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...) 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 [email protected]
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.
I'm really digging it as well. The layout is pretty great. Whatever the CMS is, they're getting a ton of flexibility out of it. It feels like a more integrated media experience -- typography, video, photography, infographics, user comments, all pretty nicely wound.
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.
Agree, although I have to add it has some terrible performance issues. The site, especially the front page, is hardly usable on slower PCs (netbooks, for example). I guess all these custom fonts are at fault here.
When the top 8 people at Engadget leave to start their own site, you can bet it'll be beautiful.
according to wikipedia:
On April 3, 2011, The New York Times posted an article on their website announcing that "eight of the more prominent editorial and technology staff members at Engadget have left or are leaving AOL and are about to build a new gadget site". The group included former Engadget editor in chief Joshua Topolsky, managing editor Nilay Patel, editors Paul Miller, Joanna Stern, Chris Ziegler, and Ross Miller, product manager Justin Glow, and developer Dan Chilton.
I love the fact that the reviews seem to be fanboy (girl) and drama-free, and that the devices are evaluated fairly on their merits, regardless of their sources. The reviews are detailed enough to be useful, while more-detailed reviews like the multi-pagers at Ars and Anandtech can be overkill, for me.
Mine used to be Engadget, but the comment quality is simply awful on the website with flame wars springing up every which way.
I think some of the top-level editors of Engadget left to start The Verge. Because of this, the actual product reviews on Engadget, which I initially liked, have decreased in robustness as well.
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
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.
That's debatable. I'm an Android fanboy, but the retina display is a year old and is still debatably the best screen out there. 720p is awesome, but pixel density is still not as high as the retina display, and the sub-pixel density is definitely not.
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to figuring out a way to convince myself it's worth paying full price for this phone, and I love a huge screen (Droid X owner). But AMOLED is a mixed bag. I find it to be a bit over-saturated, and the power savings is only for blacks, and overall, I think AMOLED has been shown to consume more power, not less. But the pentile subpixel arrangement is the biggest thing I'm worried about, being one of those people who wants to vomit when looking at a screen like the EVO 4G's.
I'm not saying the retina display is unequivocally better, mind you, I just disagree with you that the NG's screen is "clearly a significant step up."
I don’t know. The screens seem a wash to me and whether one is better than the other depends more on taste than specs.
I personally don’t like how those OLED screens look (I like their contrast and blacks, don’t like their colors) and I also dislike PenTile immensely. The screen being larger is actually a negative point for me. I guess it would still be alright for me but only just.
On the whole I get better contrast and blacks and higher resolution with the Nexus but also lower pixel density, worse colors and larger size. Whether one or the other is better for you personally can’t be determined from that.
For me those screens seem about equal with different upsides and downsides. If you like larger screens you might clearly prefer the Nexus.
A clear verdict about the screen doesn’t seem possible, neither one is clearly inferior.
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.
This and the 4S are different enough that a comparison is hard (as someone that's contemplating either an ICS phone or a 4S soon, I'll vouch for that) - I think "competitive" is a good way to put it.
Siri and the tight integration with Apple TV (specifically, the ability to mirror) are way ahead of their Android equivalents. The countless docks and accessories for the iPhone also give you a lot of options.
The camera looks to be a worthwhile advantage for the 4S - the motion-stabilized video in particular really stand out and make video actually worth watching/sharing.
People dismiss this as pedantic, but iOS's app advantage is still worth noting. GarageBand and iMovie are easily the most sophisticated mobile apps I've seen yet - Android equivalents (there really isn't one for GarageBand) aren't in the ballpark. If you're bored, $.99 will get you a great game optimized for the newest hardware like Scribblenauts or Shadowgun - Android looks to be at least a year behind. There always seems to be an Instagram/Orchestra/Oink with no Android equivalent.
But how do you weigh that against a larger screen that looks far better for reading and video? Similarly, this makes Android's already far superior Maps more useful. And I could see ICS's live voice transcription being just as much of an advantage as Siri. These are arguably more common use-cases than the Apple advantages I just listed.
All this to say that I wish it were an easy choice which were superior.
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.
Talking purely about looks: The look is a massive improvement over Honeycomb with its terrible 1980s future look (and quite obviously so much better than anything Android offered before).
I still prefer iOS on tablets (I like the changes Apple made for the iPad and I also think that for some strange reason iOS visually works better on tablets than phones) but on smartphones there are now two OS – WP7, too – that look better than iOS†.
That’s looks. I’m definitely looking forward to trying ICS out and it looks like Google put a lot of work into fixing many (all?) of the little and big annoyances that previously made me want to throw Android devices at the wall when I used them for longer than ten minutes.
It’s nice that Android is shaping up as a real alternative for me. (What’s a bit annoying is that if you want a phone without all the crap you have about as much choice as when you buy an iPhone. I’m not sure whether Google wants to or can change that with ICS.)
—
† Android still gets details wrong. I can live with that. More or less, I guess.
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.
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.
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.
You can't get RAW files out of that sensor (well, maybe someone will hack something together, but definitely not out of the box). Also, to rely on Lightroom, iPhoto, or any post-processor to get your photos to look good is a stupid strategy. People who take pictures with phone cameras by and large aren't at all interested in tweaking them later.
