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.
The Nexus 4 was massively supply constrained, not available in most countries (either for a long time after launch or at all depending on country), didn't do LTE, and wasn't marketed heavily. If you're comparing it to the S4, which is the most marketed consumer tech product on the market and is available everywhere, it's not surprising it didn't sell.
It was never available in the areas that people wanted them most. Hobbling sales was more of a decision by Google than a lack of demand. I suppose Google just wanted to show that a device could be built at this cost and prove a point. Here in India the demand for the Nexus 4 is HUGE however, after taxes, import duties and markups, it retails for around the same price as a iPhone 4s which a lot of people prefer as a status symbol, never mind capability. Most discerning techies however, carry a nexus.
I've never really seen it advertised. They definitely don't spend the kind of money Samsung do advertising the S3/4. Also, the hardware isn't all that nice looking when compared with the S3/4 or iPhone. It's very bulky in my opinion and looks are important to the average consumer.
I got one a few months ago (my first Android device) and I'm pretty happy with it but: the camera sucks, the screen is weak (I'm not sure the issue, it just looks a lot worse than the S3/4 and iPhone) and it's bulky. If I didn't need it for development purposes I wouldn't keep it for those three reasons. I'd probably go with an S3 if I were going to use Android everyday (although Touchwiz puts me off).
I've had a Nexus 4 for over a year and it's been passed around quite a bit between friends and coworkers who all either have iPhones or S3s and I've never heard a disparaging remark about the screen, quite the contrary actually.
The number one thing iPhone users lament about when they hold my phone is how bright and spacious the screen.
I've never once felt the camera sucked, in fact on a trip to Scotland with family I ditched my Canon PowerShot because the Nexus 4 was producing better results. The group consensus was that it took the best pictures on the trip beating out an iPhone 4S, Galaxy S3, two different Canon PowerShots and (shocker) an iPad.
I used the S3 quite a bit and I always come away feeling like it's a toy or one of those phones with giant numbers for the elderly. Samsung's UI tweaks feel like a throwback to UI design in Windows 95 or XP and the font sizes feel like they're geared towards old ladies. I always feel despite the screen size that things are cramped.
Physically speaking the iPhone windows out hands down by a large margin. The S3 just feels plastic, it's not really cheap but it's not nice either, the Nexus 4 feels much more solid in your hand and the choice of matte plastic appeals to me much more than the glossy of the S3. That being said it's build quality is dwarfed by the iPhone 4 and 5. It's sad that the beauty of those devices are hidden by the garish cases people always put them in because holding one naked is an experience.
It's interesting to hear your opinion. I exaggerated a bit regarding the camera - however my iPhone 5 camera is noticeably better.
My iPhone 5 screen is much better than the Nexus 4. It's much brighter. I find it hard to believe that iPhone users found the Nexus screen better. They might have appreciated the extra screen real estate but the brightness on mine is quite awful.
I would agree with you that the iPhone 5 has a better camera than the Nexus 4 but we're talking about camera phones, not a DSLR vs a Point-n-Shoot. It's better but it's not that much better. I'm sure my knowledge of exposure settings and basic rules of photography helped with my photos but they wouldn't have overcome the failings of a dramatically inferior camera.
Regarding the screen, Android's dynamic brightness adjustment setting is much dimmer than iOS's. In iOS you can define it to be brighter or dimmer while still keeping the dynamic adjustment, with Android the dynamic setting is either on or off. If you turn it off on both devices and set brightness to full, they're pretty on par. Colors looked warmer on the Nexus 4 when my gf and I compared the other night but neither screen was noticeably brighter.
That being said, Apple has the highest standards of quality in the industry so it's entirely possible that the quality of the Nexus 4's components varies wildly and I just happened to get a good one.
The Nexus 4 was out of stock within half an hour, and didn't come back in stock for 3 months or something. That probably killed it in it's infancy. By the time it was available again, the S4 was "in sight", etc.
Most phones are sold thru wireless carriers. Since the Nexus phones can't be loaded up with carrier bloatware, they have little to no motivation to sell it.
