“The Nexus 4 is absolutely wonderful, but it’s also vexing. Frustrating. Annoying. It’s easily the best Android phone on the market right now, and has some of the most powerful software that’s ever been put on a mobile phone. It’s an upgrade from last year’s Galaxy Nexus in every way. It’s terrific – save for one small thing. ” Lack of LTE, obviously. Bigger issue for me as a European: glass back. Apparently it cracks. Who’da thunk?
I’ve had my iPhone 4 for almost 2.5 years now. The glass back and front are still just as nice as when I got it, and it’s spent half that time without a case.
Glass is great for phones. It doesn’t scratch or end up looking like crap like coated aluminum or plastic. You know what the secret is for not cracking it? Don’t be careless with your stuff. It’s not that hard.
Strange, my experience with portable devices (not just phones) is the reverse: every glassy screen that has went through my hand tends to accumulate a fair amount of scratches, while cheaper plastic stuff has mostly survived unharmed, save for the nice but fragile grip coating that some constructors tend to put on them, which can wear out quickly in the corners which the thing falls on very often. Or when I accidentally put the thing in a puddle of acetone while working in the lab… :/
Never cracked a glass screen so far either, but then I wouldn’t buy devices with large glass panes either. Sounds way too fragile for something which I am going to use daily. All sorts of claims have been made regarding Corning’s glass superior strength, but so far what I have seen on videos is mostly toughened glass like they put on cars: it will break anyway, just with the desirable asset of not sending flying chunks everywhere.
Technology is here to adapt to human beings, not the reverse in my opinion. If some company release a product that is designed to be carried around everywhere, spilled hot coffee on, dropped accidentally, fallen upon and whatnot, then they better make it bullet-proof, especially if it gets really pricey like a high-end laptop or cellphone.
Edited 2012-11-03 06:56 UTC
…often held in hands. And aluminium & glass generally feel unpleasantly cold to the touch. Especially since many of the most lucrative markets have rather low temps in winter months.
I disliked that aspect of my old Nokia E50, don’t really want to get anything metal/glass-clad any more. It’s baffling to me that people seem to love it (or does fashion overrule unpleasant sensory perception?)
The trade-off is that with glass, one little accident tends to break things completely, whereas plastic and metal will get more scratches from daily wear and tear. Glass is great for silly, vain people who trust in luck and use their tools as jewellery.
The worst material is probably Nokia’s polycarbonate, which is solid and scratch-resistant, but so damn slippery that you have to dress up your phone in a rubber condom just to avoid having it slip out of your hands and pockets.
That’s one of the dumbest comments I’ve read in a while. You should come back to reality before wasting any more time with nonsense like that.
Care to explain a bit more? I will gladly admit that the OP was needlessly harsh in his conclusion, but it seems to me that he makes a valid point regarding the fragility of glass, and thus how using it prioritizes aesthetics over sturdiness.
Soulbender already answered the question. All glass is absolutely not created equal. One of the ways glass is rated is in hardness. The higher the rating, the more tolerance it has before being compromised. You bundle that with protective film/layering and you easily have a very durable & scratch-resistant glass which works great for applications such as cellphones where the product is highly susceptible to accidents like dropping & scratching.
There’s a reason Gorilla Glass or similar is used in so many portable devices. It’s not because it looks pretty and jewelry-like as the OP suggests. It’s because of the high durability & resistance to scratching and breaking. This is not a matter of opinion. It has actual science behind it, unlike the OP’s idea that using glass in a cellphone is merely vanity and fashion.
I can attest to the strength of Gorilla Glass: I have this 10-inch tablet that I just kind of slap around, sometimes piling stuff on it, throwing it in my bag with all of my other gadgets, books and the likes and so on, and I still can’t find a single scratch on it, let alone anything worse. All I see on it is a whole lot of smudges!
Of course, this is only anecdotal evidence, but I sure wouldn’t call Gorilla Glass fragile.
Makes you wonder what some people, for whom it breaks, do it with… (or maybe that’s mostly just the expected crop of units with production flaws)
Glass can be made extremely resilient.
