
Galaxy Nexus Review - hasanove
http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/17/2568348/galaxy-nexus-review
======
cryptoz
For anyone with the Galaxy Nexus here, I'd like to point you in the direction
of the pressureNET
([https://market.android.com/details?id=ca.cumulonimbus.barome...](https://market.android.com/details?id=ca.cumulonimbus.barometernetwork))
as you are in a new group of Android users that have barometers! I'm the
author of this app, and we're building a crowd-sourced network of live-
updating Android barometers in hopes that we can improve short-term weather
prediction. The app is open source and free, of course! You can get the code
at cumulonimbus.ca

</shamelessplug>

Edit: Most of our users are on the Xoom (and some other tablets). I have not
been able to test on the Galaxy Nexus yet. If you have bug reports, please
send them to software@cumulonimbus.ca

~~~
dman
Not in good taste.

~~~
cryptoz
So, I was nervous of that but decided to post anyway. I think HN seems okay
with this post (it currently has 9 points, for full disclosure) but if this
type of post isn't welcome here, I will take it down. I'm not profiting off
this and the project is entirely open source, so I felt okay about it. Does HN
want it deleted?

~~~
bryanlarsen
In my opinion, it was dman's post that was in poor taste. Hacker news is and
should be about people showing off their hacks. Additionally his post adds no
content -- a simple click on the downvote button provides all the information
and feedback required.

~~~
dman
I only kept my post brief to be polite. While I agree that Hacker News is the
place to show off hacks hijacking threads is not the way to do it. If parent
poster has a hack that is worth showing on HN he should submit it as a news
item and if there is intrinsic merit the post will attract an audience.
Posting self promotional information on threads that are tangentially related
is in poor taste in my opinion. Its a slippery slope - if every iphone post
here attracted comments by all of us who were building an iphone app then HN
would be the worse for it.

~~~
esrauch
If he was pushing a random android app on an article that was about a random
android phone then you would have a good point. In this case it is more than
just tangentially related, the vast majority (read: pretty much all) android
phones don't have barometers, this is pretty much the only phone that can even
run it. And it also answers the question of "what would I ever do with a
barometer on my phone?".

~~~
dman
The thing with subjectivity is that it is subjective.

------
icarus_drowning
Is it just me, or is anyone else incredibly impressed with The Verge? Their
reviews are incredibly detailed, and yet they still manage to make extremely
interesting, short, and informative video reviews for many products. Add to
that the fact that the site, at least to me, is absolutely gorgeous, and I
think I've found my new favorite gadget site.

~~~
barrkel
I must dissent on gorgeous: to me, it's a triumph of style over practicality.

It looks like a magazine page (perhaps one you'd see advertising architecture,
or furniture) made flesh in the browser: the pictures are too big, the
headlines are too big, the text column wanders from the left side of the page
to the right, and it does all of this with highly excessive CPU consumption.

On Firefox it's particularly painful - on an i7 920, merely selecting text
takes over a second - while even on Chrome, the fans start up and blare as a
core hits 100% for several seconds as the page loads.

It's not down to custom fonts either, as I have those disabled in Firefox.

It all adds up to make me want to avoid the site in future, knowing I'll be
assured of a laggy unpleasant experience.

~~~
EwanToo
Curious, I've got none of those problems visiting the site when running
Firefox on a windows 7 PC.

I wonder if it's some kind of plugin issue, Firebug is a monster consumer of
resources for example.

