do a text in airplane mode and press the mic you see it does work.
 

dalvik

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Sniper1087
Just curious.. That's quite a lot of smartphones for two years, you do reviews of these phones or buy them for yourself? If you don't mind me asking...
 

maxburn

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google dictation works perfectly for me now google dictation doesnt mean google now try to do a text in airplane mode and press the mic you see it does work.

So does that mean something crashed on the phone and dictate stopped working? Because it has stopped working a couple times now. I'll have to screenshot of the error next time I see it.

Sniper1087
Just curious.. That's quite a lot of smartphones for two years, you do reviews of these phones or buy them for yourself? If you don't mind me asking...

I would say it's closer to 3 somewhere, all of my iphones I bought used off of ebay. I am on prepaid and I have no contract to contend with. Nexus is the first phone I've got brand new.
 

scoobdude

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Settings > language and input > speech typing > settings > check offline speech.

For signal on WiFi and such be sure to compare actual db vs signal bars. I remember reading apple tweaked theirs due to antenna gate.

Try other radios for better cell coverage.

Remember android is more like winmo. Everything can be hacked from a sw point of view.

For screen issues there are kernels and Roms that give you more control. Look up galaxy nexus purple tint.

Xda will be your new time suck if not already

Welcome to open source

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Android Central Forums
 

maxburn

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Settings > language and input > speech typing > settings > check offline speech.

Thanks, the menus are a little different on my phone but that got me there, it says english is downloaded and installed already? Not sure what the issue was then and it hasn't repeated again.

For signal on WiFi and such be sure to compare actual db vs signal bars. I remember reading apple tweaked theirs due to antenna gate.

This is true, I went though this with the 4 I had, they both changed the level at which certain bars appeared and the overall shape of the bars. Honestly though the level it displays anywhere doesn't matter to me, I was mainly going by the bluetooth radio can't solidly reach my jambox in the kitchen, the phone won't ring when you call it when it is deep inside the house and not near an exterior wall and this being the first device that couldn't reach wifi in my bedroom if I hold it a certain way. This tells me it is right on the edge of its capabilities and for me shouldn't be an issue as it is "good enough" but better cell reception would be nice to have.

Try other radios for better cell coverage.

I have no idea what you are trying to communicate with this statement.

Remember android is more like winmo. Everything can be hacked from a sw point of view.

For screen issues there are kernels and Roms that give you more control. Look up galaxy nexus purple tint.

Xda will be your new time suck if not already

Easy hackability is #2 on my personal list of why I am switching to android from iPhone behind a big screen. The simple tweak for brightness I mentioned would have been flat out impossible on iPhone and I have jailbroken to get F-lux and simple radio on/off toggles on iPhone for example. I was thrilled that the radio on/off toggles were a widget already installed out of the box on the nexus.
 

zrxoa1

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By other radios the poster means flashing different radios on your Nexus, like you flash roms.

I want to thank you for your write up here. I have been thinking of grabbing the unlocked Nexus and jumping to straight talk. I am currently on Verizon, going back n forth between my jailbroken iPhone 4 and my rooted Rezound. I have unlimited data, but Verizon is ticking me off.

Gives me some answers.....I think I'll stick with the phones I have and Verizon for now.


Sent from my ADR6425LVW using Tapatalk 2
 

maxburn

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By other radios the poster means flashing different radios on your Nexus, like you flash roms.

Wow, that is a level of hackability I wasn't even aware of, thanks. I am of course reluctant to test that out.

I want to thank you for your write up here. I have been thinking of grabbing the unlocked Nexus and jumping to straight talk. I am currently on Verizon, going back n forth between my jailbroken iPhone 4 and my rooted Rezound. I have unlimited data, but Verizon is ticking me off.

Gives me some answers.....I think I'll stick with the phones I have and Verizon for now.

The nexus is a great phone screen problems aside and I'm on hold to get an RMA and fix that now.

