I've got two gripes with the HTC One as a "Nexus" device. First, it's got hard buttons for home/back/etc., rather than the soft buttons that Google seems to prefer. Second, HTC seems to be self-destructing as a company.

Unless you're in a hurry, I'd wait for the Motorola "X Phone" to come out and see what that's got going for it.

Meanwhile, I read somewhere today that the Verizon variant on the Samsung GS4 can use the AWS spectrum where Verizon is now expanding their LTE coverage. That means you can have that LTE coverage all to yourself. But then you're not going to have the "Nexus experience", at least not without hacking your phone and downloading sketchy software builds from people on Rootswiki.

I'm a lot closer to pulling the trigger on a new phone. I'm still waiting to see what the deal is with this "super amazing fully user-designed mind-blowing phone" from Motorola, which probably won't be much more than "choose your color and engraving."

I'm still leaning heavily towards the HTC One Google Edition. I know, it's got those hard buttons and doesn't have an app switcher button, but I finally got to see one in person and it's freaking gorgeous. It also has easily the best speakers I've ever heard on a phone before. I mean, it's not going to provide tunes for my next party, but if I'm washing dishes or emptying boxes and I want to listen to podcasts, it's more than adequate on its own, and I wouldn't have to carry around my portable speaker.

I've done the math, and even though it's expensive, it'll only take me about 4-5 months on the $30 T-Mobile plan to make up the price difference. I'm paying WAY too much for phone service right now.

And Tony, thanks for mentioning Groove IP. I've tried it out now and was pretty impressed. I minor issues with it, like the fact that every part of the app looks just awful. Also, in my test calls it seems like for some reason the app has trouble if the phone tilts enough to rotate the screen. When that happens the person on the other end can't hear me. I'm not sure why it would even rotate in the middle of a call, but I'll have to see if I can turn that off. Anyway, it really has me more confident about moving to TMobile and losing minutes on my plan.

Is it possible to use Groove IP with the built-in dialer?

The Nexus 4 just dropped by $100. The 8GB is $200 and 16GB $250. Even though this seems indicative of something new coming, that's a crazy price for a great phone that has plenty of life left in it.
https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_4_16GB?id=nexus_4_16gb

I was thinking the same thing. That's extremely tempting now. If I get that $30 T-Mobile plan, the difference between my current plan would pay for that phone in two months.

...and yet I still wonder about a Nexus 5...

I recently acquired a ZTE Open to screw around with. Simply because it's an $80 phone and I'm interested in seeing new stuff (Firefox OS).

There is no question that the 8GB Nexus 4 is worth the added expense. The Nexus 4 is a premium device in every way, whereas the ZTE Open is meant for bottom-feeders. I appreciate what Mozilla is doing. But, if you have access to a Nexus 4 for $200, get that without a second thought.

I just might do that. Good advice. Besides, even if a Nexus 5 comes out in 4 months, I can still sell the Nexus 4 at a small loss and chalk it up to a phone rental fee

That's exactly how I live my life. I rarely keep a phone more than 3-4 months and I never lose my shirt. I can't see how a $200-250 Nexus 4 is a bad investment. Even if you sell it a year from now, how much less can it be worth? Earlier this year, I unloaded an international Galaxy S II for $200. That phone is ancient!

The Nexus 4 is just brilliant.

I have zero complaints about it since I moved from my iPhone 4S. It's such a quick phone, Jellybean is pretty slick as well.

It was a no brainer at the old price, it's even more of a no brainer now.

18 months ago I'd have told you there was zero chance of me owning an Android phone, let alone enjoying the experience.

Even the wife secretly likes my phone.

sn00p (and others here with the N4):

Have any of you gotten the 4.3 update yet? I had heard of problems. I know there's problems with almost every phone OS release (even on iOS sometimes), but these issues sounded pretty bad, and I hadn't heard if they'd been resolved yet. This is separate from the Nexus 7 issues I've heard about.

