Uhoh, Tom, the Android hater is starting a Galaxy Nexus thread, run!

I did want to see who here is getting one or has one already, because I am interested in the impressions others have of it. After reading and watching The Verge review, it does really seem like Google has made a big leap forward with this phone. Joshua Topolsky is someone I trust to be in line with my kind of thinking regarding tech gadgets.

I'm now curious to see one in person, mostly for the screen. The Pentile displays on my Samsung Captivate and Focus annoyed me quite a bit. It looks like the Nexus has a much improved version.

I know the Google ecosystem is mostly not for me, but I like seeing it improve anyhow. Competition in the market is a good thing. I've also been critical in the past here when other companies copy ideas. And to clarify a bit on that, I don't personally mind the copying too much as a way to spread innovations around, as long as it's done the right way. Blindly copying someone else, without understanding why leads to a bad copy. Multitiouch performance, and other iPhone like features on my Captivate was so frustrating because it tried to blindly copy Apple without getting it right. The people doing the copying didn't understand the importance of why the iPhone worked the way it did and performed the way it did, so it felt like a shoddy knockoff.

Looking at the pure Google experience on 4.0, Google seems to be copying some aspects from other ecosystems with the understanding of why those other systems worked the way they do. The Multitasking interface sudo clone from the WebOS side is fantastic. The touch response finally looks to be to the level I've grown accustom to since mid 2007.

Based on his comments in the Q&A, and parts of the review, it still seems iOS and potentially Windows Phone 7 have the edge on ease of use from a consumer point of view, but 4.0 does close the gap greatly. Now hopefully the 3rd party Android program makers, and the OEMs also follow suit and raise their own quality bars to the level Google appears to be aiming for.

I'll also be interested in seeing 4.0 on a tablet to see if it also gains similar improvements. Honeycomb fits into my "shoddy knockoff" category, and I've had direct experience with every 3.x revision on multiple devices.

Oh, it's a bit disappointing to see Verizon end up with the only US version of the Nexus. Hopefully that won't last long, as I'd be very tempted to take one on a proper month long trial of the Google vision for smartphones. The Captivate and general Android experience was horrible for me when I tried in 2010, it's impressive to see the amount of iteration and improvement in just 1.5 years time.

I never got the impression that you were a hater, just that it didn't work for you. Which I can understand. iPhone doesn't work for me because there's not enough fiddlability with it, but it's almost certainly more efficient at what it does.

Good commercial too. People actually using the phone for the features it has. Bonus points for part of it being filmed in Austin.

I'm definitely interested but I'm on T-Mobile.

Well, I think everyone here knows I'm on board to get it the moment it's released here in the US. I'm very jealous of the UK empeggers right now, who can just go out and buy one as of yesterday.

I've been very displeased with Samsung and Verizon in their handling of the release of this phone. I had assumed the lack of an announcement regarding the release date was a marketing thing, and they were putting a campaign together, but it sounds like the phone just got a somewhat surprise release in the UK. The November 17th UK release date was rumored for a long time, but never confirmed. Then it just seemed to show up in the stores.

The initial rumors were for the 10th here in the US, but clearly that didn't happen. Now it's very unclear, and some rumors put it for black Friday, which I would HATE. I despise the idea of going anywhere on the day after Thanksgiving, especially to any retail store.

My assumption now is that Verizon is also trying to figure out how to handle the steady stream of Android phones. If they'd released the RAZR and the Galaxy Nexus on the same day, all their shoppers would have asked why the phone with the older version of Android was better, and they'd have a tough time answering. I think now they're just trying to put as much time as they can (just a couple weeks) between the two handsets.

Tom, unfortunately I just don't think there's much you can do to crossover between the platforms. If you're very ingrained in the world of Apple, I don't think an Android phone is going to work well for you. If you're totally into Google, I think the same is true. If you use one or the other lightly, I think you're fine. My wife loves GMail and her iPhone equally, for example, but she doesn't have a Mac and she doesn't use Google Music, so she's just the right fit for crossing over between the two companies.

