My Sprint contract ends next month, so I'm in the market for a new Android phone. It doesn't look like the Nexus 5 is coming anytime soon, so the best options out there right now seem to be the Nexus 4, the HTC One, or the Samsung Galaxy S4.

My gut feeling is that the Nexus 4 is my best bet. I won't have to worry about a contract, it has wireless charging (albeit not as good as what the Palm Pre had four years ago ) and the performance gap compared to the newer phones seems to only be around 10-15% on most benchmarks, which doesn't seem like a difference worth worrying about. Plus, I'll retain the Nexus line's advantages of getting more consistent attention from the ROM community.

The downsides seem pretty minimal to me. The screen isn't as pretty, but since I'm stepping up from a ~3 year old phone, I think I'll be pleased with the upgrade even if it's not 1080p, which on a ~5" screen, seems like overkill. The HTC's camera is getting a lot of nice reviews despite the lower raw pixel count, but I can't imagine it makes up for the extra cost.

The one wildcard seems to be the One's hardware design, which seems to be nicer and sturdier than the Nexus 4's glass. Still, hard to imagine the nicer exterior and better camera are worth hundreds of dollars over the life of a two year contract.

Can anyone think of anything else I'm not considering that would make one of the non-Nexus phones worth the extra cost and hassle of a contract? I've just about talked myself out of them already, but thought there might be some owners of the other phones here who could share their experiences.

The battery isn't easily replaceable, but for most people nowadays that's not a consideration.

If I didn't already have a Galaxy Nexus, then I'd get a Nexus 4 with little hesitation.

Cheers

Yeah, I'm okay with a built-in battery.

One thing I forgot to mention is that the LTE advantage of the newer models isn't something I care about, since there's no T-Mobile LTE here, and no sign that it's coming soon.

Yeah. And most reports on LTE include "poor battery life". That will likely change eventually, but..

Right, and by the time that happens, I'll be ready to upgrade to a Nexus 5 or whatever the new hotness is in Android phones.

Wait until Google I/O (next week?) and see if anything is announced. Assuming that there's nothing new and shiny, then I'd save some coin and go with a Galaxy Nexus rather than a Nexus 4. It's only dual-core rather than quad-core, but you can replace the battery and it's less likely to shatter when dropped. (I've dropped my GNex many, many times, and it's still in fine shape.)

I'll note that more and more phones are capable of being unlocked without too much hardship and are then supported by CyanogenMod and the like, letting you have the "pure" Google experience without vendor cruft (which, supposedly, has become less crufty over time).

IMO, there's no question that you should wait for Google IO. If a new phone isn't announced then, it's probably not going to be announced until the fall/December.

Unfortunately the leaks have been very few about a new phone. Early on it was the rumors of the Motorola X phone, which I thought was the last of the pre-acquisition pipeline (which even Google reps were calling crappy). Then there were rumors of a good Motorola phone, but still not a "Nexus" device. Then the last I heard was that LG would again make the next Nexus phone, but who knows?

I have a Galaxy Nexus, and I've had it since release day. For a while there, I'd rooted it and installed the AOKP ROM, which I regret due to the immense aggravation it caused due to HORRIBLE performance issues. It was awful, and I don't know how anyone is using that piece of crap. Once Verizon/Samsung got off their collective asses and finally updated their GN to 4.2.2 I went back to stock and I've been much happier.

If a Nexus 5 gets announced, I will be buying it.

The only non-Nexus device I've ever considered is the One due to its extremely good hardware design, but as long as it has Sense UI on it, I will never ever go near it.

There's no way in hell I would EVER purchase a Samsung phone again. Especially a non-Nexus device. I recently had to help someone out with their S3, and the UI was an utter mess. The S4 looks even worse.

If no phone is announced soon, get the Nexus 4 or a used Galaxy Nexus. No question to me.

Yeah, I forgot I/O was coming up. I'll wait to see what happens there -- at the very least, an N5 announcement should put downward pressure on N4 prices.

