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Comment by ChikkaChiChi | Hacker News Reader

KitKat issues aside, there are a few minor concerns with the phone that seem to be causing the most issues:

The vibration motor is at the top of the phone. This is causing some people to complain on XDA that the haptic feedback is weak or non-existent. When you run a vibration test its easy to hone in on exactly where the motor is located which seems a bit off to me.

The speaker is absolutely anemic. I 'feel' the sound vibrating the back of my phone more than I can hear it through the single tiny speaker located at the bottom of the phone. Companies need to start emulating the HTC One and place the speakers on the front.

Otherwise the device feels elegant and the texture allows for a softer grip that allows longer use without getting crab hands.

Now KitKat (and specifically Hangouts) is a different story altogether...

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So far, my biggest gripe with KitKat is that there is literally zero customization available for the launcher, and if you switch to something like Nova (my previous choice), you lose the 1) easy access to a Google Now screen, and 2) "Ok Google" voice search. This wouldn't ordinarily bother me much but there are two big UI/UX gripes I have with the KitKat launcher:

1) To quote a Reddit meme, the icons are just... too damn big! Yes, the screen is lovely and the new icons are perfectly good looking, but they're huge! Even on a 5" 1080P screen, you are only allowed a 4x4 grid. I used a 6x6 grid on my Galaxy Nexus and think that size is far more appropriate, especially if you want to take advantage of multiple widgets on your homescreens, or a mix of widgets and shortcuts on the same homescreen.

2) Related to the first complaint, you can't create app folders in the app drawer. This makes it impossible to "hide" things like LightFlow, News & Weather, Keep Screen On, the default Email client, or other utilities and random apps you don't ever want to see. At least you get five rows of four, but still, the icons are infuriatingly large.

I haven't played with the camera enough to comment, and the battery is light years better than my Galaxy Nexus so I have no complaints there (yet). I do carry a Powerstick (http://www.powerstick.com) in my briefcase when traveling, though.

The fact that you can now do both video and voice, or just voice, Hangouts while on cellular networks is enough for me to overlook quite a few issues.

One last tidbit: the new dialer & phone app is much, much better than the old stock one (imho, this is something Samsung really did a good job of with Touchwiz), but it is not intuitive and there are some wonky things about it, like the fact that the standard dialing screen only shows 3 of your starred contacts and there is no apparent way to scroll/view the rest of your favorites.

I'm expecting a 4.4.1 sometime not too long from now because there are enough things lacking polish to warrant a few extra weeks in the oven.

As for the hardware, not a huge fan of the sharp edges, but it does feel good in the hand and the small side bezels make it feel smaller than a 5" phone should.

Well put all around. Here's to hoping Nova and the like add Now integration.

Re number 2, is disabling apps from settings not a stock feature? I've never needed to hide apps in the drawer, I just disable them and they never bother me.

Yes, you can definitely still disable apps in order to hide them. (Though this isn't as flexible, especially when one app owns multiple Launcher icons such as the Google Settings one).

I'd have hoped Google would've learned about the importance of a good speaker with the N7. Seriously, good speakers are not optional.

Then again, I wonder how much of the "your speakers suck" problem is really just "OMG netflix why the hell are your streams so quiet"?

Do you prefer to not use headphones? Because it's a problem I pretty much never think about because I always use headphones.

I absolutely prefer to use headphones, when they're available. But I prefer not to have one more thing in my pocket getting tangled up with my keys.

Use one of those pouches that come with some earphones.

Those are pretty big to be throwing in your pocket. A lot the time I leave the house with nothing but my jeans to carry stuff. Pocket space is a limited commodity.

I would hope that you could use the Nexus 5 as a speakerphone too.

Would you buy it again if you had to do it over again? I'm on the fence, having an aging Galaxy Nexus.

I get to play with a lot of phones in my company so would I take it over the:

Galaxy Nexus? Yes. Nexus 4? Closer, but still yes. Galaxy S3 and S4? Yes, because Samsung is really pissing me off with their lack of speedy updates. HTC One Play Edition? Undecided. Merging the two together would be the best phone (speakers on One, the proud buttons and texture on the N5) but I wouldn't trade one for the other at this point.

I went from the Galaxy Nexus to the Samsung S4, and I wouldn't do it again if given the chance.

The unremoveable bloatware and need-to-root for certain features is beyond frustrating. It's like that Dell laptop you got back in the early 2000's, except you need to reinstall the OS to run it normally.