As for stuff that's lifted from other companies, yes, there are some elements from other platforms in ICS. Just like iOS5 lifted several Android features But yes, they improved on them. For example, iOS improved on the Android notification shade, and I think Google is trying to come back by matching or improving on those improvements.

Google is definitely afraid of Siri, though. They're going to have to top Apple on that feature, and I'm not sure they have a plan for it. In that feature war, Apple had extremely basic voice control, then Android had FAR better voice control, and now Apple has blown them away.


As for my expectations of the phone:

- I'm somewhat hesitant about the display, but I've been rocking a pentile display on the Nexus One and I don't have a problem with it. The display on the Galaxy Nexus will be far better in contrast and resolution, so I don't think I'm going to have much of a problem.

- I can't wait for the speed. My phone is a cow right now, and loading an image in the gallery takes like 30 seconds. I'm getting a lot of crashing apps too.

- I can't wait for more storage space. It's ridiculous how little room for apps they put into the Nexus One. That was poor planning on Google's part.

- I suspect I'll like the form factor of the phone, but the plastic feel and lightness of it will probably bother me. I'll probably get over it, though.


The biggest problem I'm going to have to get over with ICS is the lack of consistent placement of the menu and search buttons. this concerns me greatly. As for the menu button, I happen to be a big fan of it. I use it all the time, and I think it's a great way to tuck away additional options that you don't want cluttering up the screen. This is a fundamental UI choice that is very polarizing, I could offer many arguments for it, and those who don't like it could offer many against it, but I like it and I think Android users are used to it. The problem I have is that they didn't get rid of it, they made it something that will be shifting position based on the app. I don't like how it works on Honeycomb and I don't think I'll like it on ICS either. The annoying part to me is that I think the menu button is FAR more useful and important than a button that does nothing more than switch between apps. I do use this button on Honeycomb, but not nearly as often as I use the menu button in the apps that have it.

The other big concern I have is losing the search button. Not so much because I use it to search within apps, which I do, but because I use it ALL THE TIME to do voice search. In Android, if you hold down the search button for a couple seconds, it brings up the voice input mode. Nine times out of ten, I then say "note to self: ______" My phone then automatically sends an email to my inbox so I have a reminder to do something. They've removed this button entirely, and now search only exists on the home screen as one long bar. I do not like this, as one of the first things I did on my previous Android phones was to remove the search bar from the home screens to make more room for icons.


Anyway, obviously I'm looking forward to this phone. Now I just need a release date!

Given that the UK Galaxy nexus is the first pentaband GSM phone, which will work on every single GSM carrier in the world, apparently, there's no reason that it can't be offered on other carriers in the US. They just have to wise up and carry it.

Apparently AT&T had a post up on Google+ asking followers if they should carry the phone. It appears this was taken down, but it was caught by a couple blogs, I think.

A couple random thoughts:

- I'm planning to upgrade my 1.5 year old Droid X to a Galaxy Nexus, and thus renew a 2 year commitment to Verizon. The release date seems to be a moving target. droid-life.com seems to be covering the rumors reasonably well. The latest two rumored dates seem to be Nov. 21 and Dec. 8. We'll see.

- I've been saying for a while now that the only way to have a good Android experience is to have one that hasn't been dorked up by third party. Also, if there's some kind of serious problem, then it will impact enough Google employees that they will file bugs and/or just go fix it themselves.

- Plus, you're modestly less likely to have carrier-installed spyware like Carrier IQ. (It's entirely unclear whether other phones have the same issue or not. The company claims to support more than just Android.)

- The level of spit and polish looks impressive to me, but then I'm more of a power user than a "keep it clean and simple" guy.

- If you prefer AT&T, you should be able to import the international version at full price. It also works on AT&T's HSPA+ network. I don't know about whether it will additionally work with T-Mobile's equivalent network.

My ignorance about cell phones is beyond description, so please bear with me.