Historically, that's not been the case. The Nexus handsets already have "low" prices at launch, so there's no huge amount of discounting to be done when a new model is announced.

New models don't come out until the fall anyways.. way too early for that right now, apart from perhaps a T-Mobile/LTE variant of the N4.

They haven't in the past, but that doesn't mean they'd never step up the release schedule so they could compete with modern phones. But you're right, it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't announce a new phone.

From what people are saying, it's sounding more likely that they'll release a new Nexus 7-sized tablet with a high-res screen. I'd be interested in that too...

It's already changing. The initial issue was that the phones stuffed two discreet cellular modem chips in. The LTE chips were first generation, meant more for MiFi and USB WAN adaptors. The mobile phone market has become so competitive, phone makers used these first gen chips.

More recent LTE phones offer a single chip solution using second, or now even third generation LTE modems. The Nexus 4 has one of these inside it, but the LTE portion is disabled.

Rumors seem to be that Google I/O may see a slight bump in the Nexus 4, enabling CDMA and LTE, along with offering larger flash storage. Seems reasonable, since the work to do this is minor and could fit in well to a midcycle update to the phone.

That'd be perfect for my needs. I feel like I jumped on Android bandwagon at the wrong time by committing to a two year contract with the Nexus S just a few months ahead of the Galaxy Nexus release, so getting something off-contract that just received a spec bump would give me the flexibility to trade up to the N5 whenever it comes out, or stick with the N4 if the N5 is a dud or there's something better on the horizon from one of the other manufacturers.

I'm not a huge fan of the Nexus 4. I think the screen could be larger, I prefer AMOLED, and I prefer removable batteries. However, one of the biggest problems is the glass back of the Nexus 4. I have never owned a phone that has slid off the couch so much. To correct this, I had to put a TPU case around it and I hate putting cases on my phones.

The back glass of the Nexus 4 is not any sort of fortified/Gorilla Glass material. It will get scratched fairly easily if not protected. The camera lens sits against this scratch-prone glass, so that wasn't the best design decision.

Other than these personal preference issues and lack of LTE, the Nexus 4 is a really powerful phone (especially for the price). The camera is also one of the best I've used on a phone.

I also hate using cases, and I'm aware of the problems people have had with glass, but I just can't see coughing up $600 for the HTC One with the N5 on the horizon. I'm basically seeing the N4 as a 6-12 month rental with the possibility of an extension if it works out.

For the price, it's hard to go wrong with the Nexus 4 even if you only intend to keep it for a short time. I just hope the Nexus 5 improves on these issues.

I don't know about the couch, but when it comes to other surfaces, Tony might not have to worry as much about that. The new nubs should also help a little to protect the camera when you place the phone on a table.

Yeah, N4 it is for me. No updates at Google I/O, but I really can't see spending 300 clams for a nicer screen/camera, a removable battery, and an SD slot. Does look like a nice phone for anyone who wants to keep it for at least a couple years, though.

It's not worth $650. There's no way I'm ever buying a Samsung phone again anyway, but $650 for a phone with that build quality is a ripoff. The Nexus 4 isn't the phone the S4 is, but at half the cost it's a bargain...

I went ahead and placed my N4 order last night. I've read enough bad/mediocre reviews of the wireless charging orb that I think I'm going to go with some other Qi solutions instead, at least in the beginning. For my car, I was thinking about this product, but I'll probably have to order a different mount for it the way the guy in the video did, since I would need to mount it on my dash and not on my windshield.

The company that makes it has a package deal where you get the car dock and a Qi wireless charging mat for $86, which seems like a pretty good deal since charging mats alone seem to be going for $40-$45 on Amazon.

Really wish they'd just done the Touchstone thing with the wireless orb. Fuckin' magnets -- how do they work?

If I was looking for a cheap answer, I'd track down a GSM Galaxy Nexus. One Amazon vendor has it for $369. I'm assuming they can be had cheaper.

For the high-dollar set, hopefully the much rumored Google/Motorola X Phone will be coming out in December (just when my Verizon contract is expiring).