The onus is even stronger than on DSLRs to get the defaults and automatic settings right, since you're dealing with a demographic that is even less inclined to tweak, but will judge the results nonetheless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
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).
> 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."
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.
There's Android File Transfer for Mac users, which supports MTP. Not sure there's anything at all for Linux users.
This issue has turned the phone from must-have to never-want for me - it's unbelievably handy to essentially have a 32GB USB hard disk in my pocket wherever I go. Are there any actual advantages to MTP or PTP for end users?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] cryptoz|14 years ago|reply
</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 [email protected]
[+] [-] dman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icarus_drowning|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinph|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barrkel|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bgarbiak|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeramen|14 years ago|reply
according to wikipedia:
On April 3, 2011, The New York Times posted an article on their website announcing that "eight of the more prominent editorial and technology staff members at Engadget have left or are leaving AOL and are about to build a new gadget site". The group included former Engadget editor in chief Joshua Topolsky, managing editor Nilay Patel, editors Paul Miller, Joanna Stern, Chris Ziegler, and Ross Miller, product manager Justin Glow, and developer Dan Chilton.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Verge_(website)
[+] [-] FiddlerClamp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hansy|14 years ago|reply
I think some of the top-level editors of Engadget left to start The Verge. Because of this, the actual product reviews on Engadget, which I initially liked, have decreased in robustness as well.
[+] [-] justinglow|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polshaw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joebadmo|14 years ago|reply
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to figuring out a way to convince myself it's worth paying full price for this phone, and I love a huge screen (Droid X owner). But AMOLED is a mixed bag. I find it to be a bit over-saturated, and the power savings is only for blacks, and overall, I think AMOLED has been shown to consume more power, not less. But the pentile subpixel arrangement is the biggest thing I'm worried about, being one of those people who wants to vomit when looking at a screen like the EVO 4G's.
I'm not saying the retina display is unequivocally better, mind you, I just disagree with you that the NG's screen is "clearly a significant step up."
[+] [-] ugh|14 years ago|reply
I personally don’t like how those OLED screens look (I like their contrast and blacks, don’t like their colors) and I also dislike PenTile immensely. The screen being larger is actually a negative point for me. I guess it would still be alright for me but only just.
On the whole I get better contrast and blacks and higher resolution with the Nexus but also lower pixel density, worse colors and larger size. Whether one or the other is better for you personally can’t be determined from that.
For me those screens seem about equal with different upsides and downsides. If you like larger screens you might clearly prefer the Nexus.
A clear verdict about the screen doesn’t seem possible, neither one is clearly inferior.
[+] [-] jsz0|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] saturdaysaint|14 years ago|reply
Siri and the tight integration with Apple TV (specifically, the ability to mirror) are way ahead of their Android equivalents. The countless docks and accessories for the iPhone also give you a lot of options.
The camera looks to be a worthwhile advantage for the 4S - the motion-stabilized video in particular really stand out and make video actually worth watching/sharing.
People dismiss this as pedantic, but iOS's app advantage is still worth noting. GarageBand and iMovie are easily the most sophisticated mobile apps I've seen yet - Android equivalents (there really isn't one for GarageBand) aren't in the ballpark. If you're bored, $.99 will get you a great game optimized for the newest hardware like Scribblenauts or Shadowgun - Android looks to be at least a year behind. There always seems to be an Instagram/Orchestra/Oink with no Android equivalent.
But how do you weigh that against a larger screen that looks far better for reading and video? Similarly, this makes Android's already far superior Maps more useful. And I could see ICS's live voice transcription being just as much of an advantage as Siri. These are arguably more common use-cases than the Apple advantages I just listed.
All this to say that I wish it were an easy choice which were superior.
[+] [-] juliano_q|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ugh|14 years ago|reply
I still prefer iOS on tablets (I like the changes Apple made for the iPad and I also think that for some strange reason iOS visually works better on tablets than phones) but on smartphones there are now two OS – WP7, too – that look better than iOS†.
That’s looks. I’m definitely looking forward to trying ICS out and it looks like Google put a lot of work into fixing many (all?) of the little and big annoyances that previously made me want to throw Android devices at the wall when I used them for longer than ten minutes.
It’s nice that Android is shaping up as a real alternative for me. (What’s a bit annoying is that if you want a phone without all the crap you have about as much choice as when you buy an iPhone. I’m not sure whether Google wants to or can change that with ICS.)
—
† Android still gets details wrong. I can live with that. More or less, I guess.
[+] [-] matheusalmeida|14 years ago|reply
Anyhow, we are in a free world where everyone can make reviews and I'm glad we are in that world.
[+] [-] mikeknoop|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canes123456|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blinkingled|14 years ago|reply
[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|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] potatolicious|14 years ago|reply
The onus is even stronger than on DSLRs to get the defaults and automatic settings right, since you're dealing with a demographic that is even less inclined to tweak, but will judge the results nonetheless.
I think the criticism is completely fair.
[+] [-] ugh|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] schrieaj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexholehouse|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nextparadigms|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] awolf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nissimk|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ConstantineXVI|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowmix|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moe|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aissen|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joe_fishfish|14 years ago|reply
This issue has turned the phone from must-have to never-want for me - it's unbelievably handy to essentially have a 32GB USB hard disk in my pocket wherever I go. Are there any actual advantages to MTP or PTP for end users?
[+] [-] WildUtah|14 years ago|reply
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