Does this mean that the Galaxy Nexus is made by Samsung to Google's specifications, and runs purely Google OS with no "features" and crapware added by anybody else?

If so, that seems like a good thing.

tanstaafl.

The prior two Nexus phones had this property. Zero crapware, plus no boot-locking, so you could rebuild the whole phone from source code, if you wanted, and install it without being required to "jailbreak" your phone.

For the current Galaxy Nexus, this appears to be the case, at least for the GSM version they're selling everywhere except the U.S. It's less clear what's up with the U.S. CDMA version. There's some screenshot evidence to say that it comes with a handful of Verizon apps, but it's presumably still a proper dev phone, so it should be relatively painless to return to pristine form, if you really want.

Also, for the record, the two previous Nexus phones weren't exactly made "to Google's specifications." My understanding is that they were more the case that they had these in the works and Google came along and said "gee, let's make that be the next Google phone." The current Galaxy Nexus appears to have been more of a direct collaboration between Google and Samsung, at least based on a handful of sketchy stories I've read. This is almost certainly a good thing.

What about Iris then? (no personal experience with it though...)

I've not tried it, but I've heard of it. From what I can tell it's not nearly the same thing, and doesn't really do the personal assistant stuff that Siri does or with the same level of natural language. I'll give it a shot sometime and see how well it works, though!

The Nexus One did have some crapware. Most notable is Amazon MP3, which had the wonderful property of starting itself constantly. There were other preinstalled apps, too: Twitter, Google Goggles, maybe more.

While I agree with you on the Amazon MP3 store (I hated how that behaved - I'm glad I rooted) and Twitter, if you include Google Goggles, what Google products do you draw the line at when calling them included crapware?

It looks like the rumors are centering on December 8th now, though given how horrible Verizon has been in this whole process, I wouldn't be surprised if THAT date was missed too. I can't stand how they're treating this release...

If you can't uninstall it and it's not a basic part of the OS, it's crapware.

I guess I wouldn't include first-party apps, at least not in the discussion we're having. By your definition I could also include the built-in Android Email app. The app isn't essential to using the phone (I haven't used it in three years of owning an Android phone), and I can't uninstall it. The same goes for the Places app.

I guess for me there's a psychological difference between Google's included apps and a third-party's, and it's the same reason I prefer the plain Android experience, because I figure Google knows what's going into that. When a manufacturer adds their skins, it's out of Google's hands and they don't have control over what that company does.

Of course Google's apps can still suck and third party manufacturers could do a good job (though the latter seems to be pretty impossible). But I have more confidence when I start with Google's vision and add what I want on top of that.

*edit*
BTW, I was saying Android's Email app wasn't "crapware," but I do believe it's "crap"

So, what is a basic part of the OS? An email client? A contacts manager? A web browser?

None of those, IMO. To be clear, I think it's perfectly reasonable to include those with the OS, but the fact that I can't uninstall them is … annoying. I mean, if I decided that the only browser I wanted to use is Dolphin, why am I required to still have "Browser" hanging around? (To be honest, this isn't a great example, as most of what "Browser" is is part of the native rendering engine.)

IMO, the only things that should be considered basic parts of the OS are things that are required for other programs to be able to function and for the user to be able to access them.

Agreed - part of the reason I finally decided to root mine was to get rid of 'uninstallable' things like T-mobile's top 5 apps app, which seems to want to update all the time, and assorted other crap.

I wouldn't mind them bundling a wide range of stuff, as long as they let you uninstall.

Bummer.



I can understand why people would want a unified partition with all the storage available in it, but releasing the phone before there's a solution for non-Microsoft platforms is kind of weak. Not that I'm in the Galaxy Nexus sweepstakes anyway, given I'm just a few months into my Nexus S contract, but, still.

I was actually chatting with a colleague several months ago about how hard it would be to hack up a block-level FAT32 interface *above* a traditional file system to solve exactly this problem. The conclusion of that conversation was that, yeah you could do it, but it would be exceptionally ugly.