That may be true, but the much-hyped Gorilla Glass used in most high-end smartphones seems to break easily, as the Nexus 4 shows. It’s certainly more scratch resistant than plastic, though.
yeah I have a friend that used to brag about how durable the iphone with glass back was. Until they dropped it …
But they had apple care and replaced it quickly.
Then they dropped it again a few days later….
So now their iphone 4 is encased in a case for good.
Glass back + no removable battery + no sd card ?? Not going to pick it up. Which is really kind of sad, considering I could sell my current phone and buy an unlocked nexus 4 and have cash left over. But I’m encouraged by the low price and hopeful the next one won’t have glass backing. Maybe the moto nexus in Q2 2013 with Key lime?
Edited 2012-11-03 03:35 UTC
The review says reception/call quality rates a 6. Is this a phone or an MP3 player?
Once again Google proves it hasn’t a clue.
You’ll probably get modded down for that comment, but you are exactly right. When the iPhone 4s came out, Fandroids blasted it for not having LTE, not having a removable battery, not having an SD card slot, having a glass back that could shatter easily, etc. Now that the Nexus 4 is out, the irony is certainly not lost on me.
And this isn’t any ordinary Android phone either – it’s the phone that those of us who wanted stock Android and care about timely updates were told we are supposed to buy. That makes it the flagship Android phone, and really the only one that matters. And now Android users are expected to choose between a phone that has been violated by carriers and one with specs mostly straight out of 2010.
This is a sad, sad day for the Android community, and Google should be ashamed. If Apple can give us a phone with LTE on all major networks that is untouched by carriers, why can’t Google? If you think HSPA+ is fine, you obviously haven’t lived in an area with good LTE coverage, and experienced the difference between 20mbps and 4mbps.
iPhone was never designed to be sold off contract, so the excuses to not have LTE it had none. Nexus 4 is an experiment with a completely unlocked phone. As a consumer I’d prefer a fully “productionized” phone, of course, but Nexus line was always on the experimental side, with Google’s partners producing mainstream devices. Google clearly doesn’t treat sales of Nexus the same way as Apple treats sales of iPhone, allowing itself more room for research.
I’m more concerned about glass back than anything else (rigid back of my gnex feels quite nice). We’ll see how it goes. And if you want some features not in Nexus 4 you can always, you know, buy another phone.
What are you talking about? That is absolute crap!!! I can walk in to an Apple Store today, buy an unlocked iPhone and walk out with zero contract. Don’t judge the entire world by your market. Most countries, other than the US, that sell the iPhone now support this model. I can also buy an iPhone subsidised by a UK carrier, but then I can also buy a Nexus phone subsidised by a carrier here. The subsidy has nothing to do with the actual phone’s capability. Indeed, I have an old iPhone 4 that is carrier unlocked, and was throughout the contracted period to O2, from about 1 month in. The only reason it was delayed was that O2 didn’t start unlocking iPhone 4’s right away… had to wait till the demand subsided so that unscrupulous individuals didn’t fraudulently buy them, unlock and then sell for a profit.
In short – I call bullshit.
Edited 2012-11-04 01:58 UTC
for 300 dollars?
Oh – move goal posts, so cost is now the deciding factor as to what purpose the manufacturer had for the phone? How much is a Galaxy S 3 unlocked? You can certainly buy them unlocked here.
And SGS3 comes in all flavours that you want with reasonably rapid updates as well. And is costs about the same as iPhone5.
In Australia.
Unlocked iphone 5 16GB – AUD799
Unlocked Nexus 4 16GB – AUD399
The OP said nothing about “cost”. The OP said that the iPhone wasn’t designed to be sold unlocked/with no contract, which is obviously not true – otherwise one would be unable to buy an unlocked iPhone of any description. Now you’ve moved the goalpost to “cost”. *sigh*
The best solution is always to find the phone with the specs you care about and has a cyanogenmod build available. For people who want the best android experience, anyways.
The irony is completely lost on you.
