Two months with Nexus 4

Preface from the translator

I believe that 80% of all phone reviews are slag; and they all look the same: with a hundred photos of the phone and screenshots of the system, analysis of all spherical characteristics and the final phrase like “N is a great phone for everyday use with a nimble processor, but the tar of the tar is a small time of the phone under the jet stream: only 2 seconds . Therefore, our estimate is 7/10 ”. But it seems to me that a real review of the phone is how it behaves in real life, and not laboratory measurement of characteristics. It is a pity that such conclusions can be made only after months of use. This article from the Central Android site dedicated to Nexus 4 is intended to partially compensate for the lack of such experience. So, let's go :



A little more than two months have passed since Nexus 4 first appeared on Google Play. We all know perfectly well that we bought it extremely quickly (or, if you like it better, Google coped with the delivery of devices even worse than last time). So, it can be said that those who have been with him for 9 or 10 weeks are in the extreme minority ( article from January 23, 2013. Hereinafter, italics - comment. Transl. ).
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Given this, we thought that we would return to the experience of its use after two months and see how the flagship will show itself in everyday life. If you have recently purchased a Nexus 4 or are still waiting for shipment, you can now find out what awaits you in the future.

Under the cut - about how Nexus 4 worked for 70 days in the hands of the editor of "Android Central".

Rear window will be scratched

My Nexus 4 has been in my hands every day since mid-November, including a week of daily use at CES 2013 in Las Vegas. He fell. Only once. On the carpet. Nothing else happened to him.

For two months of normal use, he collected his share of scratches, and most of them accumulated on the rear window. If he is left without a cover, the back panel will get scratched very soon, even if you are very thrifty. In my case, the upper part of the rear window was covered with the thinnest scratches, as well as the back of a used iPod Classic. Fortunately, the dark shade of glass and sparkling pattern make these scratches almost invisible most of the time. But they are, and you know that very well. Worse, some of them are dangerously close to the camera lens, and this is already a problem.

So far, I have not yet broken the rear window of the phone, but the forum has a lucky theme that still succeeded (photos are attached).



The only place where something else has been scratched (but only slightly) is the upper part of the silver frame around the front panel; the strange thing is that the lower part now looks like new. All this is clearly seen in the photo below, but it is worth noting once again that such things are much more difficult to see. In any case, the result of the work of designers LG - a sparkling phone is very easy to scratch.

Although it will be difficult for you to find a phone that after a couple of months would not collect any signs of exploitation on itself, so the Nexus 4, though easily scratched, is no worse than any other. For example, the Galaxy S3, which I used about the same, collected a few scratches on the back cover. However, in his case, all this was compensated for by its easy substitutability. Also note that any shiny item will pick up scratches much faster than matte, such as the HTC One X with a polycarbonate case.

At the forum, the majority of respondents answered that they wear Nexus 4 with covers or bumpers to avoid such troubles. Someone, however, likes to take risks. The user palitsyn writes: “I have a bumper and a case, but I stopped wearing them, because I like the phone as it is. If it breaks, it breaks. I want to enjoy my phone. ”

8 gigabytes of memory is almost enough

After I told you not to buy the Negus 4 version, I went and bought the Nexus 4 8Gb. On the crazy day of the start of sales, I had only a choice between the 8-gigabyte nexus and no nexus, and I made the only possible decision for me - to order a younger model with a smaller memory size. But in terms of freedom of choice, I would still recommend paying an extra fifty dollars for double the amount of memory for all the same reasons that I indicated in the original article ( in the original there is no reference to the article in this place, but let me agree a priori with the author : after all, at 16 gigabytes you can always fit more data in which case ).
But since I was dragging my miserable existence with the Nexus 4 8Gb, the limit of 5.67Gb has not become such a big problem. Ordinary Android applications do not require as much space, and since I had unlimited internet, I prefer listening to music through Google Play Music rather than using the old-fashioned phone to download mp3 files.

Most of the time, eight gigs will be enough for you (and we have heard from many manufacturers that the results of their surveys also confirm this). There are only a few cases where a small amount of Nexus 4 memory becomes a problem. The first is games. High-end class games require a gigabyte of free space and more. Need for Speed: Most Wanted , for example, takes two gigabytes. On 8Gb, this is more than a third of the total space available to you, so you should watch out for it if you are a game lover.