I know I have to be missing something about that statement, because it makes no sense to me whatsoever. Not when there's this. I'm pretty sure there's little debate over whether the N4 is a better phone than the Galaxy Nexus, especially when you're talking about GSM, in which case neither phone has LTE at the moment for those carriers...


Well, the hope is that it won't be the "high-dollar set," but instead be released at the same price that the N4 is listed now, as the N4 gets phased out.

I suspect that a GSM GNex can be bought for less than the N4 on Google Play. But even if they're about the same, the GNex at least gives you a replaceable battery and is somewhat less likely to spontaneously crack.

Whever I'v looked, the GSM Galaxy Nexus has been available at $300 for the last 8 months or so. $369 sounds steep.

$300 sounds steep! I don't really see how a replaceable battery is worth not upgrading to a much better phone.

I have a Galaxy Nexus, and I have a spare battery - I never use that spare. It's just too much of a hassle and my backup is never charged.

My N4 arrives tomorrow. In terms of phone plans, I think T-Mobile's $30/month 5GB/100 minute prepaid plan is perfect for me. I've averaged around 200 minutes of voice in the last few months, but even if I go over by 100 minutes, it's only $10 more, and I can always use GrooveIP to save on minutes if I need to.

I've read conflicting things about how you can get T-Mo's $30 plan. Older posts online suggest that it was a Wal-Mart only thing, but this post suggests you can just order a Micro-SIM online and activate it with the $30 plan on T-Mobile's web site. I'm going to try that.

The problem, of course, is I need to wait for the Micro-SIM to arrive, and I'll have the phone in my hands tomorrow without a SIM. I've never owned a GSM smartphone before -- will I be able to do anything with the phone without a SIM? I was hoping to be able to do the initial setup, downloading apps, etc. on my home wifi at least. Is there some way I can buy a cheap prepaid SIM with data service in a store somewhere to use it for a few days until my T-Mo SIM arrives? If so, where's a good place to get one?

Clueless as to your local SIM availability, but you should be able to do everything not related to making non-emergency calls (emergency calls should still work even on a phone w/o card) or mobile data traffic (WiFi works). Some settings regarding the SIM card (enable mobile data traffic etc) I'd think not be available until the phone sees a card... Loading and configuring apps (unless, I imagine, they for some reason need phone or non-WiFi data traffic - haven't stumbled on any such apps myself) is perfectly possible - I've just done much of this process for my aunt.
Once she got here it was just a matter of swapping the card over from her old phone and enabling data traffic - everything else was already loaded and configured.

It'll be fine, Tony. Many people hang onto their old phones to use as PMPs. Basically without the SIM they're just like an iPod Touch. You can still do everything you need to as long as you're connected to WiFi.

Which is fine, because you really want to do all that initial setup over WiFi anyway, since it'll be faster to download all the apps and re-sync your email/calendar/contacts. It ends up being a good bit of data.

I'm really jealous of you. I'd love to get an N4, but at this point I might just stick it out. I'm still on my contract for my Galaxy Nexus, and while I know the N4 is a nice step up from my phone, it's not worth the cost of the phone plus the ETF. Hopefully by the time my contract is running out, there will be a real Nexus successor for me to jump to, and not an overpriced Samsung product...

Yeah, the N4 should be fully functional (except for the mobile voice/data features) without a SIM card installed. So use Wifi to set things up and customize it, add apps, explore, etc.. until you get the SIM.

Cool -- thanks, guys. I guess I don't need to bother getting a burner SIM for just a few days, then.

Matt, I felt the same way when the GNex came out and I still had a year plus left on my contract. I'm actually jumping into the N4 a month before my Sprint contract ends so I have a GSM phone to take with me on international travel next month. With a $30/month plan, it won't be so horrible to pay for two phones for a month, and it gives me the flexibility to stay with Sprint if anything goes wrong with my T-Mobile experience.