A ton of fandroids are angry and calling out Google on its choices – and not drinking the kool aid, or living in the reality distortion field,or rewriting history like fanbois do. And the Nexus 4 for all it lacks is far cheaper than the similarly “crippled” iPhone 4 ever was.
iPhone is not untouched by operators. iPhone is tested on all the networks that officially sell it. New software releases go through a rigorous testing process. And it still gets stuff turned off at the request of operators.
One thing that is true – it has no bloatware. But otherwise it’s not really that different from what Android releases go through.
If you read the article carefully, this rating is simply due to the lack of LTE, and “regular” HSPA communications will work just fine.
Misleading rating in my opinion. But then again, the same reviewer will also consider getting more than 16 hours of battery life out of a cellphone as some sort of wonderful achievement…
Would have concerned me if it was ordinary glass, but it ain’t. The phone’s outer is mostly made up of gorilla glass.
By the odd chance of it accumulating some unsightly scratches good jewellery store’s will be able to delicately buff it away.
Here in the UK, only *one* network (Everything Everywhere) has released 4G (or LTE as the US likes to call it) and that was literally only a few weeks ago. It’s fast, but very limited in coverage and expensive (I believe it can drain batteries faster too).
It does beg the question why the existing non-4G networks haven’t had their coverage/speeds improved? That would benefit 99% of the UK that currently isn’t on 4G for whatever reason (the phone, the area they’re in, the contract price or they’re not on EE).
4G in the UK looks to me to be about a year away from where we are with 3G – coverage has to improve, the prices have to drop, all the network providers have to actually launch 4G and, yes, phones have to launch with 4G. Until then, in the UK, a 4G phone is an utter waste of money.
Edited 2012-11-03 09:52 UTC
To be fair, from what I could gather about LTE, it’s pretty much what 3G should have been from a design standpoint, which might explain why carriers and phone manufacturers are so interested in it.
LTE and LTE Advance are designed to support an all-IP architecture, on which voice is just one stream of data packets like all others (save for higher QoS priority). That is conceptually much simpler (and should thus be more reliable and future-proof) than a weird hybrid between legacy 2G protocols (GSM, cdmaOne…) for phone services and more modern data protocols, requiring two simultaneous radio connexions and sucking power at a crazy pace.
Of course, that’s theory, in practice it seems that you get early LTE modems that are even less energy-efficient than current 3G modems and carriers across the world that enjoy each using a different frequency band, resulting in a practical impossibility to build a true LTE world phone. Gotta love bleeding edge tech…
Edited 2012-11-03 17:25 UTC
More recent 3G networks can also use IP, at least on the carrier side (probably most of what they care about, their side of the infrastructure; and what can be done in foreseeable future, since a lot of people will continue using old phones & it seems 2G is here to stay for a while) – some Huawei-supplied networks do that.
LTE deployment is generally also about more efficient utilisation of scarce spectrum resources – just like 3G was vs 2G. Not necessarily brining much higher speeds for the individual, but able to service more people in a given area with acceptable speeds.
And I doubt 2G/3G hybrid “sucks power at a crazy pace” you mostly just do one or the other – and since standby times are good, it strongly suggests the connections don’t use much power when not-very-active.
Edited 2012-11-03 21:03 UTC
Honestly, I’ll trust you on that one, though I still don’t understand why the ITU would make such a big deal of 4G being an all-IP network in such a case.
This discussion reminds me of something… Haven’t we already been talking about that in the past, before being stopped by OSAlert’ 5-day comment limit as usual ?
Anyway, I agree with you that 3G standby consumption alone should be too low to explain it, but it is my experience that in two different French cities (Paris and Grenoble), with two different phones (Nokia E63 and Sony Xperia Mini Pro), two different operators (Orange France and Bouygues Telecom) and my same old phone usage patterns (lots of texts, occasional web browsing and e-mails), I have always approximately halved my battery life by switching from EDGE-only connections to UMTS-only connections in my phone settings.