------
justinglow
Thanks for the kind words about The Verge, everyone! Just a heads up, but we
(Vox Media, home of The Verge and SB Nation) are hiring:
<http://sbnation.theresumator.com/apply>

------
polshaw
I can't believe how much everything is still framed around the iphone. I think
its crazy to call this phone just 'competetive' with the iphone 4S; especially
the screen-- it is clearly a significant step up IMO. ICS is surely at a point
where it can, currently, safely be considered to be ahead of iOS- especially
in its unadulterated 'nexus' form. And whilst pentile isn't perfect, its 720p
FFS. If that wasn't enough OLED gives it vastly better blacks, contrast, and
potentially power consumption too, not to mention the fact that it's bigger.
Unless you happen to have an irrational love for iOS the iphones camera is the
_single_ area where the 4S beats out the nexus (perhaps some app availability,
but that works both ways). Oh the curse of being one of the 100 phones vs 1.

~~~
jsz0
_single area where the 4S beats out the nexus_

The review doesn't mention it but the GN has a rather weak GPU. Quite a lot
slower than the iPhone 4S and actually slower than some of Samsung's other
recent Android phones. If you plan to play any 3D games, especially at 720P,
the GN is probably not the best choice. We'll have to wait and see what the
benchmarks and real world performance are like though.

~~~
polshaw
Noted (can't edit anymore). Thats a shame, especially given the high res
display.

Having said that, there is really not widespread use of the GPUs out there
today. I hope that will change, but 3d gaming on phones (especially that
pushes the GPUs to the limit) is very much niche right now.

------
juliano_q
Quite impressive. 10 for performance and software (iPhone 4S received 8 and
9). The device seems to be very good, but ICS is the star here. I am eagerly
waiting to receive the update at my Nexus S.

~~~
matheusalmeida
Am I the only one who thinks that a 10/10 is... let's say, hard to believe ?
What does that mean? In terms of software, it doesn't have bugs, it's
completeley optimized and you have days of battery life and tons of available
memory ? Is the integration of all functionalities perfect ? You don't need
task managers to kill faulty apps ?

Anyhow, we are in a free world where everyone can make reviews and I'm glad we
are in that world.

~~~
eavc
You're not the only one hung up on it, no. But I don't see anything strange
about a 10/10 score. It doesn't imply perfection, only relative excellence.

This is how it's always been with game reviews, for instance. A video game
released in 1996 gets a 10/10 because it's better than other games yet seen.
The same game released today would get panned. It doesn't imply any claim to
absolute perfection.

------
blinkingled
I obviously don't have an actual ICS device to test but - a) The emulator that
came with v4.0 platform is more usable due to reasons I am not fully sure of.
Previously where I would be spooked out by the thought of launching the
browser and loading actual sites - it was much more pleasant this time around.
Emulator boot up time for ICS AVD was also much faster. b) The browser has
made some forward progress as far as HTML5 is concerned - 2.3 got 177 score on
html5test.com - ICS one gets 230. Not sure why the <video> tag support and
WebM support are still missing - may be just an emulator thing.

[Edit] Boot time improvement are due to SSD - The AVD manager chose my home
directory on SSD to create the AVD file - my older ones were on standard HDD.
But still the in-emulator navigation is somewhat better. May be improved
drawing performance.

------
glimcat
Complains about the camera's sensor, blames the lens.

Wait, what?

And what is objectively wrong with it? The big red text complains about "color
reproduction" - does this guy know anything about photography? Neither camera
is color-calibrated, that's what Lightroom is for.

~~~
ugh
I think he means white balance. And since both cameras don’t output raw files
Lightroom won’t help you (much) with that. Besides: Consumer cameras should
generally have a good automatic white balance since the vast majority of
people will never bother to manually tweak.

That whole sensor/lens mixup is probably an honest mistake. He was talking
about software vs hardware and not really going so much into detail as that
making a distinction between sensor and lens would matter. He was talking
about the whole sensor and lens package as a whole.

~~~
glimcat
RAW is good, but you can still get some benefit in crappy cellphone JPGs.

I've had to make batches of personnel photos taken with an iPhone look
presentable for a web page on several occasions. A few seconds to set the
white balance and normalize the orientation and scale makes a significant
difference. It doesn't make it into a great photo, but nothing short of going
back with an SLR is going to do that.