Frankly, if your whole thing with the $30/month TMobile plan works out, that would really go a long way to justifying the ETF for Verizon. I'd make up the difference in a couple months, sadly.

At first I was worried about the voice minutes, but I just looked at my usage. I realized that I spend most of my long voice calls (remote support sessions with clients) on my computer through Google Voice, and those don't count towards my Verizon minutes.

Tony, you may have talked about GrooveIP before, but could you tell me about your experiences with it?

I think I might be following your lead, Tony

ps-I don't suppose you get wifi tethering with that $30/month plan, do you?

I've used it about a dozen times, and the call quality has been decent. There's a bit more latency than normal voice calls, but nothing too terrible, and I'm sure some of that was spotty mobile data service.

In terms of wifi tethering on T-mo, I'm not sure how that'll go, but it seems pretty promising. The deal with Nexus phones on Sprint was that it was officially unsupported / prohibited, but there was nothing they could do to stop it since it was pure Android without any carrier limitations.

From what little I've read about tethering on T-Mo, Nexus phones or other phones with third party roms loaded seem to do tethering okay, but there are some people who claim that T-Mo detects tethering by examining user-agent strings, which is pretty vile if you ask me, but also easy to defeat by either changing your browser's UA string or routing your traffic over a proxy or encrypted tunnel.

I'll certainly be testing it out when I travel next month to avoid hotel internet costs, but even if I lost tethering, it'd be worth it to cut my bill by more than half.

Make sure you check their coverage maps, specifically their data map for your area. I was going to go with that same plan, but ended up with Net10 instead because T-Mo had no data coverage in my area.

I'm paying $45/mo for unlimited, unlimited, 1.5GB on AT&T's network.

Yikes! See, I use less voice minutes than I thought because I have Google Voice on my desktop, and I only send texts through GV on my phone, so those are free already, but I definitely use WAAAY more than 1.5GB of data per month! I could never get by with that little...


It's funny, I had the Nexus One when tethering was first introduced to Android. At that time, the carriers didn't have much experience with it, so even though you knew they weren't pleased by it, they allowed it. I used tethering on that phone the whole time I had it and they never complained. Of course, the speeds were only 3G, so the experience wasn't great, but it worked!

Yeah, my wife's on T-Mo (postpaid) so I have a vague idea of what to expect. She's not a heavy data user, so there's a chance I'll be disappointed, but at least I'm not dealing with a contract or anything. That Net10 plan sounds great, though -- will look into that if I see myself going over on minutes too much.

Net10 only has the data limit on AT&T sims, so if you're happy with T-mobile, their unlimited/unlimited/unlimited plan is the same price. I'm sure you'd eventually get throttled, but I'm not sure where the limit is.

Hmm... I might have to look at those Net10 plans. Thanks for sharing that, John! They have a plan for unlimited everything with no international calls for $45/month. That's a little more than a third of what I pay Verizon (though I have tethering with Verizon, which Net10 doesn't allow).

They're a little unclear about the other plans, though. How does data work on that 750 minute plan? It says "auto-refill," but what the does that mean?

After writing about this, I decided to do some research into the official Nexus 4 bumper. Youtube reviews seemed favorable and noted that the rim around the bumper isn't rubberized like the Apple bumper. I really dislike the Apple bumper due to that rubbery material along the edge. It makes the phone very difficult to slide out of a pocket while sitting down.

So, now I'm sitting here now with an official Nexus 4 bumper on my phone, and it's fantastic. Much better than the TPU case I was using before. There is a metallic ring around the circumference of the bumper. It might actually be plastic, but it looks very good. The material that keeps the phone off the table isn't rubberized and it's not the TPU material I'm familiar with. It's quite rigid and easily slides out of my pocket. The back of the phone is now exposed, but the bumper keeps it from sliding around hard surfaces. I think it will provide good protection while not getting in the way as much as my old case.

Overall, I can highly recommend the Nexus 4 bumper if you must put protection on your phone.

If you buy a Net10 SIM, you are limited to the unlimited voice, text, and data plan for $50 or $65 with international features. Any other Net10 plans you may see on their site are for dumbphones sold at retail in a blister pack.

