Right around Christmas time I went and got the latest and greatest Google Phone, the Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. I stood in line for a bit to get it and was thoroughly excited for the Android 4 goodness, the super large screen and the 4G LTE. Here I am, almost a month later, left with a bad taste in my mouth from the phone, from Google and from Verizon.
Let me start by saying I’m not an Apple fanboy and I’m not a Google fanboy. I like products on both sides and know that the competition is good for everybody. I do use a Macbook Pro now though because OSX is seriously nice and the laptop itself is fantastically engineered with great battery life, etc. Anyways, I’m supposed to be writing about why I loved the Galaxy Nexus and why I decided to ditch it.
The Galaxy Nexus has a lot going for it. It has a really large, high resolution screen that has more pixels than Apple’s iPad. Honestly going back to any phone smaller than the GN feels funny and I do prefer the larger screen. However, having such a large screen made the phone a little clunky to carry and getting it out of my pocket was always a chore. That’s a minor gripe. The display is nice, especially at high brightness levels, but that sucks up battery quickly. Lowering the brightness helps but I quickly noticed a lot of banding in the screen. Hard to explain, but it almost looked like little waves in the pixels. Here’s a screenshot by somebody else that really shows off what I’m talking about.
Next thing that was nice was the 4G/LTE. The kind of speeds I was getting were really fast and very impressive. I could sync and download apps super quickly. Google Music worked really well with 4G also. I don’t really have any complaints at all about the 4G network. Coverage was good, speeds were great. I’ll miss that.
Battery life was OK. I picked up the extended battery so that I could get through a complete day with casual use. Without the extended battery I could barely get to the afternoon before needing to charge again. I do like that the GN gives me the option of getting extended batteries. I could have lived with the battery life I was getting daily with the extended battery.
The camera was garbage. It was really fast, with no shutter lag…. and took really bad, blurry, grainy pictures. I used it quite a bit and thanks to it being so fast, I would have to take 10-20 pictures just to get 1 or 2 good ones. It was really really bad in low light. The video was pretty good, no real complaints there. The built in panoramic mode was pretty cool as well as some of the image effects and editing tools. I never played with the Movie studio app though.
Also, in terms of the smoothness in scrolling and the response of the OS, Android 4 is the best version of Android yet. It still doesn’t match the smoothness and responsiveness of iOS though. I’m not just talking about the home screens with your icons here, because ICS has a really smooth home screen with widgets and live wallpapers. It’s when I’d start running apps that shouldn’t be laggy where I noticed it all. Run the CNN app on the Galaxy Nexus and watch it stutter trying to scroll the headlines. The Amazon App Store was even worse. Netflix scrolled horribly slow and laggy. I can be content with that though, because the HTC Incredible I had before was way worse than the GN. I’ll kinda miss widgets and live wallpapers, but they aren’t required for the phone to be acceptable. I could only stand to use slow moving live wallpapers anyways and widgets really only showed me the weather, some pics and my email. Like I said, they are nice, but I can live without those things.
Even with the things I mentioned above, I would have been willing to keep the phone and use it for quite a while. I had 3 extremely annoying problems, that were probably hardware related, but who knows. I’ll get to why I didn’t just trade in for another GN in just a minute. The 3 problems were:
- Quite often I’d go to use the camera and get this message: “Cannot connect to Camera”. Only solution I found was to reboot. This happened probably 30% of the time I would go to take a picture. Missed a few shots of my kids playing that would have been good.
- The proximity sensor had issues, especially after playing a game or using the touch screen with an app. When phone calls would come in, sometimes the screen wouldn’t turn off at all during the call. I muted a few people and hung up on a few others. It also happened the other way around where I’d get a call and the screen would go off and stay off. No matter what I tried, the screen would not come back on until the other person hung up.
- The phone froze up and rebooted way more times than a new phone should. It happened mostly when I’d get calls. That’s not acceptable to me. A smartphone in 2012 should work 99.9% of the time when it comes to sending and receiving calls.
I tried to take the phone to Verizon to just get another Nexus. Just like when you take your car to the mechanic, when I got to the score I couldn’t reproduce any of the problems I was having. They wouldn’t even just take my word for it and said they couldn’t help me. I was down to either just getting a ‘refurb/like new’ from Samsung or to trade in for something else since I was in my grace period still. I contemplated some other Android phones, all of which had their flaws. I honestly just felt like I didn’t want to go through the hassle with Samsung when it should have been so much more easier than this. I’m unhappy with this phone, it has problems, believe me and give me another one. Apple does that right.
I went home and just sat on it all for another day or so. I thought about some other things, mostly with Android itself, that helped steer me towards just getting an iPhone. Quite a few times recently some friends at work would show me an app on their iPhone that was very cool/useful/fun, etc. I’d go look in the Android market for the same app. No dice. It’s not that Android doesn’t have plenty of apps, because it does, but it’s still missing so many apps that are available on iOS. I think software availability is very important to me. I like features as much as the next guy, but what good are a bunch of bells and whistles if you can’t get software that really lets you “use” your phone. Apple does that right, and things could change for Google this year or next.
I’ve given Google a few chances now, but I’m tired of dealing with a poor product and poor service. I went back over to the walled garden for a bit with an iPhone 4S. Will I stay with it? No idea, but I am hopeful that it will just work as it’s supposed to and maybe later this year I’ll look and see where Google’s at with things. I think they’ll do well as more phones come out with ICS and I will be looking forward to going back to 4G. However, I believe that Apple is probably cooking up some big updates with the iPhone 5 and I look forward to seeing what they show off too.
So in short:
Galaxy Nexus -> big, nice screen, crappy camera, fast 4G, weak market, only sometimes smooth, buggy
iPhone 4S -> smaller, really nice screen, great camera, slow 3G, fantastic market, always smooth, less-buggy
One final thought: I’m not really trying to start another iOS vs Android debate. Really and truly if Verizon had just taken my word for it and given me another Galaxy Nexus, I would have kept it and been fine. I know how good Apple’s customer service is and I know the 4S is a good phone, even if it’s not 4G, so I’m choosing the side that will mean the fewest headaches and right now that’s Apple.
