Galaxy Nexus Review
theverge.com
theverge.com
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Edit: Most of our users are on the Xoom (and some other tablets). I have not been able to test on the Galaxy Nexus yet. If you have bug reports, please send them to software@cumulonimbus.ca
[Edit] Re dsman's comment: "... if every iphone post here attracted comments by all of us who were building an iphone app then HN would be the worse for it"
It depends, IMO, on the nature of the app. Trying to crowdsource weather prediction is a sufficiently interesting hack that I think HN would very much not be the worse for knowing about this. I would only find it objectionable if cryptoz starts promoting in every Galaxy Nexus thread.
The site is obviously great despite that (and certainly also impressive).
I think some of the top-level editors of Engadget left to start The Verge. Because of this, the actual product reviews on Engadget, which I initially liked, have decreased in robustness as well.
according to wikipedia:
On April 3, 2011, The New York Times posted an article on their website announcing that "eight of the more prominent editorial and technology staff members at Engadget have left or are leaving AOL and are about to build a new gadget site". The group included former Engadget editor in chief Joshua Topolsky, managing editor Nilay Patel, editors Paul Miller, Joanna Stern, Chris Ziegler, and Ross Miller, product manager Justin Glow, and developer Dan Chilton.
It looks like a magazine page (perhaps one you'd see advertising architecture, or furniture) made flesh in the browser: the pictures are too big, the headlines are too big, the text column wanders from the left side of the page to the right, and it does all of this with highly excessive CPU consumption.
On Firefox it's particularly painful - on an i7 920, merely selecting text takes over a second - while even on Chrome, the fans start up and blare as a core hits 100% for several seconds as the page loads.
It's not down to custom fonts either, as I have those disabled in Firefox.
It all adds up to make me want to avoid the site in future, knowing I'll be assured of a laggy unpleasant experience.
I wonder if it's some kind of plugin issue, Firebug is a monster consumer of resources for example.
That said, if the content is good enough, i can deal with that. Maybe I'll just block JS for this site since i suspect that's the primary issue here.
There are no speed issues on my laptop browser or ipad...
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to figuring out a way to convince myself it's worth paying full price for this phone, and I love a huge screen (Droid X owner). But AMOLED is a mixed bag. I find it to be a bit over-saturated, and the power savings is only for blacks, and overall, I think AMOLED has been shown to consume more power, not less. But the pentile subpixel arrangement is the biggest thing I'm worried about, being one of those people who wants to vomit when looking at a screen like the EVO 4G's.
I'm not saying the retina display is unequivocally better, mind you, I just disagree with you that the NG's screen is "clearly a significant step up."
It makes no sense to hold this in higher standing than the actual pixel count-- nobody is asking for smaller screens with the same resolution. Simply holding your phone further away would have the same effect as a smaller, more pixel-dense screen. Increased pixel density naturally comes with increased resolution, it is great but not the end in of itself.
The subpixel count is about the same as the iP4 and the pixel count is quite a bit higher. Pentile isn't ideal, but I'd take a 1280x720 pentile display over a 960x480 RGB. every, single. time. Higher resolution has tangible benefits (like better viewing of desktop websites). I'd have to be being actively picky to have any issue with the screen on my SGS, and it should be much less noticeable on the G Nexus.
Exactly the same, 1280x720x2 = 960x640x3.
I personally don’t like how those OLED screens look (I like their contrast and blacks, don’t like their colors) and I also dislike PenTile immensely. The screen being larger is actually a negative point for me. I guess it would still be alright for me but only just.
On the whole I get better contrast and blacks and higher resolution with the Nexus but also lower pixel density, worse colors and larger size. Whether one or the other is better for you personally can’t be determined from that.
For me those screens seem about equal with different upsides and downsides. If you like larger screens you might clearly prefer the Nexus.
A clear verdict about the screen doesn’t seem possible, neither one is clearly inferior.
For me, PenTile is a deal breaker.
Also, remember that real pixel density is slightly lower, because each pixel has two subpixels instead of the three in RGB displays: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5000/galaxy-nexus-pentile-disc... (though I don't care as much about this).
Comparing form factors with the iPhone works because the iPhones have always been around the same size. Comparing displays to the retina display works because it's the most common smartphone display.
If they said "it's good" or "it's as good as the ObscurePhone X4", it would be harder for me (and probably others) to rate the Nexus.
The review doesn't mention it but the GN has a rather weak GPU. Quite a lot slower than the iPhone 4S and actually slower than some of Samsung's other recent Android phones. If you plan to play any 3D games, especially at 720P, the GN is probably not the best choice. We'll have to wait and see what the benchmarks and real world performance are like though.