The only link you should be looking at for Net10 is Net10SIM.com. That is the BYOD (bring your own device) website.

People that prefer being on AT&T's network may want to wait for AIO Wireless to roll-out nationwide. Although it looks like an MVNO, AIO Wireless is owned directly by AT&T and is being test-marketed now. For $55/month you get unlimited talk and text, and 2GB of 4G data (apparently including LTE). After the 2GB, you're throttled.

On Net10's AT&T SIM for $50/month you get 1.5GB of data and then are cut-off. I would rather spend the extra $5 a month on AIO Wireless for more data, then throttle.

If you're fine with being on T-Mobile's coverage, then you have more options for unlimited data for cheap and Net10 might be a good option.

It's tough not knowing how TMobile's high-speed HSPA service works near me. I have a feeling I'd be fine with it, but I don't know. I do know that there's simply no way I can get by with 2GB/month. I'm at least double that most months...

Thanks for the bumper review!

Thanks for the info, Rob!
I don't have an N4 (GN here), but your posts are very helpful and informative, and I'm already looking forward to them for the N5/N6!

Cheers

You give them your credit card info and they automatically recharge you every month (and give you a $5 discount). That's why I said $45 instead of the advertised $50. They also give an additional $5 discount for additional phones, so I only pay $40/mo for my wife's phone on the same plan.

EDIT: just checked my bank, and it looks like after taxes and fees, the actual numbers are $49.99 and $44.50 - so while the advertised price is slightly false, it's not as bad as most of the carriers.

I was just confused because it seemed like the plans with minute allotments didn't have any information about data. But because I'd be BYOD customer with TMobile, it sounds like that wouldn't apply to me anyway...

Got and activated my SIM card tonight. One regression that I knew was coming but that I wasn't quite mentally prepared for was the loss of Sprint's excellent Google Voice integration. Being able to have my GV number show up from my mobile phone when I'm using the cellular network was really nice. The one other Voice-related limitation that I wasn't aware of is that T-Mobile prepaid phones, for whatever reason, can't do conditional call forwarding, which means I can't have the voicemail for calls to my cell number sent to Google Voice.

This is sort of a bummer, because though I plan to have everyone keep calling me on my GV number, a lot of people will just use recent calls to call whatever number I called them from last, which might be my cell number. My hope is that T-Mobile does full Google Voice integration in the future, but who knows when that'll happen. A bit of a sad loss of functionality, but, alas one I'll accept to cut my bill in half.

In terms of coverage, cellular calls at home seem fine so far. 4G at home (not terribly important because of wifi, of course) is a bit shaky -- it seems to flicker between HSPDA and 3G periodically -- but when it has an HSPDA fix, throughput is very solid. I'll see how coverage is in and around the office and around town over the coming days.

I can confirm that mobile hotspot tethering works -- just did some light web browsing to confirm it, and at least initially no issues with T-Mobile intercepting requests. Will probably have a chance next weekend to give it a more rigorous test.

Anyway, looking good so far.

Can you explain this statement? I use Google Voice 100% of the time between AT&T and T-Mobile, and the only number anybody ever sees is my Google Voice number.


Yes, this is unfortunate. If you don't care about losing T-Mobile's voicemail service, you can call 611 and they will remove it from your account. So, if someone calls your Google Voice number, there is no chance of T-Mobile's voicemail intercepting the call. However, if someone calls your T-Mobile number, the phone will ring endlessly.

That may be intentional. Here, I know my N3 sits on the lower speed network when idle, and then bumps up to the higher speed network when moving any non-trivial amount of data. Perhaps your carrier has configured things to work that way there, too.

When you asy "Google Voice" are you talking GrooveIP? Because yeah, if I do that people see my GV number. But on Sprint, if you turn on GV integration, you can call using the native cellular dialer and the other side still sees the GV number.



That may be -- I'm totally new to GSM phones, so seeing it switch between them made me think it wasn't a good thing.

