Review: Google Nexus 4
There are two numbers you need to keep in mind as you read this review. Firstly, 239, the remarkably small number of beer tokens Google wants in return for an unlocked, Sim-free 8GB example of the latest Nexus phone. And 2, which is the number of months it has taken me to actually get hold of one for a long-term test. The second …
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Note 2
The Note 2 has cornered battery life. It lasts literally forever and the phone is great too.
This Nexus handset is poor but for half the price of the Note what do you expect. Add to that LG are poor at making phones generally so it's a no no.
Re: Note 2
Agreed. Having purchased the Note 2 I can't praise it enough. The only way I'd have bought anything else is if there were a decent android with a hard qwerty keyboard available (i was upgrading from the desire Z).
Re: Note 2
'Literally' denotes that the following word be taken in its pure sense, no ifs, no buts, without qualification of any kind.
'Forever': until the end of days, the heat death of the universe etc.
Saying 'it lasts literally forever compared to other Android handsets' makes no sense. Either something is infinite, or it isn't. Infinity minus one is still infinity.
Re: Note 2
Regrettably, the non-literal use of "literally" is now acknowledged/accepted in non-formal contexts even in the Oxford English Dictionary:
"In recent years an extended use of literally (and also literal) has become very common, where literally (or literal) is used deliberately in non-literal contexts, for added effect, as in they bought the car and literally ran it into the ground. This use can lead to unintentional humorous effects ( we were literally killing ourselves laughing) and is not acceptable in formal contexts, though it is widespread." --> http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/literally?q=literally
Re: Note 2
Gosh it hurts when they go and define words by how people use them. :-)
It's almost like pedantry doesn't matter - shame as it's a great hobby.
Tempting
Nice to see this beast exists, phones are evolving nicely.
Re: Tempting
Seems pretty unremarkable to me... the price and vanilla 'droid are what make it noteworthy.
The Article
After my feedback on previous crappy quality reviews I thought I'd comment here.
This article is good and I heartily commend it.
Actual pictures of the device in the reviewers hand, genuine screenshots and fairly decent reporting of the device.
Many thumbs up!
Have one - love it
Storage (16GB) isn't an issue for me - I can't imagine installing so many large apps (ie games) that it's used up and I'm not about to start loading DVD-sized videos onto it.
Battery life - pretty much the same as my S3, so no surprises there - power costs.
It looks and feels like a quality device, 4.2 is gorgeous as well.
Give me a grand to spend on a phone and this is the phone that I would buy - no contest.
Try this Nexus availability checker app
Yes, Google Play is almost permanently out of stock, but for the few hours it isn't, may I recommend this checker app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.julienvermet.nexusavailability
Yes, a bit chicken and egg, but you've surely got another Android device somewhere? :-)
HTC One S
These can now be had for £250 sim free.
Albeit not the 4.7" powerhouse of the Nexus 4, in general use most people won't notice the difference.
They are also 16GB and have the 4.1.1 JB update, not the 4.2.
Some like HTC Sense, some don't, I personally prefer HTC's keyboard over the stock Android.
I also have no complaints about Battery Life - indeed it certainly lasts a LOT longer than the HTC One X ever did!
Personally I love this phone, I missed out on the initial batch - but I got in on the second batch, ordered within 2 minutes of them going back on sale - was told 7-14 days for delivery and sure enough 14 days later - it turned up. Haven't had a lot of luck with Photo Sphere yet - but then I've not had the chance yet to try it out outside - and I've been informed by the numerous Photo Sphere "experts" on G+ that it doesn't work too well indoors - and especially not at close range.
I was thinking of one of these...
...now I'm not. A battery life of 10 hours is utterly ludicrous. What is it with this obsession in making phones the size of monoliths? Have our hands and pockets trebled in size or something? The battery for these things has got to be measured in days, and weeks for standby. If it's not, then it's not fit for purpose.
I'm still looking for a new phone, but there is nothing on the market. It's like laptops - all 16:9 1366x786 glossy screens and thus utter shit. Wrong aspect ratio, dreadful DPI., wrong finish. 16:10 matte screens are the only sensible choice.
Why is technology racing forward on the one hand,but engaged full reverse in the other?
This has left me in two minds
I'm not sure what to do now. When the second batch went up in to the store some 5 weeks back I snagged myself a 16 GB one on 5-6 weeks notice (has anyone with shorter notice received theirs yet ?) as:-
1. My HTC Desire Z was near killed by the Gingerbread upgrade (known issue HTC refuse to acknowledge) (oh and none of the reliable rooting methods work beyond Froyo)
2. My Desire Z is rapidly failing (HTC don't seem to make them like they used to)
3. I can't swap my phone under contract until mid Feb
4. While tempted by a Note 2 for Feb I want to wait till Voda sell the LTE version (June/July ?)
I felt it was a decent handset for a silly price to tidy me over till June/July and then possibly sell. The problems for me are as to whether it will actually arrive, and more importantly battery life. My present and previous two phones have been fitted with extended batteries (HTC Desire Z, HTC Touch Pro, and HTC TyTn) as I like to have some juice spare by the end of the day and traditionally have travelled through low signal areas, which always hammers the battery. The repeated reviews claiming short battery life worry me.
