Vyse The Legend
Member
Initial impressions:
Bumper is nice. It is well-made and perfect for showing off the nice design of the phone. It should help with small falls, but I doubt it will help with hard impacts.
I have not had a non-AMOLED phone since the G1. I had a Nexus One and a Galaxy Nexus. I was worried that it would be a downgrade for me, but I'm happy to say it is not.
Coming from the GNex, I was surprised how big of an overall improvement the screen is. Both displays are 720p, but the N4 is definitely sharper (text and clarity). To me, the colors on the N4, except black, look much more accurate but also much more "neutral" than the GNex; the latter and AMOLED screens in general tend to have saturated colors, which makes them appear more vibrant. It is one of the things I love about them, but the pentile matrix hurts them in the long run. I loaded up NeoGAF on both, and I was embarrassed how discolored the white background was on the GNex. How did I think that was acceptable? If you have an iPad with a retina display, then expect the N4 to look like that exactly, except smaller.
The camera is a decent improvement. I have not tested it extensively, nor am I an expert. But, in lowlight, the pictures do get noisy -- though they are clearer than the GNex. In daylight, it is no contest with the N4 wrecking the GNex. Overall, it probably can't compete with the big devices with better sensors, but coming from a GNex, I am pleased so far.
I have not used the phone for more than a day, so I can't comment on battery life. I will say that it came with about 56% battery out of the box, and I managed to eek out almost 2 hours of screen time (about 1hr and 45 min) before I needed to charge it -- and that's with me downloading all my apps and setting up the phone from scratch.
Also, HOLY FUCK is this thing fast. Yes, the GNex runs smoothly with Jellybean, but you can tell that it has to pause and think for a second when transitioning quickly from app to app. The animations on the GNex are very noticeably slower than the N4 -- likely because they're trying to mask the loading/delay. On the N4, I can zip around with no hiccups. Everything launches faster, and the animations are smooth and quick. Too bad, on stock, we are stuck with Chrome, because it is definitely not up to the task.
One of my main reasons for upgrading was the lack of RAM on the GNex. 1GB is a lot for a phone, but the minute I started switching between apps, the Galaxy Nexus would have to unfreeze them and load them back into memory. If you have GNex now, you can tell this happens when you go back to the browser, for example, and the current page appears greyed out and begins to "refresh" itself. For me, this would happen every time I loaded up the gallery then went back to the browser. It was incredibly annoying. On the N4, this hasn't happened to me yet even with extensive gallery use. I'm sure it will happen, but the threshold is much higher.
Also, as I posted on the last page, 42mbps 3G is amazing. I actually beat my friends iPhone 5 running on Verizon LTE.
Negatives:
Because of the glass back, the phone feels super slippery in my hand. It almost wants to shoot out of my hand like a banana and smash itself into the floor. The bumper helps, but not by much.
No stock browser. Chrome really does hurt the speed.
Lock screen widgets: they're useful, but absolutely convoluted right now. They need to work on their implementation.
Bumper is nice. It is well-made and perfect for showing off the nice design of the phone. It should help with small falls, but I doubt it will help with hard impacts.
I have not had a non-AMOLED phone since the G1. I had a Nexus One and a Galaxy Nexus. I was worried that it would be a downgrade for me, but I'm happy to say it is not.
Coming from the GNex, I was surprised how big of an overall improvement the screen is. Both displays are 720p, but the N4 is definitely sharper (text and clarity). To me, the colors on the N4, except black, look much more accurate but also much more "neutral" than the GNex; the latter and AMOLED screens in general tend to have saturated colors, which makes them appear more vibrant. It is one of the things I love about them, but the pentile matrix hurts them in the long run. I loaded up NeoGAF on both, and I was embarrassed how discolored the white background was on the GNex. How did I think that was acceptable? If you have an iPad with a retina display, then expect the N4 to look like that exactly, except smaller.
The camera is a decent improvement. I have not tested it extensively, nor am I an expert. But, in lowlight, the pictures do get noisy -- though they are clearer than the GNex. In daylight, it is no contest with the N4 wrecking the GNex. Overall, it probably can't compete with the big devices with better sensors, but coming from a GNex, I am pleased so far.
I have not used the phone for more than a day, so I can't comment on battery life. I will say that it came with about 56% battery out of the box, and I managed to eek out almost 2 hours of screen time (about 1hr and 45 min) before I needed to charge it -- and that's with me downloading all my apps and setting up the phone from scratch.
Also, HOLY FUCK is this thing fast. Yes, the GNex runs smoothly with Jellybean, but you can tell that it has to pause and think for a second when transitioning quickly from app to app. The animations on the GNex are very noticeably slower than the N4 -- likely because they're trying to mask the loading/delay. On the N4, I can zip around with no hiccups. Everything launches faster, and the animations are smooth and quick. Too bad, on stock, we are stuck with Chrome, because it is definitely not up to the task.
One of my main reasons for upgrading was the lack of RAM on the GNex. 1GB is a lot for a phone, but the minute I started switching between apps, the Galaxy Nexus would have to unfreeze them and load them back into memory. If you have GNex now, you can tell this happens when you go back to the browser, for example, and the current page appears greyed out and begins to "refresh" itself. For me, this would happen every time I loaded up the gallery then went back to the browser. It was incredibly annoying. On the N4, this hasn't happened to me yet even with extensive gallery use. I'm sure it will happen, but the threshold is much higher.
Also, as I posted on the last page, 42mbps 3G is amazing. I actually beat my friends iPhone 5 running on Verizon LTE.
Negatives:
Because of the glass back, the phone feels super slippery in my hand. It almost wants to shoot out of my hand like a banana and smash itself into the floor. The bumper helps, but not by much.
No stock browser. Chrome really does hurt the speed.
Lock screen widgets: they're useful, but absolutely convoluted right now. They need to work on their implementation.