I paired the phone with my car's bluetooth this morning, and was sad to see that an old annoyance from my previous phone persists. This might be a CyanogenMod thing, but when I switch to the bluetooth source in my car, my phone starts playing sounds in some kind of native music player. This morning with the new phone it was an alarm tone I had transferred from my old phone to my new one. On my old phone it was a sound recording I had made a few years ago. I could never figure out how to turn this off or change it so that a music app opens instead. Anyone know what's going on here?

That's exactly how it works for me. Please see the attachment to see my settings in the (official) Google Voice app.

Huh. Is that going out over the 3G/4G data connection or as a conventional cellular call?

Yes, a conventional cellular call.

Cool, I'll give that a look when I head out for my lunch break. Thanks.

Tony, I can confirm that this is how GV has always worked for me as well. All my calls go out on my Google Voice number and appear to the people I'm calling as such. GV, the way I've understood it, never uses your data connection for the actual phone conversation (except through the GMail interface on the web), and always uses your voice connection and minutes.

However, Rob, I have noticed once or twice, that despite having that setting you show turned on, I've discovered that the person I'm calling sees my cell phone's number and not my GV number. This is annoying, since like you guys I don't want anyone to hold onto that number because one of the great things about GV is that it doesn't matter what your cell's number is

Can you configure it to use wireless, if you're in an area with poor cell coverage?

Lunch break Google Voice experimentation didn't work out all that well. I can call out via GV, but setting up voicemail fails due to the T-Mobile limitations on conditional call forwarding for prepaid plans. My understanding from some googling is that the way to "fix" this is to call T-Mo customer service and tell them to disable voicemail, but I think all that does is prevent the T-Mo voicemail from interfering with your Google Voice voicemail (so the T-Mo one doesn't pick up first) and won't do anything at all for people who call the T-Mobile cell number.

I guess this is just something I'll have to get used to.

No. You would need a 3rd-party app for that such as GrooVe IP. The official Google Voice app is not a VoIP client.

Crazy: A standard T-Mobile plan: 2.5GB per month bring-your-own phone costs $60/mo. There's a pre-paid plan with the same specs and prices, but then there's also a $30/mo. plan with 5GB of data and "only" 100 minutes. Clearly, the $30/mo. plan is a world beater... leading you to ask the question "can I just pay you an extra $10/mo. for conditional call forwarding?" Sigh.

After a week of using my N4, I'm prepared to say that Betteridge's Law holds, and that the answer to the question I posed in this topic is "no."

I did find myself briefly intrigued by the new "Google Edition" of the HTC One, which looks pretty sweet, but just like the Galaxy S4 Google Edition, I can't see spending all that extra coin for an aluminum body with a few extra bells and whistles. The HTC One's screen is higher-res, but on a 5 inch screen, who cares? Faster CPU? Heck, I know I upgraded from a pretty dated phone, so maybe my perception is off, but I haven't had any noticeable lag using my N4, and it's not like I'm going to be encoding videos on it or anything. Twice the internal storage -- okay, that's nice to have, but is it worth $250? I don't think so. And no wireless charging -- I think that's just about a dealbreaker for me at this point. Oh, how I've missed wireless charging!

Data speeds are very solid for me around here. I'm getting HSPDA+ just about everywhere I've tried, and haven't had any major hiccups streaming high-quality audio or Slingboxing. I've used about 400mb of data in the first week, which puts me in a pretty good spot to stay under my 5GB/month limit if that reflects an average week. I'm sure I'll go over some months and be sad with the throttling, but I feel like I can manage.

Did some light tethering over the last couple of days, and no nastygrams or walled garden pages from T-mo. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Also ordered one of those OwlPad/CarPad combos, which probably won't show up for another week or two since they're coming from overseas. I'll probably end up getting a wireless charging orb for my nightstand, and maybe one more for the living room if they ever go on sale.

So yeah, everything's looking great. No buyer's remorse at all.