Got one
The battery life feels about the same as my previous iPhone 4S. On paper it may not be (I haven't really checked), but day in day out I'm noticing a huge amount of difference. It's certainly better than the Nexus One I had before that, which struggled to get through a working day on standby! Being vanilla Android, it's trivial to toggle on things like Bluetooth, GSP and WIFI when you need them and have them switched off at other times.
If you don't mind having to charge it every evening, it's fine. As to the rest of the phone, it's gorgeous.
Re: Got one
... That should have said "day in day out I'm _not_ noticing a huge amount of difference".
The battery life thing is a mystery to me.
I have what I would think of as a normal amount of apps running, and most of them set to receive new data immediately (whatsapp, email, farcebook etc). I make an average amount of texts and calls per day, and am either connected to wifi or mobile data all day. With all of this I manage to get around 1.75 days out of the battery, and to be fair have done on every android phone I have ever owned. The only thing I rarely do is play games on a phone (which as in a previous post, would rather do on a tablet for bigger screen etc).
Seems to me that people complain about battery life, citing the actual device, when in reality I would think it is more to do with the apps etc installed by each individual user?
It's always a problem with battery testing. What constitutes "average" use. To get around that I load up the same apps that I have on my own phone (the Razr i) and use the review handset for a few days in its place. With something like the Nexus 4 I also spend at least 30 mins per day gaming and the same watching video. I think the last two are reasonable, after all, why buy a large screen HD phone if you avoid doing the things many people buy a large screen HD phone to do?
As a matter of course I'm inclined to be more negative about battery life in a handset with a fixed battery simply because investing in a new battery after 12 months of run-of-the-mill degradation is not an option.
Pretty fair review
My 2p, as someone who got a 16GB model in availability window 2...
Battery life was initially appalling, to the point where if it hadn't been the Christmas break it would have probably gone back. It now seems to have settled down, and is no worse than my old Galaxy S2, although still not as good as the Galaxy Nexus I have from work. I'm convinced there's a bug in the firmware personally, as looking at the usage stats "Keep Awake" seems to be double compared to the Galaxy. It is now perfectly ok for my usage pattern though, so it's not a problem for me.
Photosphere is a fun gimmick, and works reasonably ok though I always get at least one stitching artifact somewhere. It seems to work much better with the phone held in portrait.
Overall, now that the battery life is ok, I'm extremely happy with it - it's lightning quick, very nicely designed (I was ready to call bullshit on the rounded edges business, but it does seem to be effective) and the screen is excellent. The combination of Google Listen for music and the fact that I use my tablet for video rather than the phone means 16GB is now enough for my phone - YMMV.
It does get surprisingly warm under heavy load but not to the point where I find it uncomfortable. For the price I paid it's unbeatable value - at the price the high street wants to charge I'd say it's still a good buy, but of course it's sat there sold out on Play with the price tag it's got....
Important last point though - either get a case or be bloody careful with it. A colleague dropped his from waist height on New Years Eve, and the front is smashed to bits. Gorillas notwithstanding, it's glass and it can break.
The Nexus 4 is affected by a current kernel bug which causes excessive battery drain by stopping the device sleeping properly. Should be fixed with the next update.
The Galaxy S3 is most definitely not cheaper than the Nexus 4. No other high end device is. I think saying the 4 is 'ordinary' because it has an extremely high ppi screen instead of a stupidly high PPI screen like the 1080p screens is daft. You can't see pixels on the Nexus at all.
Bug-gers
"The Nexus 4 is affected by a current kernel bug which causes excessive battery drain by stopping the device sleeping properly. Should be fixed with the next update."
I don't understand why this sort of thing happens. This is the kind of problem that can be caught by giving it to any reasonably experienced person for a couple of day and then asking them, "what do you think of it?"
Two days after buying my Asus Transformer Tab, I had found three 'bugs' that were simple, obvious and annoying. After the next firmware update, those bugs were still there. I suspect that the developers (and managers) are under pressure to get the product released to a timescale, not to a quality level.
Re: Bug-gers
It is strange it slipped through the net. Especially considering a lot of reviews marked it down for battery life. Not that it really matters, you can't get one even if you wanted one.
specs
Im glad this was out of stock when I considered one last year - as the review says, the specs now look anything but cutting edge. I would have been very disappointed owning this when in a few months time 1080p screens with 10+MP cameras are commonplace.
Thanks for the stock problems, google!
Re: specs
"I would have been very disappointed owning this when in a few months time 1080p screens with 10+MP cameras are commonplace."