The problems seem not too serious and fixes are in the pipeline. Meanwhile there are workarounds.

tanstaafl.

FWIW, I went to CyanogenMod, installing the 10.2 nightly on my VZW Galaxy Nexus. I'm liking it a lot. Among other things, I love that I've been able to slap Privacy Guard on all the apps that don't need the permissions they ask for (my logs are full of denied location requests from Facebook). Another unexpected bonus is that there are "color calibration" sliders. I've dropped the green levels a bit and now my phone matches the calibrated colors on my screen. Huzzah.

The only downside seems to be that HBOGo refuses to install on my phone.

I've been running 4.3 on my Galaxy Nexus since shortly after it became available, and the only troubles were very briefly with apps that required root access on my heretofore rooted phone. That got fixed ages ago now.

Cheers

Still loving my N4 -- no regrets at all about not getting the pricier, fancier phones, especially considering how nice wireless charging is. At the new price, it's a total no-brainer, and given how Google changes these things at a moment's notice, I'd grab it right away before they come to their senses.

The one gripe I have about my phone has nothing to do with the hardware, and that's the new Google Maps. What a total train wreck that thing is. They hide all the useful things from the UI, they kill the navigation and local icons... The core functions are all still there, but they've made things a lot harder to access regularly, and all for what? A "streamlined" more Apple-like interface? Talk about "fixing" something that was never broken.

I actually like it, but I agree that they've made some weird choices. I don't particularly like the new practice of hiding the menu items in a hidden menu that slides from the left. GMail has the same thing.

I'm tempted and I don't even need one. I've got an S3, which I'm perfectly happy with. I can't even get one "for the wife", because she's only just got an S3 Mini.

Actually, I also think the new google maps sucks, mainly because (as I realised on train journey this week) they've removed offline maps.

What a useful feature that was, no dependancy on network availability for areas you've saved and brilliant for using google maps abroad without a data connection.

Big loss for me.

Zoom out to the area you want to cache, then type "OK Maps" in the search bar. It will save that area if it's under the previous size limit (about 80MB).

I realised that after I wrote the message, but it's still a pain in the backside.

The previous system where you dragged a box and if it was too big it told you dynamically was way better. Plus you could actually see a list of the cached areas....

This mechanism has me binary chopping in zoom levels and then I forget exactly where I've cached.

They're apparently adding a button, but this is just going to save you typing in "OK Maps", but it's still a pale imitation of its former self!

Edit:

The button is there in mine, you have to click in the search area, then click on the map to dismiss the keyboard and then you can click "make this map available offline".

Rubbish!

Agreed.

Well, I can finally answer the question posed by this thread title: no.

I ordered a 16GB Nexus 4 at the end of last week, and it just got here today. Yes, there's already rumors of a Nexus 5 coming out, but we'll see about that. For now the immediate benefit of cutting my monthly phone contract down from $140 to $30 is going to help my wife and I out a great deal.

So far I'm loving the phone. The immediate impression is that the speed is a huge improvement. Everything just works and I don't have any halting issues like I did with my Galaxy Nexus. This could just be the effect of having a new Android phone, but hopefully now that TRIM is in 4.3 I won't see another slowdown after a year.

Here are some more first impressions:

- I think I definitely like AMOLED more than LCD. The whole display looks relatively washed out when compared to the GN. I'll live with it, and probably get used to it and forget about AMOLED, but at the moment it's a bit of a let down. I'm also noticing a tiny bit of burn in, which is troubling right out of the box. I don't know if it shipped with the screen on the whole way, but I can see some definite yet slight burn in at the left and right edges of the screen.

- I don't know if it was an isolated thing, but the call quality isn't great. I had trouble hearing the TMobile rep, and he had trouble hearing me. That could be the particular call, the phone, TMobile, or the reception in my home.

- The loudspeaker is terrible. It's a waste. After hearing the HTC One's speakers, everything is a let down, but this one is just awful. The GN had a better one.