Straight Talk isn't truly unlimited, especially if you are on an AT&T SIM like I am. If you keep your data in check it can be nice to save a lot of money on, read all about it here: Straight Talk

I still feel that verizon has better coverage for voice and now LTE, but you sure are going to pay for it. I have always had verizon on my important corporate cells.
 

maxburn

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Now officially pissed off at Google. Spent a total of 50 minutes ao far today on hold across three calls in to the play store 1-855-83-NEXUS (63987) to process an RMA and they couldn’t be bothered to answer the phone. There is also no provision on the play store website to start an RMA which would be something I would expect from a company strong on the web like you know, Google. That’s 50 minutes today spent thinking about how easy it was to get my iphone swapped several times for problems.
 

djflan

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Now officially pissed off at Google. Spent a total of 50 minutes ao far today on hold across three calls in to the play store 1-855-83-NEXUS (63987) to process an RMA and they couldn’t be bothered to answer the phone. There is also no provision on the play store website to start an RMA which would be something I would expect from a company strong on the web like you know, Google. That’s 50 minutes today spent thinking about how easy it was to get my iphone swapped several times for problems.

I'd give it a couple days, they are probably just overrun with the Nexus 7 launch. It has not gone too well....just take a look at the Nex 7 forum. I'll bet the call center is getting spanked right about now. Sorry about the probs with yours, I love mine.

I do have a couple qualms about the Gnex...notably

1. The battery life sucks....at least on the stock battery, or the extended Verizon battery (which is a joke IMHO)

2. The construction could be much better. This is what I love about the admittedly few Apple products I own - the engineering of the actual product is amazing.

some things I don't care for are software issues:
I hate the small buttons used in Google music to do an operation to a song, playlist, etc...

Anyway, give the phone some time - its a great experience, and I wish everyone had the gnex experience when using Android for the first time - then it might not have its reputation as a second-rate os. I don't understand how people can buy $50 phones and expect an Apple-grade experience.. :p
 

maxburn

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With my experience on the play store I was almost ready to just return the thing. A further 52 minutes on hold got me in and because I wanted an RMA they just transferred me to Samsung which would've been nice to know right off the bat but two more operators later with Samsung I had an advance RMA processed.

Funnily enough I like the construction of this phone much better over the current iPhones it's much more practical. But it doesn't look like a piece of art.

I'm rather liking the software so far but it's going to take much longer than this to get a full impression, this is my first experience with android.

This is actually the first new cell phone I've ever owned. All my other iPhones etc. I bought used off of eBay.
 

EnDroidable

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idk if anyone has mentioned this already, but you can put 20,000 songs for free on googles music player, and just use wifi/3g/4g lte to connect to it and all ur songs are there, so you dont need to waste any memory on the phone for songs.
 

maxburn

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idk if anyone has mentioned this already, but you can put 20,000 songs for free on googles music player, and just use wifi/3g/4g lte to connect to it and all ur songs are there, so you dont need to waste any memory on the phone for songs.

I am on prepaid with terms that prohibit streaming (straight talk).

What's wrong with your phone?

The screen issues I mentioned above, I also have a whole another thread on it.
 

sting7k

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Oh man that sucks, Just saw the pic your other thread about it. I see the blue tint at the top of the screen there. Hope they get it sorted out quickly. It was nice being able to get such easy replacement of an iPhone even with seemingly minor complaints.

Nice take on coming from an iPhone. I am a long time iPhone user as well and just got my Galaxy Nexus recently. I feel the same on many things.
 

maxburn

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Oh man that sucks, Just saw the pic your other thread about it. I see the blue tint at the top of the screen there. Hope they get it sorted out quickly. It was nice being able to get such easy replacement of an iPhone even with seemingly minor complaints.

Nice take on coming from an iPhone. I am a long time iPhone user as well and just got my Galaxy Nexus recently. I feel the same on many things.

Yeah it does but I have an advance replacement arriving tomorrow. Based on others feedback I think I have a good chance that one will be trouble free. I don't feel the galaxy nexus is anything special hardware wise but its decent enough for many people. I'm thinking this battery situation is going to be trouble though, continued...



Galaxy nexus as a GPS

Today I spent four hours driving out to and from a job site. I had dogcatcher running a podcast into the stereo via a line in and the phone was plugged into power. At the same time I was running google maps navigation with supposedly "offline" maps. This is a very very common task for me and I have done it with a win mobile 6 device ages ago plus my succession of iPhones before but those devices were all on TomTom off-line maps. My observations:

-Battery was discharging the whole way while the screen was on, despite being plugged in and charging. If I hadn't noticed and turned off the screen I might have arrived on site with 50% battery. Instead I turned off the screen on long stretches of interstate and arrived with 80% battery. The device started the day 100% and was plugged in the whole time.

