New Phone

By Jesse Morgan

My droid has reached the end of it’s life, so I’ve gotten a replacement- the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Pros

  • Peppy– My droid was showing it’s age. It lagging pretty badly, regardless of what was installed or how it was configured. The Nexus can run several things without issue.
  • ICS -The nexus is the first phone running the newest version of Android, “Ice Cream Sandwich”. A lot of cool new features that I’ve just barely touched.
  • Front facing camera – This makes video chats possible. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to use it with google hangouts.
  • Face recognition unlocking – Thanks to the front-facing camera, looking at the phone while bringing it out of sleep mode will unlock it. It’s peppy compared to trying to do the pattern unlock, which it fails over to if it can’t match a face.
  • Digital menu buttons – the control buttons at the bottom (options, back, etc) are on the screen rather than physical buttons; this allows them to be customized or removed completely.
  • Big Screen – massive screen makes reading easy on the eyes.
  • Clamshell case – seems more durable than my first one, and it has a built in stand for propping the phone upright.
  • Active Wallpaper map – my background is my current location, which also shows traffic conditions. I suspect this may be draining the battery badly, so I’ve turned it back off.
  • Traffic widget – shows how long it’ll take to get to a location with the current traffic conditions.
  • App/widget menu – apps and widgets are all in the main menu.

Cons

  • No Mass Storage Option – MTP is the new protocol used, and normally I would support moving to new tech, but it would have been nice to keep the existing mass storage option available since MTP support isn’t automatically connected like the mass storage option.
  • Convoluted process for adding Ringtones and Notifications – On the droid, you drop an MP3 into the ringtones directory and that was it; my Nexus moves them to the music directory automatically, and I had to download a 3rd party app to get it to set it up my custom ringtone and notification.
  • Battery Life – My droid wasn’t very good, but it lasted over 24 hours. Waking up at 9 and writing this at 2:20, the Nexus is at 20% already, and this is with the *extended* battery. I was expecting it to be bad, but not this bad. I suspect this is from the maps wallpaper- I’ll test again tomorrow with a static wallpaper.
  • Vanilla ICS – You get spoiled using CyanogenMod, which is what I’ve been using on my droid for the last years. As of right now, the Nexus isn’t supported by Cyanogen yet, but we’re hoping to see it real soon now. Currently missing a lot of configurability.
  • No Hardware keyboard – This is the biggest adjustment I’ve had to make; it’s a little more awkward, but it results in a much thinner phone. Not sure if it was worth it.
  • Big screen – big screen means it’s hard to hold with one hand.

Those are my initial thoughts; I’ll provide more as I find them.