Also part of why I think claims about the awesomeness of the iPhone camera
should be taken with a pound of salt. It's a fairly nice cell camera, but it's
still a cell camera.

~~~
ugh
Sure, there is some room to play but with JPG it’s possible that some photos
are not recoverable. If you get the raw output auto white balance is basically
completely irrelevant (beyond convenience). No matter how badly the white
balance screwed up, it’s always possible to recover (since it’s all software
and you are working with the original input data).

But I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far. Even a budget DSLR that is
perfectly capable of shooting raw should have great auto white balance: Most
people don’t want to endlessly tweak photos. Better auto white balance means
better photos, even if theoretically everything could be fixed in post.

Oh, and just because smartphone cameras are nowhere near as good as DSLRs
doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful to compare them with each other, doesn’t mean
one can’t be much better than another one.

~~~
glimcat
"it’s always possible to recover"

Only if the initial exposure was good.

~~~
ugh
See, I wanted to mention that but completely forgot about it while writing.
(Still, you might have been a little more charitable with me. I think the
context made it pretty clear what I was talking about.)

I was only talking about color, not exposure. (Of course there is only so much
white balance can do – but if you get the raw data you can do just as much
with the color as the camera, heck, you can even throw more processing power
at the problem than the camera ever could.)

------
alexholehouse
Disappointed by the camera though - 5 MPs is fine if the sensors are up to
scratch, but the 4S's camera is just so outstanding ( _and_ 8 MPs) that a so-
so camera might actually swing it for me.

~~~
nextparadigms
I don't think most people will make their decision between an iPhone 4S and a
Galaxy Nexus because of a slightly better camera. Sure, it might be even a lot
better, but at the end of the day, they are both far from point and shoot
quality.

I think most people would rather choose between them because of each one's
software or even hardware. Company allegiances/principles/beliefs will go a
long way in making the decision, too, for some people.

~~~
joebadmo
I agree. Personally, I don't expect great photos from my phone, but I _am_
really excited about how fast the camera is. (This was one of the things that
made me really envious of the iPhone 4S.) Because if I want to take really
nice photos, I'll bring my DSLR. But the phone camera is for situations when
you want to capture a moment, and speed is more important in that situation
than quality, at least for me.

------
awolf
While I find Topolsky's ultimate conclusion of a 10/10 a bit hard to believe
given the plastic case a mediocre camera sensor, I was impressed with the
review. It was very detailed without being excessively long and it was
presented in an easy-to-follow manner. Look forward to seeing more from The
Verge.

~~~
nextparadigms
The overall score is 8.6/10, not 10/10. They gave it 10/10 on software and
performance, which has nothing to do with the plastic case and the camera
sensor. FYI the for the camera it got a 7/10.

------
nissimk
I'm very curious to see hands on reviews of ICS on the tablet form factor.
When are the first tablets supposed to ship with or receive the ICS update??

~~~
ConstantineXVI
No proper announcements yet; but Asus seems to be saying early December for
the Transformer.

------
moe
Yay, a notification LED!

This tiny feature alone makes it a serious contender for me.

However, I'll definitely wait for the first real-world reviews to learn
whether ICS _finally_ does away with the infuriating stalls and input lags
that have plagued all of my previous android devices (up to the SGS).

~~~
petedoyle
> However, I'll definitely wait for the first real-world reviews to learn
> whether ICS finally does away with the infuriating stalls and input lags
> that have plagued all of my previous android devices ...

I'm really hoping the new hardware acceleration stuff will help a lot. I think
I read somewhere they also tweaked MotionEvent handling to decrease input
latency (though I can't find the link for the life of me).

From the review:

"As far as phone performance is concerned, however, the Galaxy Nexus feels
blazingly, stupidly fast to me. Touch response is excellent on the phone —
everything reacts quickly to your movements. Homescreen scrolling was snappy,
moving into and out of apps was instantaneous, swiping through long lists was
stutter free, and web browsing (even on heavy pages like ours) was super
speedy."

and...