- I don't know if it's just me, but I don't have those little nubs that were supposedly getting added to the back of the phone to keep it from sliding around.

I'll update as I go along, but I'm very pleased. It's funny that I got this on the same day as the Apple announcement, but I'm very pleased with this phone.

I think you'll find that the yellowish tint will go away as the phone ages. Something about the glue used to bond the LCD to the glass.

I do agree about your preference for AMOLED. I've had multiple phones with both LCD and AMOLED displays and I have a strong preference for AMOLED.


I think the nubs were designed to give the speaker some breathing room so that if you place the phone on a table, it's not completely muted. I don't think they're very noticeable, but they shouldn't be microscopic. If you can hear the speaker when the phone is placed on its back on a flat surface, you probably have them.

AMOLED displays are beautiful. Primarily, when they're black, they're completely dark. The contrast ratios are just outstanding. Likewise, they have a much broader color gamut, with far more saturated colors than are possible with traditional backlit screens. The downside is that the Android software stack and graphics chips can't deal with this amazing color gamut. They just make all the colors more saturated. It's cool looking, but it's not correct. There's also a greenish color cast. Now that I'm running CyanogenMod, I can at least fix that with their "color calibration" setting. Very nice.

I have a question for the Nexus 4/Google Voice users out there.

I just noticed the downside to not being able to forward calls to my regular cell phone number to GV. On my Galaxy Nexus, if I wanted to dismiss an incoming call I could swipe the slider to the left and it would go straight to voicemail. On my Nexus 4, if I do this the call is instead sent to my TMobile voicemail, which I absolutely do not want.

So is there any way to fix this? Or is this just something I'll have to live with?

I'm not a user of GV but you know you can press a volume key whilst the phone rings and it will silence it and stop it vibrating? It will continue to ring of course but completely silently.

It doesn't have to do with the phone, it has to do with the T-Mobile prepaid plan. I talked quite a bit about it up-thread -- basically, sending calls to your normal cell number to your GV voice mail is a feature that requires conditional call forwarding, and T-Mo prepaid doesn't support this.

The absence of conditional call forwarding on T-Mo prepaid plans is a hugely annoying thing. Here's one blog post about why prepaid plans might be less desirable that gets into lots of details.

The magic date when my VZW lockin expires is rapidly approaching and I have no idea what I'm going to do. It looks like our family situation is going to change from how it is now (one LTE phone with a legacy unlimited plan and one crappy feature phone) to something quite different (two smartphones and a tablet, all LTE-capable), making my legacy VZW plan less interesting, never mind that it seems unlikely that there will ever be another Nexus phone on VZW.

In my dream of dreams, Google creates an MVNO where your GVoice number is the only number you have. Do voice-over-WiFi when you can (as with Republic Wireless), and otherwise fall back to GSM with a reasonable price (anything under $50/mo) and they'd kick ass all over.

Sigh.

I knew you talked about this, Tony, and I was prepared for it. But if you'll notice, I said that calls to my GV number are not sent to GV voicemail if I do it manually. Only if I let it ring through. If I swipe the call away, whether the call was made to my cell or GV number, it always goes to my T-Mo voicemail. If I let the call ring, calls to my cell number go to T-Mo and calls to my GV number go to GV. I don't know why swiping GV calls doesn't make them go to GV voicemail.


This is what I do, but it's not ideal. Frequently I'll need to put the phone back in my pocket, and I'm always worried that I'll pick up the call accidentally.

...except there's almost no details about why it might be a bad thing. The article only mentions two downsides. The first is lack of LTE, and the second is throttling.

I've not noticed any problems with data speeds on HSPA+. It's pretty great, actually. So far I don't miss LTE one bit. Perhaps it's because I moved from a slower phone with faster internet to a faster phone with slower internet. In all it's either a wash or perhaps a little better because rendering times have improved.

Throttling isn't a problem for me because I know it's not unlimited data. It's 5GB then I get throttled. I prefer that to having 6GB on Verizon (for 4.5 times the cost) and getting hit with overages. I just make sure I stay under my cap, just like I did before.