Which, combined with 3G’s significantly more sloppy coverage in “difficult” areas like trains and big buildings, is why I tend to keep these little gadgets on EDGE unless I really need the extra speed
Edited 2012-11-03 21:37 UTC
Maybe they make a big deal because it’s through-and-through IP? (and/or because when the story get going there were no IP 3G networks – which are still back-end only, I suppose essentially tunneling “legacy” services)
Yeah, we discussed it – but maybe not the limit stopped us, maybe there was not much more to add. And I must again point out that, if using the handset only for data (with data-only SIM, any “legacy” channel used only for control messages – which, considering long standby times, should be irrelevant), switching to UMTS from EDGE also ~halves battery life.
(likewise when switching to… LTE)
And shouldn’t such a “pure” IP architecture imply some extra niceties for operators and/or users? I would imagine that a 2G protocol tunnelled through an data-only network would not have the same flexibility on the phone-carrier link side as an end-to-end IP network.
As an example, I don’t know enough about cellular networks to find out if it would be doable, with 2G tech, to efficiently use a different voice codec if the receiving phone supports it. A use case for that would be to use Opus for voice communication on phones without violating carrier fair use clauses or modifying the underlying network.
I can understand that for heavy data use: if significantly more bits are transferred per second, it sounds logical that even the most efficient modem could draw more power. What I don’t understand now is why UMTS will draw that much more power when I don’t make heavy use of the extra data link.
Edited 2012-11-04 08:35 UTC
Possibly, however I suspect it’s pretty much unattainable in foreseeable future – it seems to me we might be sort of “stuck” with 2G (maybe except Japan, IIRC one of their main operators managed the feat of pretty much retiring a 2G network, when deploying a 3G one), as a lowest common denominator, with reception pretty much anywhere (so “stuck” because it’s not strictly a bad thing).
The usual good enough being the enemy of the better – like we seem to be largely “stuck” with FM radio, CD, or UNIX (which, again, are not necessarily bad things). Even the roll-out of DTV in many places has some… delays.
The real question is: would that be doable on LTE, when using its standard voice transmission protocols?
Anyway, no need for UMTS with AMR-WB codec, and since this one already gives nice quality & you can always set up some data-channel streaming on a smarthpone for more niche usage…
AMR-WB might even get wide deployment sooner than LTE voice.
IMHO you overlook some crucial factors.
First, why do we develop all those new cellular standards? To increase spectral efficiency, of course…
…but then, how do we do it? Well, using more complex radio methods, heavier on the local processing (hence using more energy)
It’s about compromises, here how big of a pipe (for simultaneous users!) you want, versus the complexity of the processing that needs to be done by the towers & handsets. The compromise spot of 2G GSM was chosen in very different times – and while, over the last two decades, GSM phones greatly improved in battery life …remember that initially they were also quite poor at it!
Well, I kind of hoped that after inventing so many variants of AMR, in an attempt to make that thing sound better without using too much bandwidth, the 3GPP members had finally learned that it’s best to design future phone networks for codec transparency.
Is it something like the good old physics problem that for a given filter design, narrower passive filters have higher losses? Or more of a digital processing problem?
Here’s to hoping that phone manufacturers will bring back those monster batteries that were used in the early days of GSM then
The current approach of increasing power consumption while reducing phone thickness (and thus, physical room for batteries) seems absurd.
Edited 2012-11-08 08:03 UTC
Who knows / we’ll see. At least AMR-WB is already quite decent…
I have only skin deep knowledge of it, didn’t dig up much (If I’d have to guess: at least ~DSP …but maybe both factors, maybe more). Generally, things aren’t free in this world,
greater spectral efficiency of more complex radio interfaces must have its cost elsewhere, when using the same generation of integrated circuits etc.
Maybe when the so-called “developing world” really gets on ~smartphone (Android, most likely…) bandwagon, there will be saner designs WRT battery aspect. They should be kinda desired, in places where mains electricity is less certain.
And/or maybe we’ll came to conclusion that the power of phones got “good enough” (like it happened with PCs a few years ago), and tech advancements will go less into speed, more into lowering energy usage.
There is also one major drawback – VoLTE has not been widely deployed(in Europe there is no VoLTE deployment at all, as EU regulations require seamless downgrade). Even Verizon falls back to 3G network for voice, so without a proper VoLTE solution in place talking on an LTE device and using data will result in using both radios.
