I've used it about a dozen times, and the call quality has been decent. There's a bit more latency than normal voice calls, but nothing too terrible, and I'm sure some of that was spotty mobile data service.

In terms of wifi tethering on T-mo, I'm not sure how that'll go, but it seems pretty promising. The deal with Nexus phones on Sprint was that it was officially unsupported / prohibited, but there was nothing they could do to stop it since it was pure Android without any carrier limitations.

From what little I've read about tethering on T-Mo, Nexus phones or other phones with third party roms loaded seem to do tethering okay, but there are some people who claim that T-Mo detects tethering by examining user-agent strings, which is pretty vile if you ask me, but also easy to defeat by either changing your browser's UA string or routing your traffic over a proxy or encrypted tunnel.

I'll certainly be testing it out when I travel next month to avoid hotel internet costs, but even if I lost tethering, it'd be worth it to cut my bill by more than half.

Make sure you check their coverage maps, specifically their data map for your area. I was going to go with that same plan, but ended up with Net10 instead because T-Mo had no data coverage in my area.

I'm paying $45/mo for unlimited, unlimited, 1.5GB on AT&T's network.

Yikes! See, I use less voice minutes than I thought because I have Google Voice on my desktop, and I only send texts through GV on my phone, so those are free already, but I definitely use WAAAY more than 1.5GB of data per month! I could never get by with that little...


It's funny, I had the Nexus One when tethering was first introduced to Android. At that time, the carriers didn't have much experience with it, so even though you knew they weren't pleased by it, they allowed it. I used tethering on that phone the whole time I had it and they never complained. Of course, the speeds were only 3G, so the experience wasn't great, but it worked!

Yeah, my wife's on T-Mo (postpaid) so I have a vague idea of what to expect. She's not a heavy data user, so there's a chance I'll be disappointed, but at least I'm not dealing with a contract or anything. That Net10 plan sounds great, though -- will look into that if I see myself going over on minutes too much.

Net10 only has the data limit on AT&T sims, so if you're happy with T-mobile, their unlimited/unlimited/unlimited plan is the same price. I'm sure you'd eventually get throttled, but I'm not sure where the limit is.

Hmm... I might have to look at those Net10 plans. Thanks for sharing that, John! They have a plan for unlimited everything with no international calls for $45/month. That's a little more than a third of what I pay Verizon (though I have tethering with Verizon, which Net10 doesn't allow).

They're a little unclear about the other plans, though. How does data work on that 750 minute plan? It says "auto-refill," but what the does that mean?

After writing about this, I decided to do some research into the official Nexus 4 bumper. Youtube reviews seemed favorable and noted that the rim around the bumper isn't rubberized like the Apple bumper. I really dislike the Apple bumper due to that rubbery material along the edge. It makes the phone very difficult to slide out of a pocket while sitting down.

So, now I'm sitting here now with an official Nexus 4 bumper on my phone, and it's fantastic. Much better than the TPU case I was using before. There is a metallic ring around the circumference of the bumper. It might actually be plastic, but it looks very good. The material that keeps the phone off the table isn't rubberized and it's not the TPU material I'm familiar with. It's quite rigid and easily slides out of my pocket. The back of the phone is now exposed, but the bumper keeps it from sliding around hard surfaces. I think it will provide good protection while not getting in the way as much as my old case.

Overall, I can highly recommend the Nexus 4 bumper if you must put protection on your phone.

If you buy a Net10 SIM, you are limited to the unlimited voice, text, and data plan for $50 or $65 with international features. Any other Net10 plans you may see on their site are for dumbphones sold at retail in a blister pack.

The only link you should be looking at for Net10 is Net10SIM.com. That is the BYOD (bring your own device) website.

People that prefer being on AT&T's network may want to wait for AIO Wireless to roll-out nationwide. Although it looks like an MVNO, AIO Wireless is owned directly by AT&T and is being test-marketed now. For $55/month you get unlimited talk and text, and 2GB of 4G data (apparently including LTE). After the 2GB, you're throttled.

On Net10's AT&T SIM for $50/month you get 1.5GB of data and then are cut-off. I would rather spend the extra $5 a month on AIO Wireless for more data, then throttle.

If you're fine with being on T-Mobile's coverage, then you have more options for unlimited data for cheap and Net10 might be a good option.

It's tough not knowing how TMobile's high-speed HSPA service works near me. I have a feeling I'd be fine with it, but I don't know. I do know that there's simply no way I can get by with 2GB/month. I'm at least double that most months...