Especially with the strange way they sell it at the moment. In vodafone you cannot get 4G without going for the highest price plan for example. (or at least that was the case 2 months ago) Which may make sense to them, but for the customer that's a bit silly. They will actually use different software in samsung phones, so that if you buy a S4 on a lower plan, it's not capable of connecting to a 4G network.
The Nexus devices aren't attractively priced in many places outside of the US. Eg my most recent device, the Nexus 7 (v1) was $199 minus $25 rebate on launch in the US, and ~ $270 ($345 with VAT) in the Eurozone, no rebate.
Apple products for example are less than 10% more expensive in the eurozone, which is reasonabe given the mandatory 2 year warranty here.
I'm not sure it makes sense to market these phones too awfully much: my guess is that they're either subsidized or sold at cost, so why hand that benefit out to those who aren't "in the know" to some degree?
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.
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.
Nexus 4 was available for like a few hours at launch, and then it was out of stock for literally 3 months after that, putting a significant damp on its total demand, I think.
Google botched the launch big time last year. Hopefully they won't repeat the same mistake this year. Even if all of their stock sells within a day, they should at least be ready to satisfy 2-3x that within another 2 weeks. Waiting another 3 months is just ridiculous.
i'm not a fan of rounded edges like that. "Straight edges" usually make a phone look more modern( like the htc one ).
Also black plastic is ugly. Aluminium makes a phone more elegant in real(and more robust). That's why i'm not a big fan of Samsung phones neither, they are overrated.
To be fair, the excitement is in tech circles which is a relatively small portion of the market.
Generally, the overwhelming majority of handsets in at least North America are procured through one's carrier. If I'm getting a device through the carrier, not only do they not even offer Nexus devices, if they did it would seldom make economic sense: Get a subsidized $700 iPhone for $199 (so $500 of subsidy), or a subsidized Nexus for perhaps $0 (so $349 of subsidy?).
Speaking of carriers, this is why the overwhelming majority of smartphone ads for Apple are actually carried by carriers.
Curiously in the UK carrier subsidies seem to have dried up totally for the iPhone 5S at least.
To buy a 64Gb 5S from Apple for cash is £709.
To buy it on finance over two years from Apple (which is a commercial rate loan) costs around £820 in total.
To buy it from 3 is £99 plus £51 a month for 2 years. The same tariff as SIM only is £15 a month giving a total handset cost of over £960.
Essentially carriers are not just no longer subsidising the iPhone here, they're charging a greater than commercial loan rate for people buying it as part of a contract.
Except with ATT it doesn't matter if you bought your phone for 600$ or 199$ with the contract: you pay same rates. So, if you don't mind being on contract for 1.5-2 years until next upgrade, just do it. Because if you won't upgrade after 2 years you still pay same rate. If you bring in your 700 dollars phone you still pay same rate, so why pay more then? ATT and Verizon match each others prices and have no problem with monopolizing market and charging 3000% profit on SMS service
"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."
"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"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
How is it not a solution? The problem is needing to add more storage. Microsoft lets you add more storage. That way you could buy the 8GB version of the phone for $200 and add 64GB of more storage, if necessary, for $50. The alternative is to pay $200 for 8GB or $350 for 16GB... which would you pick?
Removable storage is always going to be a problem, as Google points out. Adding storage after the fact is solved, and one of the solutions is what Microsoft offers.
Lots of hate for this idea, but makes perfect sense to me. I could buy an 8GB phone, decide later that I need more storage, then expand that with a 32GB SD card. No confusion as long as it's explained that the card is for expansion, not removal.
Yeah, I think those are 2 really bad justifications. Android has file managers, you don't need them for most things, but the ability to transfer a file from a remote computer, an sdcard, a webdav server, etc. makes the OS more usable in those instances where you do need those things.
> 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.
This is pretty easy to answer; you do it exactly like you do it when there is no sdcard. Leave 3rd party apps for power users to extend the base functionality with outside storage.
>> "Yeah, I think those are 2 really bad justifications."