The GS4 is available in a Google edition without the Samsung junkware...

How practical is it to do just that, reinstall the OS, say Kit-kat? If its pretty easy, I wouldn't mind doing it.

Nexus5 or GN3 for T-mobile? The ONE must have feature for me in native tethering, which is available on the Nexus4, and I presume will be available on the Nexus5. Thoughts? Thanks.

I have the Nexus 5 on my T-Mobile account as I write this, so my answer is definitely that!

What do you mean by "native tethering"? I have free tethering on my TMO Simple Choice plan for all my lines - which all have iPhones (I gather the phone doesn't matter).

I think because you have tethering, that is why the tethering option on your iPhone is enabled. When you don't pay for tethering, or get it for free, that option is disabled.

On the Nexus 4 and 5, the option is enabled regardless if you paid for tethering or not. This is because the phone comes directly from Google, so t-mobile did not get to install bloatware (custom OS) that disables the feature.

I call it "native" because it is built into the OS, versus installing third party apps that mimic the feature. Usually these apps require rooting your phone.

What about vs IPhone 4s? I'm looking to get my wife a new phone. The 5 and 5s are too expensive, so my choices are 4s and this Nexus 5. She already has Android, but we aren't picky about OS.

I don't like the 4S form factor from a screen perspective. I found that when I carried two phones (work and home) the iPhone would get less use than any other phone because it wasn't as easy to use as a reference device.

The iPhone 4s looks and feels like the two year-old phone that it is. The only reason to choose it over the Nexus 5 is because either you want iOS or you really like the small form-factor.

Samsung as pretty much lost me as a customer at this point..

I have used nothing by samsung smart phones, the last phone I had that was a non-samsung was the Moto Razr Original Flip phone.

I currently run a Note II, will never buy another directly as a Result of their lack of updates for the device. Stilling have 4.1 as the official rom is ridiculous

It's leagues better than the Galaxy Nexus, and quite a bit better than the N4. No question. The only other phone I'd been considering was the LG G2, with an intent of loading a new ROM (or hoping they release a GPE), and really just because of the 3000mAh battery.

Great, those were precisely my top 2 gripes with the Nexus 4 and I was hopeful they received enough complaints about it to rectify it, but I guess not.

Too bad I already ordered the 5, but if its as bad as you say, I may have to sell it and just give up on Nexus and get the HTC One.

I'd recommend the Play edition HTC one, which I've been using for 4 months, since it was released. Updates seem to be only a week or so behind Nexus phones. Everything else seems pretty similar to the 5, except that the case is metal, the speakers are loud, and the camera is probably better. The loud speakers are the biggest difference to me - this is the loudest smartphone I've ever owned, and I was coming from the barely-there Galaxy Nexus.

I really wish they'd put some more effort into the speakers and camera on the Nexus phones, though the Verge review implies that the meh Nexus 5 camera is mostly software.

What are the issues about KitKat you're talking about?

For starters it's the lag which at this point seems to be so nested into the core that unless vital components get rewritten from scratch, will not fade away anytime soon. Every reiteration of Android sees a new stab at taking the lag and overall unresponsiveness away, but all they do is adding work-arounds or surface optimizations.

What lag are you talking about? Even critics of Android have offered up that the Nexus 5 is smoother and silkier than even the iPhone 5s.

The single and only lag complaint I've seen was an utterly ridiculous "scroll up and down quickly in Chrome" video preview on the Verge. Not only does it have zero association with actual use, iOS displays exactly the same so-called "lag" on premium devices with complex websites like the Verge.

The lag beast has been slayed. Perhaps mostly through just enormous computational horsepower, but it is a non-complaint.

>Perhaps mostly through just enormous computational horsepower, but it is a non-complaint.

You just proved my point. They are not fixing anything, just adding work around after work around and one of them is throwing more horse power at it. The inherent problem is still there, they just keep covering it up.

I didn't "prove" anything. I offered up side comment conjecture. At this point I'm unsure what your motives are.

There were recent touch responsiveness benchmarks that show that even the iPhone 4 outshines the latest Android models.

http://bgr.com/2013/09/20/iphone-android-touch-screen-respon...

I'm a very happy owner of a 2013 Nexus 7, but I have to say I think this is perceptible. It's not showstopping or even disorienting, but it does translate in performance critical tasks like web browsing and gaming being slightly less satisfying. With an iPhone, scrolling feels like you're manipulating a piece of paper under your finger; Chrome on my Nexus 7 doesn't quite achieve that illusion.