I'm sometimes not sure that I can really detect SD (never mind 720p) vs. 1080p on a 24" TV screen, why would anybody even remotely need 1080p on a 4" phone?!?!
Re: specs
" anything but cutting edge" You're kidding right? What more cutting edge components could they have crammed in the Nexus 4?
Why would you be happy you now have to spend twice the price on a device which will likely spend most of its life on outdated software? I'd be annoyed as hell if I missed out on the Nexus 4. Assuming you're OK with the onboard storage, it's not only the best deal in smartphones, it's the best Android device to date.
Re: specs
at the time, nothing. but here we are just a couple of months on with 1080p screens inbound - that's a big change that i wouldn't fancy missing out. glad you're happy with the nexus 4.
Anachronistic metric
Never mind the smartphone - where are you able to buy a beer for a single token?
Re: Anachronistic metric
Corner shop. 6 for 5 tokens even!
wallpaper?
I love the wallpaper, could anyone share the source of it.
Voyaflex
As an actual Nexus 4 owner, I don't have a problem with the battery life - I get around 36 hours between charges (right now: 1d 6h 58m, 30% remaining). I have a fairly typical set of apps installed and use my phone fairly regularly, although generally not for gaming or video. As long as it can last 24hrs, it can be charged overnight.
My previous phone (a HTC Desire) made it barely 14 hours between charges.
Just visited the Google Play Store.
It shows a total of 7 Nexus devices.
Five are shown as sold out.
Battery Life?
I am one of the lucky few who managed to buy a Nexus 4. Great phone, not without its flaws, but I don't see battery life as one of them. I use it quite heavily, and today for instance it still has 44% at 9:15pm!
It certainly lasts longer than the S3 I had before it.
Battery life and heat on mine was massively improved by installing a custom kernel and undervolting. It seems a number of people found there is a massive margin for reducing cpu voltage. Hopefully Google tweak things a bit in a future update for those not happy with flashing kernels/roms.
No pen?
Shame they didn't include a detachable Pen/stylus, can't argue with the price though.
Re: No pen?
Stylus is laughable. Do you light your house with oil lamps?
Re: No pen?
But I'm an artist and I use da Nexus to sketch my works or art don't you know luvvie.
Re: No pen?
Onscreen keyboard is laughable! Do you still use your finger to draw in the dirt?
Styluseseseseses are great. Not to control the UI, that's fiddly and annoying. But for text input and sketching on touch screens they're better than any alternative I've yet tried.
Not a Google phone
Worth pointing out here (unless someone already has) that this is an LG phone rather than a "Google" phone. I purchased on the basis that as it had Google's name stamped on it, and as I was buying direct from Google, that Google would take some sort of responsibility for product quality and customer care.
Apparently not so. As soon as you drop it, they'll hand you off to LG.
Whatever you do, don't treat it like your old Nexus S, and certainly don't drop it, you'll be without it for a LONG time! And you'll need another phone and lots of minutes if once you've send it back you ever want to see it again ..
Re: Not a Google phone
Welcome to the club as I sent my phone back to Samsung and they needed it for over 3 weeks - nice. Wife's iPhone was away from her for 20 minutes when it needed a repair. Not sure I will be buying another Samsung or LG by the sounds of it.
Re: Not a Google phone
The manufacturer's warranty is indeed with LG (pretty odd) but remember in addition to that your Statutory Rights, which are always with the retailer. Which in this case is obviously Google. They're not allowed by law to fob you off and tell you to go to take it up with the manufacturer.
Calls are a problem
The flat glass back has a small 10x2mm cutout for the speaker grille. When the phone is on a desk, the speaker's air chamber is small, and the ring is very muffled because the sound of the phone's ringing is blasted into the desk.
It's a nice smartphone but not a great phone if you want to hear it ring. It's also the first phone I've had problems with Bluetooth headsets for many years: over 6-8 feet and there's a lot of breaking up.
I'm lucky enough to have both a nexus 4 and a Lumia 920. I much prefer the 920, even though the OS is new, it seems more polished and feels more professional. Android seems like a kids toy, no wonder it's so cheap.
Any chance of giving it a wipe before you take a picture?
Having lived with the N4 for a month...
Having lived with the N4 for a month I am pretty happy with my new phone. An android user for 4 years now and this is what I have been waiting for. The screen large enough to make a screen only keyboard usable, but not so large it doesn't fit into a pocket. Battery life is pretty good for me, a heavy email/twitter/music/browsing guy and I usually have 40% battery left at the end of the day.
The storage is the only issue I want to get around, but I might invest in an OTG connector and a few hacks to allow me to travel with films and tv programmes sufficient for journey times. Cloud storage is fine, but if I travel abroad I will have to find a hot-spot to update my on-phone collection which is a pain.
Overall 4 out of 5 from me.
Google have to play a balancing act between not wanting Samsung to get too dominant but not wanting to screw them over too much - but I still expect they will want a proper return on their purchase of Motorola.
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