Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

Indeed... everything you posted is the exact opposite of my experience with stock Nexus 5 and my non-techie friends with their S5's and Galaxy Notes.

View on HN

Anecdotal, but I've got a Nexus 5 and its substantially less stable than the Windows Phone I had before it, or the iPhone before that. Not full phone crashes, but a "Unfortunately, X app stopped" messages. I'm not a power user by any means, and I don't run anything more exotic than Yelp. So when I run into a bug with basic functionality, like cropping profile photos, its irritating. Also, battery life is shit, won't get through 24 hours with 4-5 hours of screen use, which my iPhone could (see Anandtech's benchmark where he measures LTE web browsing time, in which iPhone dominates despite its tiny battery). Its a good phone with a great screen, but the software stack just isn't as solid as WP which is itself less solid than iOS.

Most of the "Unfortunately, X app stopped" messages are not a result of Android itself, but of bad developers who don't thoroughly debug their apps. That's not really an operating system problem. If an applications crashes with an exception or some kind of issue do to a developer, it's not reasonable or fair to blame the operating system. I don't blame iOS when a buggy app crashes.

Also, I easily get about 24+ hours of battery life on my Nexus 5 with 4-5 hours of screen use. If you look on the Nexus 5 subreddit, some people have difficult getting more than 3-4 hours of screen time while others (like me) have no problem getting 4-5 hours.

The iPhone has a screen size of 4" and the Nexus 5 is 5" - does your iPhone battery last proportionately much longer?

The Nexus 5 has 56% more screen area, but also a 56% larger battery. The Nexus 5's screen is bright, but the iPhone's is even brighter. Anandtech found the iPhone 5s got 8.57 hours of LTE web browsing, versus the Nexus 5's 6.9 hours: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7517/google-nexus-5-review/3 (all displays at 200 nits).

The iPhone/iOS just seems to have a better-optimized LTE stack. If you look at Anand's data, the iPhone drops less than 5% from WiFi to LTE, while the Nexus 5 drops 23%. iOS seems to also be much more aggressive about powering down the radio to avoid burning a bunch of battery life in bad signal conditions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com