Seeing as how KitKat is supposed to be optimized for low end devices, I can see it running on Nexus 4 amazingly well, extending it life for another 18-24 months easily.
The Nexus 4 has been, in my experience, an extremely solid and reliable phone. It easily is a better phone in its own right than the HTC EVO 4G was in its time, and that's saying a lot since the EVO 4G was a very decent unit.
But then again, I don't know if I'd still want to be using a non-LTE phone more than a year from now.
That's your call, but I suggest you heed sduda210's words below.
I'm not worried about upgrading to an LTE device until the carriers spread LTE coverage. Right now I would have coverage at work and home but in both locations I usually use WiFi to reduce data consumption. In between I do not.
Yes, exactly. In my area, there's to all intents and purposes no LTE service. Even if there was, there's been a moritorium on cell tower building, which has seriously negatively affected T-Mo's coverage. I mean, not to poo-poo LTE or anything, but without better data coverage and building penetration, speed isn't exactly the first issue I think they need to work on.
It really depends on how you use your phone. If you can run the apps you want, then you're all set. I think a lot of people will concentrate on the price of the next Nexus phone. If it's relatively cheap, people will just upgrade their phones every year, whether they really need to or not.
Yep, pretty much. Watching my fellow man is like watching sheep being led to the abattoir.
You can run Android 4.3 on the Nexus S (by flashing AOSP port) which is a three years old single-core device and it can run the OS relatively smoothly (smoother than the iPhone 4S dual-core running iOS7 from personal experience). So why not? The Nexus 4 will probably get official updates atleast two years from now, Google only promise to keep updates to 18months of the device life, but they only stop updating the Nexus One and Nexus S because they has too little ram and too small of a /system partition size in order to receive over the air updates, not because they refuses to update it anymore.
Good points, someguy01234. And unlike Apple, at least Google doesn't deliberately try to f*** with your right to do what you want with your own hardware.