Having said that, there is really not widespread use of the GPUs out there today. I hope that will change, but 3d gaming on phones (especially that pushes the GPUs to the limit) is very much niche right now.
Though I believe it was rumoured (and frankly would have made engineering sense) for them to use it when they quadrupled the resolution in the iPhone 4 but Samsung couldn't guarantee enough production to fulfil Apple's expected demand. I can easily imagine another world where Apple makes some slick videos explaining the benefits of Pentile and anyone who doesn't have it is mocked, similar to how the iPhone's Retina Display, which they admit in the very name goes beyond the point of visibility in normal use is considered the minimum benchmark for a good screen.
But neither of your complaints appears to be related to pentile vs RGB stripe. If you're talking about low pixel density then it's the same Mac OS vs Windows text rendering debate. There's not enough pixels so which kind of ugly do you prefer (or are you used to)? Some people like the hand wrangled pixels, other just let it fall where it lands. Things designed for one system will look worse on the other and especially bad to people who prefer the other look.
Siri and the tight integration with Apple TV (specifically, the ability to mirror) are way ahead of their Android equivalents. The countless docks and accessories for the iPhone also give you a lot of options.
The camera looks to be a worthwhile advantage for the 4S - the motion-stabilized video in particular really stand out and make video actually worth watching/sharing.
People dismiss this as pedantic, but iOS's app advantage is still worth noting. GarageBand and iMovie are easily the most sophisticated mobile apps I've seen yet - Android equivalents (there really isn't one for GarageBand) aren't in the ballpark. If you're bored, $.99 will get you a great game optimized for the newest hardware like Scribblenauts or Shadowgun - Android looks to be at least a year behind. There always seems to be an Instagram/Orchestra/Oink with no Android equivalent.
But how do you weigh that against a larger screen that looks far better for reading and video? Similarly, this makes Android's already far superior Maps more useful. And I could see ICS's live voice transcription being just as much of an advantage as Siri. These are arguably more common use-cases than the Apple advantages I just listed.
All this to say that I wish it were an easy choice which were superior.
Anyhow, we are in a free world where everyone can make reviews and I'm glad we are in that world.
This is how it's always been with game reviews, for instance. A video game released in 1996 gets a 10/10 because it's better than other games yet seen. The same game released today would get panned. It doesn't imply any claim to absolute perfection.
Those who write extended reviews are likely to have fairly good intuition about which phones are good enough to write about. Nobody is going to spend days writing a review for a phone that someone would only get because it's "free" with a contract.
I think it makes sense.
a few other devices have announce 1Q11 or 2Q11 (mostly the latter)
Tablets I've heard about:
- ASUS Transformer (and Transformer Prime if necessary) update "soon" after the Transformer Prime launch (possibly before the end of the year) [1] I believe the Slider is also being upgraded, but I'm not sure whether or not it is on the same schedule.
- Acer Iconia tablets update January 2012
- Motorola XOOM confirmed (no ETA except for a retracted 6 weeks after source release). Surprisingly (for a launch device), it sounds like the XOOM won't be the first Android tablet to ICS.
- Samsung Galaxy Tab - all Honeycomb models are getting ICS (no ETA)
- Lenovo's working on a Tegra 3 ICS tablet (rumored to be out late this year), but I haven't seen anything about their existing Honeycomb tablets
[1] That probably sounds incredible if you haven't seen ASUS's stunning update history so far (beating the XOOM to worldwide rollouts of new Honeycomb versions and several feature/bugfix upgrades, to boot). I'm one happy ASUS customer.
I still prefer iOS on tablets (I like the changes Apple made for the iPad and I also think that for some strange reason iOS visually works better on tablets than phones) but on smartphones there are now two OS – WP7, too – that look better than iOS†.
That’s looks. I’m definitely looking forward to trying ICS out and it looks like Google put a lot of work into fixing many (all?) of the little and big annoyances that previously made me want to throw Android devices at the wall when I used them for longer than ten minutes.
It’s nice that Android is shaping up as a real alternative for me. (What’s a bit annoying is that if you want a phone without all the crap you have about as much choice as when you buy an iPhone. I’m not sure whether Google wants to or can change that with ICS.)
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† Android still gets details wrong. I can live with that. More or less, I guess.
Also agree that the UX looks massively improved as well. It always felt like features and ugly shininess took precedence over UX before, but it seems like Duarte is having a good influence here.
