If the battery lasts longer than 5 minutes. Sure, you could underclock the device to save battery, but what's the use of all that power in a mobile device if you can't use that power while mobile?
This is becoming a huge problem for the smartphone market. The phones are getting more and more powerful, but the batteries aren't keeping up. iPhones last about a day, maybe 2 with moderate use, and Android devices are all over the place, with some lasting for quite a while, but others lasting only a handful of hours before needing a charge.
I haven't really found a correlation between power and battery usage though: battery life hasn't really improved for a few years, but phones have gotten massively more powerful in that time. They only really need to last through the day.
Interesting how Google has been removing the hardware buttons in favor of software buttons onscreen. I've always like having at least a home button to always be able to exit an app, even if the UI is frozen.
The three extra physical buttons beyond Home are my favorite Android features!
- Menu: It's nice having a go-to place to find options or additional functions. With the iPhone, it's however the app author decided to design his software. With Android, hit menu, it's probably there.
- Search: Again, having a context-sensitive search button is a big win. It pulls up the URL Bar in the browser, the Search screen in the Market, and the voice commands on the home screen.
- Back: This is the really big win. Having a constant way to have the phone go back to wherever you were previously is huge, especially given Android's "intent" system. Twitter -> Browser -> Mail Client -> Incoming SMS, and to get back to Twitter I just hit the back button until I'm there.
I'm not sure I could even use an Android phone at this point that didn't have the hardware back button.
I Assume Honeycomb is a template to where the phone is headed (given Google's announced intent to merge the two OS forks and the fact that Honeycomb was branded 3.0). If that's the case you'll have all the same buttons and they'll be ever present on the screen. They'll just be Hardware instead of software.
On my Xoom the Back, Home and Application List buttons are visible in every application (as is a search button in the menu bar)
I used to assume the same thing (I love the buttons on my N1!) until I used a Gingerbread tablet for awhile.
The software "buttons" on a Gingerbread tablet are pretty much identical to the capacitive buttons on most Android phones, but they have the advantage of rotating with the tablet. Turn it any direction: sideways, upside down, etc. and all the buttons are still in the same relative location. It's nice actually.
I think the idea is that the OS will always have software equivalents of those 4 buttons on the bottom of the screen, so you'll always be able to do the things you mentioned. You won't get nice tactile cues, though, which makes me like the hardware buttons.
On phones like the Nexus One and Nexus S, the "hardware keys" are raelly just an extension of the touch screen, so the phone uses "haptic feedback" to vibrate the phone when you trigger those keys. I actually like it even better than the hardware keys on my old G1 or on any of my friends' phones since then.
Extension in that they are "smooth", but physically, they are separate pieces of hardware (the light intensity of each can be set independently for instance).
My experience with my Nexus S is that the few times the UI freezes, neither the physical mechanical buttons nor the physical capacitance buttons help any. I can either wait a while, or hard reboot and wait longer.
You can see their logic though. Even one button means you have to give up a whole inch with of space on the phone. I don't see Google removing the side buttons (assuming the Motorola Xoom is where the phone is headed in terms of button design). So you should always be able to do a hard reset if nothing else.
For the record I can see Google's point but I agree with you. The irony of the Xoom is the ever present software buttons take up as much room as the hardware buttons do.
The benefit though is that when you rotate the screen, the back and home buttons are still at the bottom of the UI. You can use the Xoom in any orientation and the buttons will always be where you want them.
The major place I miss a hardware button is to end calls. If the software is just slow (not frozen), it can lead to awkward trying to hang-up sounds for the other party.
With Android, under Settings -> Accessibility, you can select that the power button ends the call. I find this very useful, as it gives me a hardware button to use to end a call.
I like the idea of no buttons and I've been waiting for it for a year now. It means no wasted physical space, and depending on how they implement the virtual ones, they might not even occupy screen space all the time, but just activate on demand.
Personally, I find the iPhone home button to be the worst feature of its design. Now that I have a Nexus S, seeing that bit giant hole of a button reminds me of its 5 year old design.
Yeah, Apple got this one right. No matter what you do with your phone, you can just press the big black button and everything is back to normal. If anything, I think these software buttons will lead to further user frustration.
There will be software buttons, so even if an app freezes, the home button will not. Unless Android itself freezes, in which case the hardware home button would be just as useless.
I bought the nexus s in part because of it's nfc hardware. I thought that cool new nfc applications were imminent. Six months later, I still haven't been able to use it for anything interesting. The next google phone may have nfc hardware, but until systems reposing on that hardware are rolled out, it makes sense that neither the OP nor potential consumers should really care.
No mention of the 1 hour battery life in the article. Features are great but so far Google has a horrible track record of caring about the overall user experience of the phone (toward which battery life is a very significant factor).
I'd like to see Google make a battery life claim that is on par with the iPhone and have it come true.
I would go less than a day with a virgin Nexus S, just by playing an hour or three of music.
Some phones handle much better in the face of low signal, some are worse. T-Mobile's coverage was pretty mediocre around my home, and that also had a huge impact on battery life.
My experience was with an Evo 4G. I tried closing / uninstalling all the apps, and I mostly just used the standard Google and HTC apps.
I sold the Evo and got an iPhone 4 and now I never have to think about the battery. During the few weeks I had the Evo I was caught a few times with a dead phone when I'd been planning on using the GPS to navigate somewhere at the end of the day. Not fun.
Yep it's all his fault. The flood of reviews and user feedback saying that high end Android battery life is poor is all part of Steve Job's reality distortion.
This is my Next, today:
"It only lasted five hours and 33 minutes, which is about three hours shorter than the Transformer and five shorter than the iPad 2. Engadget claims to have gotten ten hours on the same test and Laptopmag got about 8.5 hours on its web surfing test, but AllThingsD got a similar 5.5 hours on a video rundown test."
According to the article it's on LTE, so that means AT&T or Verizon. I can see why they're doing it as it looks like WiMax doesn't have a great future ahead of it, but I both those carriers have abysmal track records for customer abuse (as opposed to merely bad.)
4G networks will have to fall back on 3G networks sometimes, which is one of the reasons why AT&T is still building out its backhaul for its 3G network. Though I agree, it would be nice to have interoperable phones
Kind of disappointing it's not Tegra 3, but at least I hope it's the dual core Qualcomm Krait at 1.5 Ghz built on 28nm process and Adreno 300, rather than OMAP 4.
Everything else about it is exactly what I've been hoping for: HD resolution, 4.5" screen, no buttons, 4G.
4.5" seems a tad excessive to me. I'll follow you to 4.0", and you can probably talk me into 4.3... but 4.5? Getting a little to close to Dell Streak territory in my opinion.
If they follow the HTC Evo design (basically non-existant borders) and drop the dedicated button area I could see them being able to squeeze a 4.5" screen into an almost the same sized package. It's thicker than an iPhone but the surface area really isn't much more.
I am with you. These super-sized phones just seem awkward to me. 3.7-4.0" seem to be the sweet spot for me. If am looking at something that needs a bigger screen than that, an 0.5 inches probably isn't going to solve my problem and I would rather just use a laptop or tablet.
If you measure out one of the O'Reilly Pocket References, you get the feeling that a manufacture could build a phone that still fits in the pocket and has a bigger than 4.5" screen