Then again, the OS itself feels way more nimble than iOS: things like text-to-speech, app installs and multi-tasking are way more satisfying on Android.

Reading your comment I had to try this out, now down to the hardware it's proven that iDevices beat out Androids by quite a bit with regards to responsiveness, although I can't find the article describing it, but safe to say I know there's a difference.

However, I own a Samsung Galaxy S1 (that's 2010 era, people) running CyanogenMod 10.1.3 (that's 4.2.2) and my responsiveness is... just fine! Pulling down the slider I get the very slight initial lag (simply because my phone is crazy slow), and the slider itself does lag behind but that seems like it's by design.

Next I am on my homescreen; ADW Launcher, and I'm running running some taxing animations with 1x Animation Scale. There is no input lag. I can get the initial lag and again that is just my phone being a wreck by today's standards, but going back and forth the animation is as responsive as could be.

Based solely on my anecdotal evidence, I call BS.

Hand it to an iPhone user and they'll complain about lag. I'm not sure if it's bias or actual lagginess. I haven't noticed real lag on the phones since the Galaxy S2.

The Nexus 5 should have much better touch response times compared to every Android device on that list. It isn't quite as quick as the iPhone 5, but I suspect it would beat out the iPhone 4.

I suppose it depends upon what the definition of "lag" is. If it's a 50ms difference in touch response on some devices, that is quite a change from the historic meaning of lag.

Lag historically was a significant delay between interaction and response. It was also continual stutters and variances in interaction speeds.

But by Android 4.4 and the N5, that is generally annihilated. Paradoxically at the same time iOS 7 on my 3rd generation iPad has brought Android 2.x-style lag to that platform -- I now have an experience on it where keyboard presses respond 700ms later, and other activities have completely unpredictable delays.

Honest question, but can you point me to some of the critics that are saying the N5 is smoother and silkier than the iPhone 5S? I haven't seen any yet.

Off the top of my head, Topolsky refuted complaints about the Chrome browser, then observing that it operates and feels faster than other leading phones, including the 5s.

Faster than Safari on the 5s or faster than Chrome on the 5s?

Chrome has no access to the iOS Nitro JS engine so a difference would certainly be expected.

Hm, I just read his review and he mentioned that he turned off all animations. That probably has a lot to do with a phone feeling faster (just did it on my One and it really does feel faster). He also mentions that the 5S still has the best touch response, which kind of implies that if the animations weren't disabled, the 5S would feel smoother.

Overall though, I feel like my HTC One with CM10.2 feels just as smooth as my previous iPhone 5 90% of the time. 10% of the time, it stutters a bit, but I'm going to chalk that up to CM10.2 being a community project.

I'm a big Android fan and have to agree with 'pearjuice'. I have yet to see an Android device without the extra lag compared to iOS. Maybe you're confusing low lag with smoothness? Android can be smoother than iOS, i.e. you slide the finger and get a perfectly smooth animation where iOS shows a small stutter. But this smooth animation doesn't start immediately, and that is the lag we're talking about.

On iOS, putting the finger on an icon and moving it feels more "real" because the icon stays under the finger. On Android, a quick motion of the finger lets the icon trail behind... Perfectly smoothly, but behind. I hope Google fixes this at some point but I suspect the low latency we see on iOS is possible thanks to a tight integration between hardware and software that would be difficult to achieve on Android.

Leaving the "lag does exist or not" issue aside, Google is working on a Dalvkit replacment called ART (http://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/art.html).

KitKat ship with an experimental version of ART, and it seems to perform better in synthetic benchmarks than Dalvkit. People online are also reporting a smoother experience with it (but it might be placebo, I don't think there's a scientific and unbiased comparative between the two yet).

Well Google Hangouts on iOS7 can make and receive phone calls for your Google Voice account but KitKat cannot. Hangouts is considered the primary SMS application but even though option screens exist you cannot make Voice your primary app for texting. This means voice control is effectively useless.

I'm extremely disappointed that Google launched such a tight integration with such key functionality missing.

I've also had to clean my phone off twice because Google's backup service continues to think the phone is new so it keeps sending me a bunch of crap I don't want on my phone.

I haven't seen a lot of lag issues yet, but I've only had it for 24 hours or so.

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