Nope, it doesn’t http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
(and generally, 3G & LTE are about more efficient utilisation of scarce spectrum as far as carriers are concerned, so that more people can have acceptable speeds – especially in dense spots)
By all accounts, the 3 network is pretty fast. It is often going to be faster than EE’s 4G, as the HSDPA+ they now offer is at the max rate, where as the EE LTE is fairly slow in comparison. Put it this way, in practice, EE’s 4G is expensive, the cap is too small and 3’s unlimited plays, faster or slower, will wipe the floor.
No LTE isn’t a biggie for me. Glass cracking is definitely a concern, but the main thing I’m worried about is battery life and whether there are any build issues with early batches; like screen lifting on some early Nexus 7 models.
Either way, I’ll wait for some reports from users on forums before I decide. All these site/magazine reviews hardly translate to real-world use in most cases. Most of them put a review up after a only couple of days of usage. The Verge is often too forgiving to big companies like Apple and Google, probably because they don’t want to burn bridges.
Edited 2012-11-03 10:33 UTC
I expect battery life to be quite good, though YMMV, of course. Non-removable battery and non-replaceable glass back seem like bigger issues to me. Probably not deal breakers.
I don’t see anything interesting or compelling about the Nexus 4; it doesn’t offer any unique features, its camera is quite average, it looks extremely bland… In fact, I find the looks of it quite unsightly. Unmodified, fully stock Android just isn’t a big deal, either, as most phones can be rooted and then you can install a similarly stock Android on them. Oh, and glass back is something that I definitely do not like, it’s way, way too slippery.
What would get me excited? Well, let’s see:
* MeeGo as the OS.
* Similarly-sized screen as the Galaxy Note.
* 720p is fine as long as the colour balance and representation are good. And contrast.
* A hardware keyboard that can be hidden inside the phone, similar to e.g. the N900.
* Good low-light performance of both of the cameras — I spend most of my time indoors where the lighting isn’t always optimal, and here in Finland there’s only a few, precious hours of daylight anyways most of the year.
* 32GB storage.
* Rubber-/silicone-like back so as to avoid it being slippery. No hard plastics or glass or such.
* Looks similar to e.g. Nokia’s Lumia-series.
* A high-quality dock with atleast 3 USB-ports, DVI-D and HDMI outputs (not just HDMI like on so many other docks), SD/MMC reader, built-in HDD, and 5.1 audio.
And preferably, but not a hard requirement:
* A proper digitizer as the Galaxy Note has.
Weight or thickness are not issues for me. I don’t like the trend of trading features and quality for low weight or a very thin frame.
I’m holding off replacing my phone till mid-December, so I hope Jolla make some kind of announcement before that.
Edited 2012-11-04 05:07 UTC
Thankfully Nexus 4 was never intended as the ultimate Android device, just like the last 2 Nexus devices. They spearhead some areas, but nothing more. (Nexus S – NFC, Galaxy Nexus – 720p)
Wait a minute, that’s not how this works – it’s symmetric, the other part of the year you get only few hours of night!
(and when North-enough: midnight sun; generally, ~long sunrises and sunsets throughout the year, which are a “lucky hour” for photography
)
..cause majority of countries in this globe don’t have LTE yet.
Yeah, but most of these countries have other issues to worry about:
http://www.androidcentral.com/spanish-retailer-suspends-plans-sell-…
Note that this is in Spain, where you can still get a Nexus 4 directly from Google Play, so at least Spaniards have the option. Just imagine how much worse the pricing landscape is in countries where people can’t buy directly from Google. Someone from Austria told me that LG are selling it there for ^a'not550 Euros, which is ^a'not200 more than what the Play Store in Germany offers. Ridiculous.
Edited 2012-11-04 14:07 UTC
Oh wow, that sucks.
Oh dear, non-removable battery and no storage expansion? Do you think this will set a trend for most other future Android devices? Motorola has already been using the stupid non-removable batteries since the Droid 4. But with the Nexus 4 being such a high profile device, this has me really worried. I will absolutely not buy a device that I can’t open or expand its storage.