My VZW date was approaching (December). Even with the ETF, I still saved money by bailing out only a month ahead of it. I wish I'd done it months ago.

Ah, I see. I rarely swipe away calls, so I don't know if this will fix your problem, but one option is to do what I did and call T-Mo to tell them to deactivate your voicemail with them. The downside is that people who call your T-mo number will never get any kind of voice mail, but everyone calls me on GV so that's no big deal

Thinking out loud here:

When my VZW lock-in ends, I'll need three active lines: my phone, my wife's phone, and a tablet. (My wife figures she wants a tablet for really using when she's out and about, and doesn't expect to use the phone as much.)

My employer has a 15% discount negotiated with T-Mobile and AT&T, 20% at Verizon, for its employees. This may or may not apply to the prepaid plans.

T-Mobile's recent family plan has three tiers for each device: 500MB, 2.5GB, and "unlimited". Let's say we want two devices on 2.5GB (my phone, her tablet) and one at 500MB (her phone). Total price: $110/month ($93.50 after discount). In T-Mobile's new world pricing, they don't subsidize the phone any more. Instead, you can spread the cost over a two year period. I'd buy the phones on the side, unlocked, making it easier to move around. The rules on tethering are complicated, and it's unclear if they enforce them on the server side. If you bring your own gear, you can apparently tether at will.

Factoid: when I'm traveling on business and staying in a hotel that charges for WiFi, I just tether to my phone and go on with life. I've found that my regular usage in this mode is roughly 2GB/week. This suggests that I don't need any more than the 2.5GB plan since I'm rarely on the road for more than a week a month, and I'm otherwise surrounded by good WiFi (home, office, etc.).

T-Mobile prepaid offers a bunch of tweaks to this. The tablet could run on a $25/mo "mobile Internet" plan with 1.5GB/mo, but the proper answer seems to be the exciting $30/mo plan that gives you 5GB. Three of those would cost $90/mo, and might not be eligible for my discount. Furthermore, I'd have the whole conditional call forwarding issue. Given the close price difference to the post-paid plan, that seems like the winner.

AT&T is complicated. On the prepaid side, they offer a 3GB data plan for $30/mo, suitable for the tablet. and a $60/mo. smartphone plan with 2GB of data. Grand total: $150/mo. for 7GB of total data use ($127.50 after discount, if I can even get it). On a 4GB shared data plan (post-paid), the grand total comes out to $160/mo ($136/mo after discount).

Verizon is where I am now, and I'm one of the few, the proud, the grandfathered unlimited 4G, but I've only got it on my phone. To add my wife's phone, I'd have to get a new family plan, and then I lose my awesome plan. Furthermore, the whole CDMA lock-in thing is kinda annoying versus the freedom of the GSM universe. A new shared plan with 4GB of data, two phones, and one tablet? The very same $160/mo as AT&T ($128/mo after a better discount). Verizon's prepaid plans: $60/mo for 2GB on a smartphone. $30/mo for 2GB on a tablet. Again, exactly the same at AT&T. Yee haw.

AIO Wireless, which uses AT&T, charges $55/mo. for 2GB of data on a smartphone. So it's $5/mo cheaper than AT&T. The tablet price is $15/mo for nearly no data and another $10/mo for 1GB more. Rough bottom line: $135/mo, and no discount. Not interesting.

Straight Talk Wireless, the Walmart plan, is $45/mo for "unlimited" everything (save a few bucks if you prepay for the whole year). Multiply by 3 and we're talking $135/mo. No discount. Also, they don't seem to do very well on the conditional call forwarding issue, either.

Net10 Wireless wants $125/mo for three devices, "unlimited" everything. No discount.


I didn't expect I'd reach the conclusion that I want to get a T-Mobile "post-paid" traditional contract, but that looks like the best way to go, given how I expect we'll use our devices.