On crapware, one of the announced features for ICS is that you can disable (meaning stop from running and hide from app drawers and home screens) any app from system settings.
The sort of obvious thing (to me) for them to do going forward is to platformize Android better, so that manufacturers/vendors can differentiate by adding UI components, etc. in a modular way that's easy to turn off, and easy to update around. I.e. there should be a big VANILLA ANDROID button in the settings, and they should push updates more aggressively.
But ICS definitely looks like a step in the right direction.
[Edit] Boot time improvement are due to SSD - The AVD manager chose my home directory on SSD to create the AVD file - my older ones were on standard HDD. But still the in-emulator navigation is somewhat better. May be improved drawing performance.
Wait, what?
And what is objectively wrong with it? The big red text complains about "color reproduction" - does this guy know anything about photography? Neither camera is color-calibrated, that's what Lightroom is for.
That whole sensor/lens mixup is probably an honest mistake. He was talking about software vs hardware and not really going so much into detail as that making a distinction between sensor and lens would matter. He was talking about the whole sensor and lens package as a whole.
I've had to make batches of personnel photos taken with an iPhone look presentable for a web page on several occasions. A few seconds to set the white balance and normalize the orientation and scale makes a significant difference. It doesn't make it into a great photo, but nothing short of going back with an SLR is going to do that.
Also part of why I think claims about the awesomeness of the iPhone camera should be taken with a pound of salt. It's a fairly nice cell camera, but it's still a cell camera.
But I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far. Even a budget DSLR that is perfectly capable of shooting raw should have great auto white balance: Most people don’t want to endlessly tweak photos. Better auto white balance means better photos, even if theoretically everything could be fixed in post.
Oh, and just because smartphone cameras are nowhere near as good as DSLRs doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful to compare them with each other, doesn’t mean one can’t be much better than another one.
Only if the initial exposure was good.
I was only talking about color, not exposure. (Of course there is only so much white balance can do – but if you get the raw data you can do just as much with the color as the camera, heck, you can even throw more processing power at the problem than the camera ever could.)
The onus is even stronger than on DSLRs to get the defaults and automatic settings right, since you're dealing with a demographic that is even less inclined to tweak, but will judge the results nonetheless.
I think the criticism is completely fair.
I think most people would rather choose between them because of each one's software or even hardware. Company allegiances/principles/beliefs will go a long way in making the decision, too, for some people.
I'd like to try out the nexus and see if the form factor and ICS UI works with me, although it certainly looks lovely!
My biggest disappointment is that the comments suck already. A good comments section on a popular site requires a lot of work from the moderators, but it is possible. But crappy comments are like weeds -- once you let one or two through, they multiply quickly until they take over the site, which has already happened.
This tiny feature alone makes it a serious contender for me.
However, I'll definitely wait for the first real-world reviews to learn whether ICS finally does away with the infuriating stalls and input lags that have plagued all of my previous android devices (up to the SGS).
I'm really hoping the new hardware acceleration stuff will help a lot. I think I read somewhere they also tweaked MotionEvent handling to decrease input latency (though I can't find the link for the life of me).
From the review:
"As far as phone performance is concerned, however, the Galaxy Nexus feels blazingly, stupidly fast to me. Touch response is excellent on the phone — everything reacts quickly to your movements. Homescreen scrolling was snappy, moving into and out of apps was instantaneous, swiping through long lists was stutter free, and web browsing (even on heavy pages like ours) was super speedy."
and...
"I want to note that moving around all of these screens is buttery smooth. There's no lag, no stutter. Animations are fluid, and everything feels cohesive and solid."
This issue has turned the phone from must-have to never-want for me - it's unbelievably handy to essentially have a 32GB USB hard disk in my pocket wherever I go. Are there any actual advantages to MTP or PTP for end users?
MTP allows the storage to be accessed by the phone and computer at the same time.
BTW, MTP has great advantages from an engineering PoV: you don't have to use a crappy FAT filesystem on your eMMC. You don't have to give full control over an essential piece of storage to another OS, so you can continue accessing data/apps installed on the storage.
I've owned both the original Droid and the Droid X, and the original one definitely had less crapware, and the vanilla OS was nice, as was the much easier modding.
I've actually really liked Motorola hardware, and I like the more angular, more dinstinctive industrial design of the Motorola devices better than Samsung devices, but I have to admit that I'm drooling over this phone. ICS looks amazing, and seems to address almost every complaint I've had about Android so far.
They decided Not to implement USB host. Create a custom dumb one write port. Its so dumb it doesn't last one single generation (all docks had production ceased ... except nexus one's that are back)