"I want to note that moving around all of these screens is buttery smooth.
There's no lag, no stutter. Animations are fluid, and everything feels
cohesive and solid."

------
sssparkkk
No USB Mass Storage support on the Galaxy Nexus. Well, for us Linux (and Mac)
users that's some bad news.

~~~
Aissen
Really ? That's your dealbreaker ? MTP has been supported for long time on
Linux… Just tried it on gnome and kde, no problem.

BTW, MTP has great advantages from an engineering PoV: you don't have to use a
crappy FAT filesystem on your eMMC. You don't have to give full control over
an essential piece of storage to another OS, so you can continue accessing
data/apps installed on the storage.

~~~
eren-tantekin
I don't know which device you tried with Linux but Galaxy Tab 10.1 is not
working on my Linux even though every library and package related to MTP are
installed.

------
WildUtah
Does anyone know how this compares to the Motorola Razr? Is there a good site
comparing different Android hardware?

~~~
vladikoff
Here you go: <http://www.theverge.com/products/compare/2946/3581>

------
jbredeche
I might missed an announcement here - but will Verizon load their bloatware
onto ICS, or has Google managed to get them to ship a clean Android
installation on these phones?

~~~
joebadmo
Generally these Google flagship devices have little to no bloatware (depending
on what you consider bloatware), and one of the more interesting parts of the
ICS announcement was that you can easily disable apps (which stops from
running and removes them from home/app screens but not from the device) pretty
easily from system settings.

~~~
jbredeche
Nice. As far as I know, this is the first time that Verizon has one of the
flagship devices - so didn't know if they were to give this phone the same
bloatware treatment as my Droid X.

~~~
joebadmo
Well, the original Droid was kind of an almost-flagship. It was marketed in
conjunction with Google, and it had an unlocked bootloader, unlike subsequent
Verizon Motorola Droids. It also wasn't skinned with MotoBlur.

I've owned both the original Droid and the Droid X, and the original one
definitely had less crapware, and the vanilla OS was nice, as was the much
easier modding.

I've actually really liked Motorola hardware, and I like the more angular,
more dinstinctive industrial design of the Motorola devices better than
Samsung devices, but I have to admit that I'm drooling over this phone. ICS
looks amazing, and seems to address almost every complaint I've had about
Android so far.

------
eavc
Arrington's view of the original Droid is what tipped me fully into buying the
phone. I think Josh's review of this may have cemented me for the Galaxy
Nexus.

------
laserDinosaur
As an aside, damn that's a good looking website!

------
ypcx
Anyone from EU here with an information which online shop already has them in
stock? Amazon.de says 1 to 3 weeks, meh.

~~~
syeren
They arrive in-stock on the 23rd to the majority of online retailers I
believe. I bought mine from [http://www.unlocked-mobiles.com/sim-free-mobile-
phones/samsu...](http://www.unlocked-mobiles.com/sim-free-mobile-
phones/samsung-galaxy-nexus-sim-free-unlocked-mobile-phone-p-83950.html) and I
have been told that I will receive it on the 24th.

~~~
ypcx
Thanks!

------
portentint
Great. Another blindingly fast phone that sucks batteries dry. I love the
zippiness, really, but I need a phone that runs longer than 4 hours, K? I
actually use my phone TO MAKE PHONE CALLS.

------
gcb
And if you bought ANY dock (desktop, car) for your other 200 nexus models, get
ready to buy a new one for the latest one.

~~~
darshan
This is the third Nexus; there are only two (not 200) other Nexus models. The
form factors are quite different between the devices, so I wouldn't expect
dock compatibility in any case.

~~~
gcb
I know but i still have a point.

They decided Not to implement USB host. Create a custom dumb one write port.
Its so dumb it doesn't last one single generation (all docks had production
ceased ... except nexus one's that are back)

