

Nexus 5 listing appears in the Play Store - arunitc
http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/17/nexus-5-16gb-349-play-store/

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Tyrannosaurs
It's a nice looking phone but the excitement about the Nexus range seems
disproportionate with the sales figures for them. The total sales figures for
the Nexus 4 were on a par with the monthly figures for the Galaxy S4.

Does anyone know if this is down to a lack of demand or is the supply
constrained in some way? Curious as to the desire for vanilla Android that's
often talked about but doesn't seem to be a big thing for the average
consumer.

~~~
Dirlewanger
Google simply has no idea how to launch advertising campaigns. It's been their
weak point with all of their products and it's rather pathetic; the general
public just doesn't know what the Nexus product line is.

~~~
k-mcgrady
I see Chrome ads on TV all the time. They know how to do it but it seems for
the Nexus 4 they just didn't bother. Maybe because it was out of stock for so
long after launch.

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zng
Am I the only one with a confused and blown mind why they refuse to offer a
slot for MicroSD and insist on hard wired internal memory?

~~~
Shooti
Android Engineer, 2011:

"There's no particular hardware reason a device can't have both. The problem
is that there is no good UI for it. One of the core Android principles is that
you never need a file manager. Ever. We wanted to avoid the obnoxious "sneeze
and a file picker appears" syndrome of basically every other OS. Local data
that apps know how to handle should just be magically available within the
apps, or stored in the cloud. You shouldn't have to go spelunking on your SD
card to find data. The problem with having both internal storage and SD cards
is that suddenly that goal gets a whole lot harder to achieve. For a given
shot, should the camera save to internal-16GB, or to SD card? Should an app
from Market be installed to internal or SD? etc. Yes, we can solve this by
letting the user choose, or have it be in settings. But then, that's a file
picker, or close enough to the file picker experience that we dislike it just
as much. And besides that, there are API consequences: if you stick in an SD
card with photos on it, do you add those to the system media content provider?
If you do, you will screw up apps because they aren't designed with the
concept that photos can come and go. What we will probably do eventually is
add an import/export concept to removable storage. So the Camera will always
save to internal-16GB, and when you pop in an SD card (or insert a thumb drive
on USB host devices) you can start a migration or import/export dialog. But
until we have that, devices will generally either have an SD card, or a large
internal storage, but not both. I totally get that a lot of people like SD
cards, and I miss USB Mass Storage myself. But then, that's why it's great
that there are so many devices to choose from. :) tl;dr: it's a can of worms.
We're thinking about compromises for future versions."

[http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/11/18/impromptu-qa-
session...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/11/18/impromptu-qa-session-with-
android-engineer-dan-morrill-brings-to-light-reasons-behind-galaxy-nexus-lack-
of-usb-mass-storage/)

Head of UX, 2012:

"Everybody likes the idea of having an SD card, but in reality it's just
confusing for users. If you’re saving photos, videos or music, where does it
go? Is it on your phone? Or on your card? Should there be a setting? Prompt
everytime? What happens to the experience when you swap out the card? It’s
just too complicated. We take a different approach. Your Nexus has a fixed
amount of space and your apps just seamlessly use it for you without you ever
having to worry about files or volumes or any of that techy nonsense left over
from the paleolithic era of computing. With a Nexus you know exactly how much
storage you get upfront and you can decide what’s the right size for you.
That’s simple and good for users"

[https://plus.google.com/114892667463719782631/posts/JAAMUzx1...](https://plus.google.com/114892667463719782631/posts/JAAMUzx1PFX)

tl;dr Technical/UX issues.

~~~
freehunter
I'm not saying I like the idea, but Microsoft's way of handling SD cards is a
solution for all of these issues. When you put an SD card in a Windows Phone,
it becomes part of the internal storage in a way akin to Windows 8 storage
spaces. There's no picking where a file goes, it just goes to internal storage
which includes the SD card.

The major drawback of the way Microsoft did it is that if you take the card
out of the phone, the phone needs to be reformatted and the card cannnot
easily be reused.

~~~
tcoppi
That sounds much, much worse. I'd take no SD card support at all over having
to explain to people why, when they take their card out of the phone and put
it in their camera, their phone shits itself.

~~~
freehunter
The last phone I had that did this was an old Samsung Focus, and Samsung was
very quick to point this out at every step of the way. The emphasize in the
manual very clearly that this storage is a permanent addition, not a way of
removable storage.

Is it any different from telling people if they unplug their desktop's boot
drive, the computer will stop working?

~~~
tcoppi
People don't have an expectation of hard drives being removable(most people
probably don't even realize they can be removed), whereas SD cards are
explicitly designed to be mobile. People treat them as mini USB drives, so
this behaviour is directly counter to most people's intuition, regardless of
its technical merits.

~~~
freehunter
What are the numbers of people swapping their SD cards out of their phone and
into something else (and expecting it to work)? I don't know the statistics,
but I'm willing to bet it's low. In fact, the number of people in general
putting SD cards into their phones is likely to be very low, since a _lot_ of
phones don't support it.

I really don't understand your argument that phones just shouldn't support SD
cards rather than having the option to expand the storage for cheaper than
buying the next model up just to avoid user confusion. If every phone locked
out useful features just for the sake of avoiding user confusion, Android
wouldn't exist.

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dphnx
This was a slip up by Google and has now been taken down. Droid Life took a
copy of the high-res photo for anyone interested:

[http://www.droid-life.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/10/nexys-5...](http://www.droid-life.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/10/nexys-5-huge.png)

And their article on the “leak”.

[http://www.droid-life.com/2013/10/17/nexus-5-appears-on-
goog...](http://www.droid-life.com/2013/10/17/nexus-5-appears-on-google-play-
starting-price-of-349/)

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levesque
That would be pretty sloppy.. which makes me think it is intentional. In the
end, I guess there's no difference.

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maaarghk
Leakiest phone release in modern history :P

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kevinxucs
just release it already!!!

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1angryhacker
why would you buy anything but