-"Offline" maps had some troubles, they showed roads but there were some terrain tiles missing here and there, not sure why? Something I wasn't aware of until last night is you can have a whole list of offline maps for different areas, for some reason I thought you were limited to only one as demonstrated in the IO keynote. This is a pretty big deal for me, the phone shows my total cell data usage at only 30mb for the last couple days. So it looks like offline maps are prepaid friendly after all.

-I don't care for the mandatory 3D view in navigation but I can get used to it. I just think it's easier to read 2D and 3D ends up all scrunched up on the screen. There is a 2D view while in navigation but it is tied to the map facing North instead of your direction of travel, so if you are heading south you can only see a quarter of inch of road ahead of you. Would be nice for someone to mention a setting here that I am missing.

-Navigation with the beta badge plastered on several screens crashed on me once and that could have been my fault because I was multitasking between two other apps. Otherwise worked nice and wasn't overly mouthy like TomTom can be.

-When you arrive at the location you get a automatic street view picture of the building, which is very nice. No way that is coming from "offline" maps though. I'm cool with that, super nice touch. Unlike some other GPSs it tells you the side of the street you are looking for as you arrive, also nice.

-Out on the road I couldn't get voice dictation to work at all, specifically trying to say something like "find a dunkin donuts near me". Typing it worked. Even though offline dictation US shows downloaded is on I have my doubts...

-The audio interplay between GPS navigation announcements and dogcatcher playing a podcast works perfectly, it pauses the podcast while the GPS is saying directions. This is something that has annoyed me for a long time on iPhone between TomTom and Instacast, it won't pause instacast. TomTom will pause the default music app though. The default iOS music app sucks balls for podcasts and I never tried apples brand new stand alone podcast app, at first glance the feature set is way too sparse.



So yeah, liking android and likely be moving to an SIII when it gets jellybean (not soon I think) and the prices on them dip under iPhone level on the secondary market.
 

Eileen89

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Now officially pissed off at Google. Spent a total of 50 minutes ao far today on hold across three calls in to the play store 1-855-83-NEXUS (63987) to process an RMA and they couldn?t be bothered to answer the phone. There is also no provision on the play store website to start an RMA which would be something I would expect from a company strong on the web like you know, Google. That?s 50 minutes today spent thinking about how easy it was to get my iphone swapped several times for problems.

I also had the unpleasant experience of having to call Google on Monday. Spent 30 minutes on hold the first time before giving up. Called back again a few hours later and waited another 30 to 45 minutes listening to that sick elevator music before a Google rep finally took my call. While I realize they are busy I feel that any call should be answered within 15 minutes. Heck I've called Apple during the busiest times during their launch of the iPhone and iPad and the longest I waited was less than 10 minutes. Google needs to work on their call times in order to maintain customer satisfaction.


Sent from my iPad LTE using Tapatalk HD.
 

patruns

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"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?"

Since you are making a direct comparison between the iPhone and the Nexus I am not sure why you are mentioning this. The iPhone does not have a memory card slot. Also, this is a Samsung device, not a Google device. FYI, the S III does have a card slot.
 

maxburn

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Since you are making a direct comparison between the iPhone and the Nexus I am not sure why you are mentioning this. The iPhone does not have a memory card slot. Also, this is a Samsung device, not a Google device. FYI, the S III does have a card slot.

I don't feel I need a memory card slot on my 64gb iPhone 4S. Can't get a Nexus in that size.
 

maxburn

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The screen on the replacement phone is much better, no defects I can see.

The backup/restore features built in failed to do anything at all near as I can tell. It didn't download my apps and when I went and got the apps I had bought and downloaded previously from the play store their settings were not retained from the old phone either. I double checked on the old phone and backups were turned on all along. I was even getting all the same warning and first time use screens like do you want to enable google now etc.

On my old phone the data usage limits somehow disappeared. I distinctly remember checking the data as mentioned above for my trip but as I was swapping from this phone I discovered it somehow pulled down 3.5GB of data. Now I am thinking this might possibly be listing wifi data? This graph I am looking at showing all that data is after I pulled the SIM so the graph switched over to show wifi data? Data usage graph is not clear to me at all.
 

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