Thanks for the bumper review!

Thanks for the info, Rob!
I don't have an N4 (GN here), but your posts are very helpful and informative, and I'm already looking forward to them for the N5/N6!

Cheers

You give them your credit card info and they automatically recharge you every month (and give you a $5 discount). That's why I said $45 instead of the advertised $50. They also give an additional $5 discount for additional phones, so I only pay $40/mo for my wife's phone on the same plan.

EDIT: just checked my bank, and it looks like after taxes and fees, the actual numbers are $49.99 and $44.50 - so while the advertised price is slightly false, it's not as bad as most of the carriers.

I was just confused because it seemed like the plans with minute allotments didn't have any information about data. But because I'd be BYOD customer with TMobile, it sounds like that wouldn't apply to me anyway...

Got and activated my SIM card tonight. One regression that I knew was coming but that I wasn't quite mentally prepared for was the loss of Sprint's excellent Google Voice integration. Being able to have my GV number show up from my mobile phone when I'm using the cellular network was really nice. The one other Voice-related limitation that I wasn't aware of is that T-Mobile prepaid phones, for whatever reason, can't do conditional call forwarding, which means I can't have the voicemail for calls to my cell number sent to Google Voice.

This is sort of a bummer, because though I plan to have everyone keep calling me on my GV number, a lot of people will just use recent calls to call whatever number I called them from last, which might be my cell number. My hope is that T-Mobile does full Google Voice integration in the future, but who knows when that'll happen. A bit of a sad loss of functionality, but, alas one I'll accept to cut my bill in half.

In terms of coverage, cellular calls at home seem fine so far. 4G at home (not terribly important because of wifi, of course) is a bit shaky -- it seems to flicker between HSPDA and 3G periodically -- but when it has an HSPDA fix, throughput is very solid. I'll see how coverage is in and around the office and around town over the coming days.

I can confirm that mobile hotspot tethering works -- just did some light web browsing to confirm it, and at least initially no issues with T-Mobile intercepting requests. Will probably have a chance next weekend to give it a more rigorous test.

Anyway, looking good so far.

Can you explain this statement? I use Google Voice 100% of the time between AT&T and T-Mobile, and the only number anybody ever sees is my Google Voice number.


Yes, this is unfortunate. If you don't care about losing T-Mobile's voicemail service, you can call 611 and they will remove it from your account. So, if someone calls your Google Voice number, there is no chance of T-Mobile's voicemail intercepting the call. However, if someone calls your T-Mobile number, the phone will ring endlessly.

That may be intentional. Here, I know my N3 sits on the lower speed network when idle, and then bumps up to the higher speed network when moving any non-trivial amount of data. Perhaps your carrier has configured things to work that way there, too.

When you asy "Google Voice" are you talking GrooveIP? Because yeah, if I do that people see my GV number. But on Sprint, if you turn on GV integration, you can call using the native cellular dialer and the other side still sees the GV number.



That may be -- I'm totally new to GSM phones, so seeing it switch between them made me think it wasn't a good thing.

I paired the phone with my car's bluetooth this morning, and was sad to see that an old annoyance from my previous phone persists. This might be a CyanogenMod thing, but when I switch to the bluetooth source in my car, my phone starts playing sounds in some kind of native music player. This morning with the new phone it was an alarm tone I had transferred from my old phone to my new one. On my old phone it was a sound recording I had made a few years ago. I could never figure out how to turn this off or change it so that a music app opens instead. Anyone know what's going on here?

That's exactly how it works for me. Please see the attachment to see my settings in the (official) Google Voice app.

Huh. Is that going out over the 3G/4G data connection or as a conventional cellular call?

Yes, a conventional cellular call.

Cool, I'll give that a look when I head out for my lunch break. Thanks.

Tony, I can confirm that this is how GV has always worked for me as well. All my calls go out on my Google Voice number and appear to the people I'm calling as such. GV, the way I've understood it, never uses your data connection for the actual phone conversation (except through the GMail interface on the web), and always uses your voice connection and minutes.

However, Rob, I have noticed once or twice, that despite having that setting you show turned on, I've discovered that the person I'm calling sees my cell phone's number and not my GV number. This is annoying, since like you guys I don't want anyone to hold onto that number because one of the great things about GV is that it doesn't matter what your cell's number is

Can you configure it to use wireless, if you're in an area with poor cell coverage?