I disagree. The SD card confuses people. I have several friends who bought a Galaxy Ace. It had very low internal memory but they thought that was ok as they could put an SD card in. Problem is they had no idea they couldn't store apps on the SD card. Now they're pissed off. They don't understand this limitation and don't care. It makes Google/Android look bad.
Much simpler an explanation is that having removable storage means that everything in the stack needs to understand removable storage and that that imposes a cost on library authors, app developers, and most problematically, on users. Better to do away with the possibility than have to deal with explaining to someone why their pictures have all of a sudden magically disappeared.
It's weird reading the Android engineers rebuttals. It's something that really irritates me, and frankly it has put me off of owning a smartphone at all (not having a microSD slot).
I also noticed a few limititations for the first time with my partners Nook HD that does have an SD slot. I bought a 32gb MicroSD card for it to store video and music. When trying to download from the web browser files went to local storage. I also had issues with downloading in general, some of which would be incomplete or disappear. While downloading I expected to be able to move to another app, and have the download background. It was a pretty shonky experience. I tried to find some kind of setting for it and ultimately realised that Android wasn't that brilliantly suited to handle external memory.
I'm never that sure if a device is going to take ownership of something like a micro SD card when I attach it. The whole portable format thing is a pain too. Not being able to use ExFat easily on my Linux laptop is a pain. I'm surprised one of the free file systems haven't been chosen as the default for for usb sticks, memory cards etc. Probably a result of manufacturers looking to have Windows compatibility.
I'm not quite sure myself which way I think opening media should go, should I select an app first and then open something, or should I use a 'finder' to get to a file and then choose what to do with it? I guess the latter at least affords for the 'finder' to suggest what to do with it, if not have a sensible default. Should my 'finder' know if a piece of software can handle the file upfront? Should software register what it can handle to a central authority? Sometimes you might not know wihch is the best software to open something with.
From a users perspective, I'd at least hope that if the device had 8GB on it, and if I had a card plugged in with 32GB, when I went to download a 1GB file it may put that on the 32GB card. Maybe there should be named storage pools that you could select when downloading. Or a sensible default.
Perhaps when you plug in media you should get the option of integrating it to the devices storage, or having it as temporary or portable storage.
The whole file management thing doesn't feel like it's solved on the desktop, but neither does it feel particulary good on Android. I think I like to know where my files are.
I do get that this is an epic problem. My Aunt was hopeless with file management on her laptop, but is happy with her iPad, other than suggesting that she has no idea how to get the photos off of it, and hasn't succeeding in doing so yet.
Thanks, the problem really being that she has no idea how to file manage on her windows PC or add/remove software, and her attempt at installing the software failed.
Samsung has just released version 1.0 of their open-source implementation of ex-FAT [1]. Why aren't they using that? I think it should at the very least work with 64+ GB microSD cards, if not with smaller ones, which I'd be fine with.
If they still think it's risky to be sued by MS, I think that lawsuit would be well worth it. At worst, they risk losing a few tens of millions of dollars (I doubt the "damages" that can be claimed would be more than that for a single Nexus model).
But the potential upside is huge. If they win, then not only Google, but every other OEM can finally stop paying Microsoft for FAT/ex-FAT patents, and just use that. Heck, they can probably even convince Samsung and a few other OEM's to pony up a pool of money for the trial, if they don't want to take it all on themselves.
The value/cost would be orders of magnitude bigger than what Google paid for Motorola's patents. And if they win, the potential savings for all OEM's who still use microSD cards, would be in the billions of dollars.
As for my personal expectations of this happening, I think Google is too chicken to do it, as they usually are when it comes to such confrontations, but I see Samsung doing it soon. What is Microsoft going to do to Samsung? Beg them not to buy Windows from them anymore? (which is what they'd risk doing if they sued Samsung)
I have a strong suspicion that the only reason Samsung even agreed to pay them for the patents in the first place was because it was part of a deal with Microsoft, in which they got lower prices for Windows licenses, which means Microsoft may even lose or break even at most with Samsung in that deal. Microsoft would've definitely agreed to something like that, because having Samsung on their "extortion list" meant every other company would then start to give them money, too - which is exactly what happened as soon as Samsung agreed to pay, and Microsoft made it public.
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.