The second is any media consumption that requires files on the device. If you have a long flight (say, to the other end of the world to some cool exhibition) or you are going somewhere, with free data transfer, everything is not so good (say, to some cool exhibition at the other end of the world), using files from the cloud is no longer a panacea. This means that you have to pre-load the phone with various data. A 5.67 gigabyte is much easier to fill out than you think, especially when applications with downloads should get into the same framework.
Community opinion is such that eight gigabytes still a little bit lacking, but sixteen more than that. The badbrad17 user says about his 16Gb model: “I have all the applications I need, plus a bunch of photos and videos, and I still have 9 free gigabytes. And this is from 1.3 gigabyte backups. Eight gigabytes is definitely not enough, but 16 is enough for most people. ”

Android 4.2 is a bit odd but nice

Two months have passed since the start of sales, and the Nexus 4 is one of only two phones that officially use Android 4.2 Jelly Bean with a “bare” shell, which still remains the fastest, cleanest and most beautiful Android user interface among all devices. And Android 4.2, in turn, introduces several important additions to the stock UI (on the contrary, I’m somewhat annoyed by the Android developers ’constant improvement, rearranging and decorating something in their system. You’re just getting used to a certain type, for example, a drop-down panel , as in the next update, it is being reworked. It resembles a series of Ubuntu updates, when one of the few notable changes was to replace the horizontal volume slider with a vertical one, and then, with the next update, back. Notably, iOS does not p. It makes such alterations, and I consider this a sign of quality and distant planning (UI ).

The only thing that did not please me so much is the new lock screen, which now supports special widgets. Something in it seems to me to be whipped up, and after two months of use, it still remains one of the weakest points of the system in terms of design. However, I’m already used to it, and now it seems to me quite natural - and fast - to stretch my finger from the center of the screen to unlock, or grab the right edge of the screen to turn on the camera.

I was never tempted to try installing several different widgets for the lock screen. My argument in favor of this, as before, is that such things make the very idea of ​​the lock screen meaningless.

Filling the device - with a lot for the future, with one exception

In general, the Nexus 4 is an advanced smartphone, just like in November. There is still no processor that would surpass Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 Pro, and in combination with timely updates from Google, we can say that the coming year of using the phone will definitely not disappoint you. I'm not going to complain that the Nexus 4 lacks some type of 1080p screen like the Droid DNA ( we have HTC J Butterfly ). Perhaps we will return to this issue in the future, but the difference between 720p and 1080p is not so significant to worry about it seriously.

But once again, the camera becomes the Achilles' heel of the Nexus 4. In November, I called the Nexus 4 “pretty good” and I still think so. There is a whole topic on the forum , full of great pictures taken by those who agree with me. But the production of cameras for mobile phones is far from an area where the industry stands still, and this year we have already seen cameras capable of seriously moving the Nexus 4 (for example, the Sony Xperia Z ). So his camera doesn’t compare with what we see in 2013, and this is worth considering if you still choose your phone.

With LTE, everything is still unclear

Officially, Nexus 4 does not support LTE, and HSPA + remains the fastest way to transfer data. The unofficial picture remains the same vague. The owners of Nexus 4 in the United States and Canada were pleasantly surprised shortly after the start of sales, having learned that the phone hid the support for LTE. It uses precisely the frequencies that T-Mobile will soon be using, so subscribers on this network are looking forward to an update that would open up official LTE support. However, the necessary papers have not yet passed the Federal Communications Commission, so we will have to wait and see what happens in the future.

No matter what happens with LTE support on the current Nexus 4, it seems to me that we can still see the new Nexus 4 with LTE support from other operators in different territories. The American market can be quite unfriendly with respect to unlocked LTE devices, but in Europe everything is basically standardized around 800, 1800 and 2600 MHz, and it is already possible to buy unlocked European phones with LTE.

Do not forget about the Sprint, which alone pulled the Nexus S 4G and Galaxy Nexus . Today, Nexus 4 with unlocked LTE could become a real super-phone for this operator, who recently feels not quite confident.

Nexus 4 is still impossible to buy on the Play Store

( already quite possible )

Whether due to supply problems , or because of undervalued demand , the Google Play Store has effectively overwhelmed sales of the Nexus 4. Google is still dealing with this problem, but today two months of spoiled sales have passed.

LG says things will go better by mid-February, but if you've been waiting for Nexus 4 for months, is it worth a couple more weeks to wait for a chance to grab your Xperia Z? Or what will HTC present to us at Mobile World Congress? Phone booms are rather fickle.

Total

Not surprisingly, two months later, the Nexus 4 is still a great phone. Other devices will be able to overshadow it only after a few months - such is the order of things in the mobile industry. If you buy it today - it will not be perfect new for infinitely long. In the end, any phone can be broken.

We did not choose the 2012 Nexus 4 phone for reasons that we have already indicated in another article. But after two months of active use of the Nexus, which came out from under the wing of the LG, would I have advised it to you? Definitely.

Afterword from the translator

This text is in some way an experiment for two reasons: firstly, sometimes I allowed myself to move quite a bit from the text when the laconic phrase in English, when translated, in Russian looked unnatural. I identify many translations in Habré not by the corresponding mark, but by the clearly “non-Russian” style of the text. I tried to cope with this problem (if it, of course, has a place for you at all), and I get the result for general court. Secondly, it would be interesting for me to find out how relevant the topic is not of “boxed” phone reviews, namely, the results of simple household use. I am pleased to get your opinions on these issues in the comments.