Lunch break Google Voice experimentation didn't work out all that well. I can call out via GV, but setting up voicemail fails due to the T-Mobile limitations on conditional call forwarding for prepaid plans. My understanding from some googling is that the way to "fix" this is to call T-Mo customer service and tell them to disable voicemail, but I think all that does is prevent the T-Mo voicemail from interfering with your Google Voice voicemail (so the T-Mo one doesn't pick up first) and won't do anything at all for people who call the T-Mobile cell number.

I guess this is just something I'll have to get used to.

No. You would need a 3rd-party app for that such as GrooVe IP. The official Google Voice app is not a VoIP client.

Crazy: A standard T-Mobile plan: 2.5GB per month bring-your-own phone costs $60/mo. There's a pre-paid plan with the same specs and prices, but then there's also a $30/mo. plan with 5GB of data and "only" 100 minutes. Clearly, the $30/mo. plan is a world beater... leading you to ask the question "can I just pay you an extra $10/mo. for conditional call forwarding?" Sigh.

After a week of using my N4, I'm prepared to say that Betteridge's Law holds, and that the answer to the question I posed in this topic is "no."

I did find myself briefly intrigued by the new "Google Edition" of the HTC One, which looks pretty sweet, but just like the Galaxy S4 Google Edition, I can't see spending all that extra coin for an aluminum body with a few extra bells and whistles. The HTC One's screen is higher-res, but on a 5 inch screen, who cares? Faster CPU? Heck, I know I upgraded from a pretty dated phone, so maybe my perception is off, but I haven't had any noticeable lag using my N4, and it's not like I'm going to be encoding videos on it or anything. Twice the internal storage -- okay, that's nice to have, but is it worth $250? I don't think so. And no wireless charging -- I think that's just about a dealbreaker for me at this point. Oh, how I've missed wireless charging!

Data speeds are very solid for me around here. I'm getting HSPDA+ just about everywhere I've tried, and haven't had any major hiccups streaming high-quality audio or Slingboxing. I've used about 400mb of data in the first week, which puts me in a pretty good spot to stay under my 5GB/month limit if that reflects an average week. I'm sure I'll go over some months and be sad with the throttling, but I feel like I can manage.

Did some light tethering over the last couple of days, and no nastygrams or walled garden pages from T-mo. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Also ordered one of those OwlPad/CarPad combos, which probably won't show up for another week or two since they're coming from overseas. I'll probably end up getting a wireless charging orb for my nightstand, and maybe one more for the living room if they ever go on sale.

So yeah, everything's looking great. No buyer's remorse at all.

Thanks for the update, Tony. I'm really glad to hear about your experiences with it, and you're really making me want to pick one up.

For me, I was actually disagreeing with everything you said about the "Nexus" HTC One, until you mentioned the wireless charging. Unless the One sees some pretty great accessories from HTC (and they did make some good ones for my Nexus One), I really need some sort of docking solution, and that wireless orb for the Nexus 4 is calling to me.

To me, the build quality of the HTC One actually is worth the extra money. When we asked the same question here about the S4 I said it absolutely wasn't worth the extra money, but that's because Samsung makes crap phones made of cheap plastic. The HTC One is the only phone I've heard people ever speak of on levels even approaching the iPhone, and even though it's not there yet, it's pretty close. That, plus the great camera have me so very tempted to plunk down the extra cash.


...too bad houses are such damn money pits...

Have you held an N4 in your hand? I haven't seen an HTC One up close, but the N4 really feels solid. Yes, there's the "what if I break the back glass" problem, but aluminum dings, too.

As for the camera, I dunno... My cell phone camera is mostly there for "target of opportunity" shots when I forget to bring my real camera, so I don't find myself swayed by 100% crops of an 8MP or 4MP image that I'm unlikely to ever need to blow up to a level where I'd see the difference. Unless you get down to pixel-peeping levels with something like this, I don't think you really see a lot of difference. And, for me, certainly not hundreds of dollars worth of difference -- that could be a new lens for my real camera!

I'm more interested in whether the HTC One is as good on the low-light photos as they claim. I actually don't have a dedicated camera of my own anymore (I use my wife's sometimes), so my phone is my camera (and the Galaxy Nexus is no good at it).

I haven't held the N4, but I know the One is a nice looking phone. I've been trying to see one close up, but nobody has them in stores around here...