At least according to Wikipedia, there are plenty of third-party implementations of MTP for Linux and Mac. The catch is that they're not just magically built in.

In the several years that I've had an Android device, I have used USB Mass Storage exactly once. I have used other methods to transfer files, from "cloud" syncs to Android Bluetooth and SMB clients to Android FTP servers.

This occasionally gets suggested as a way of talking to Empegs (or other MP3 players), whereupon what usually happens is that Mark Lord opines that it wouldn't be all that hard, and I opine that in fact it jolly well would. One major difficulty is that there's no guarantee that you get the cluster writes in any particular order: if you get all the data clusters first, you have no idea what file is being written (or rewritten) until you get the writes that update the parent directory's clusters and the FAT.

Peter

I was upset about it when I first heard, since I hate transfer modes like MTP and Samsung Kies (which is awful), but then I thought about it a while and decided that, like Bitt, I haven't hooked my phone up to my computer in an extremely long time.

Music can be loaded with Google Music over the web, or you can download apps like Double Twist or Winamp to sync over WiFi. Getting photos onto your phone has never been a problem if you've used Picasa (now Google Photos), as it automatically showed your web albums. Now Google+ gets the photos off automatically as well.

The last thing to sideload is video, and I've never needed to do that.

Yes, there are other instances when I've hooked my phone up, but those were geeky things like wanting to sideload an APK or rooting or installing an alternative ROM (and APKs can just be downloaded over email).

I still don't think it's tricky at all. Just write the clusters to disk, and wait for a FAT update that references them. There's a chance that one might then have to go back and split up previously written data if the FAT indicates multiple files, but that's about it. Not hard to keep track, though.

There are theoretical worst cases where performance would be miserable, but I suspect real-life to be more straightforward. Most uses of FAT involve writing a single file at a time.

Shouldn't be more than a few weeks of effort for somebody on a Google Summer of Code project.

Cheers.

I think you're conflating two things here. I imagine what you hate is using proprietary software to upload arbitrary files when you feel like you ought to be able to use your OS's built-in file copy mechanism.

However, there is no reason that these file transfer protocols cannot appear to the user as a standard filesystem. There's little similarity between FAT, NTFS, ISO-9660, UDF, SMB, etc., yet they all appear to the user to be more-or-less the same. And all modern OSes are extensible to add more file system types, and there's no reason that MTP cannot be implemented as one. In fact, there is a filesystem metadriver called FUSE that works under Linux and MacOSX (amongst some other Unix-like OSes) and there are MTP implementations for it.

I have no idea what the MTP experience on Windows is, but I kind of suspect that it's worse than what it will be under MacOS and Linux, because it's less likely that anyone will bother writing an IFS driver for Windows if it's built in, even if it is only as a separate interface.

If you gave me a choice between spending three weeks to implement a MTP/FUSE driver versus three weeks to implement a FAT32-over-a-filesystem layer, I'm pretty sure I'd go for MTP/FUSE, and the result would be stable and debugged sooner.

I don't think that's what I don't like about it. The file transfer experience is just different. It bypasses both the normal Windows file transfer application AND the one I've installed to replace it, Teracopy. The result is a very different experience from normal that just doesn't feel like mass storage.

I want it to act like I've stuck a thumb drive into my computer.

*edit*
But, like I said, I don't really care about this on my phone. I never plug my phone it. My tablet, on the other hand, I plug in to load video.

TeraCopy is still using the OS's built-in file copy mechanism; that's not exclusive to Explorer. It's also used by copy.com, etc. My point is that there is no reason that MTP can't function, to the end-user, exactly like any other filesystem.

Just got mine. I'm on the T-Mobile $30 100 minutes/unlimited text/5GB "4G" data plan.

I can answer questions if anyone has something specific they want to know. Just keep in mind it literally showed up 10 minutes ago.

Screenshot attached of T-Mobile "4G" in Stony Point, NY. I'm inside a brick and steel building.

I had this SIM in a HTC HD7 previously. It couldn't manage more than 2mbps in the same spot.