I made myself a little present this holiday season, i. e. a Nexus 4. After playing with it for about a week (yepp, I cheated, but don’t tell my kids), a first résumé.
But before I deep dive into my view of the Nexus 4, some comments on The Verge’s review of this device:
A little over a year ago, I bristled at the fact that the iPhone 4S didn’t have LTE, but I also admitted that the phone was a still a “force to be reckoned with.” The same can be said for the Nexus 4, with a caveat. The mobile industry has changed a lot in the last 12 months. LTE is the norm, not a nice-to-have, and its performance has shown the cracks in the aging GSM networks of the US. No flagship device is released without it. Not even the iPhone.
For a phone and an OS built for the cloud, I think it’s unacceptable to not offer a version that takes advantage of our fastest mobile networks.
That said, and reminding the dear readers that LTE, as of now, is data only, i. e. without a 2G or 3G network, there won’t be SMS or voice calls at all, let’s drop the LTE bullshit (yes, I mean this; I use a Nokia Lumia 920 as my business phone, and I’m strongly thinking that the buildout of LTE was only one thing: rushed. With no provision for voice calls, LTE in a phone (in contrast to a tablet) makes no sense at all right now).
First thing I really noticed about my Nexus 4 was … how incredibly slippery it was. Put it on any surface — if that’s not 100% even, over time your Nexus 4 will slide away, and, with some bad luck, crash it’s shiny glas front or bottom. I got 2 scratches onto the Gorillaglas-display already from the Nexus 4 sliding down on what seemed to be an even surface and hitting stuff on the way down.
On the software side, I’m not impressed, having used the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 before (i. e. was able to glimpse at the new photo features of Android 4.2); without the multi-user addons, Android 4.2 feels not too different than Android 4.anything.
Battery life, for me, for now seems to be more than sufficient, I was recently able to sustain 8.5+ hours on battery (23% remaining) while using the Nexus 4 in a kind-of-normal way, i. e. having it update stuff and me using the Nexus 4 for reading and writing social media things.
The camera, though, is no match to my Lumia 920; somewhat sad, as even the aged Nokia N95’s camera drew circles around most of my Android imaging devices of late.
Responsiveness of the UI is great; and even web sites render beautifully fast on Nexus 4’s Chrome — compared to last year’s high end device HTC Sensation, it feels like the Sensation in on a quarter core compared to the Nexus 4. Simply awesome. Flash is lacking, though, and some site’s autodetection does not work well at times — e. g. mediathek.ard.de insisted on me installing a (not available) current Flash plugin. On the Nexus 7 I was somehow redirected to m.daserste.de where they serve non-Flash content …
All in all, I still like my (rooted) Nexus 4 — but I’m axious to drop it because of it’s design. It seems to tend to fall onto the Gorillaglas display — which is much less unbreakable and rather easily scratchable as one would think — or it’s glassy back, which cracks even more easily than the front.
Oh, yes, one big minus: there’s not HDMI out, no even via MHL (i. e. USB). Sure, I could stream content to some Miracast-Devices — which aren’t as of yet available in Europe. Oh, I just read an article that the Nexus 4 dropped MHL (thanks, I already own such a cable) in favor to Slimport — which seems to be the same idea but a different standard, hence my MHL cable didn’t light my TV. Okay, spending another 30 bucks (plus an HDMI switch) — will tell you the outcome in the future …