Thanks for the update, Tony. I'm really glad to hear about your experiences with it, and you're really making me want to pick one up.

For me, I was actually disagreeing with everything you said about the "Nexus" HTC One, until you mentioned the wireless charging. Unless the One sees some pretty great accessories from HTC (and they did make some good ones for my Nexus One), I really need some sort of docking solution, and that wireless orb for the Nexus 4 is calling to me.

To me, the build quality of the HTC One actually is worth the extra money. When we asked the same question here about the S4 I said it absolutely wasn't worth the extra money, but that's because Samsung makes crap phones made of cheap plastic. The HTC One is the only phone I've heard people ever speak of on levels even approaching the iPhone, and even though it's not there yet, it's pretty close. That, plus the great camera have me so very tempted to plunk down the extra cash.


...too bad houses are such damn money pits...

Have you held an N4 in your hand? I haven't seen an HTC One up close, but the N4 really feels solid. Yes, there's the "what if I break the back glass" problem, but aluminum dings, too.

As for the camera, I dunno... My cell phone camera is mostly there for "target of opportunity" shots when I forget to bring my real camera, so I don't find myself swayed by 100% crops of an 8MP or 4MP image that I'm unlikely to ever need to blow up to a level where I'd see the difference. Unless you get down to pixel-peeping levels with something like this, I don't think you really see a lot of difference. And, for me, certainly not hundreds of dollars worth of difference -- that could be a new lens for my real camera!

I'm more interested in whether the HTC One is as good on the low-light photos as they claim. I actually don't have a dedicated camera of my own anymore (I use my wife's sometimes), so my phone is my camera (and the Galaxy Nexus is no good at it).

I haven't held the N4, but I know the One is a nice looking phone. I've been trying to see one close up, but nobody has them in stores around here...

I've got two gripes with the HTC One as a "Nexus" device. First, it's got hard buttons for home/back/etc., rather than the soft buttons that Google seems to prefer. Second, HTC seems to be self-destructing as a company.

Unless you're in a hurry, I'd wait for the Motorola "X Phone" to come out and see what that's got going for it.

Meanwhile, I read somewhere today that the Verizon variant on the Samsung GS4 can use the AWS spectrum where Verizon is now expanding their LTE coverage. That means you can have that LTE coverage all to yourself. But then you're not going to have the "Nexus experience", at least not without hacking your phone and downloading sketchy software builds from people on Rootswiki.

I'm a lot closer to pulling the trigger on a new phone. I'm still waiting to see what the deal is with this "super amazing fully user-designed mind-blowing phone" from Motorola, which probably won't be much more than "choose your color and engraving."

I'm still leaning heavily towards the HTC One Google Edition. I know, it's got those hard buttons and doesn't have an app switcher button, but I finally got to see one in person and it's freaking gorgeous. It also has easily the best speakers I've ever heard on a phone before. I mean, it's not going to provide tunes for my next party, but if I'm washing dishes or emptying boxes and I want to listen to podcasts, it's more than adequate on its own, and I wouldn't have to carry around my portable speaker.

I've done the math, and even though it's expensive, it'll only take me about 4-5 months on the $30 T-Mobile plan to make up the price difference. I'm paying WAY too much for phone service right now.

And Tony, thanks for mentioning Groove IP. I've tried it out now and was pretty impressed. I minor issues with it, like the fact that every part of the app looks just awful. Also, in my test calls it seems like for some reason the app has trouble if the phone tilts enough to rotate the screen. When that happens the person on the other end can't hear me. I'm not sure why it would even rotate in the middle of a call, but I'll have to see if I can turn that off. Anyway, it really has me more confident about moving to TMobile and losing minutes on my plan.

Is it possible to use Groove IP with the built-in dialer?

The Nexus 4 just dropped by $100. The 8GB is $200 and 16GB $250. Even though this seems indicative of something new coming, that's a crazy price for a great phone that has plenty of life left in it.
https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_4_16GB?id=nexus_4_16gb

I was thinking the same thing. That's extremely tempting now. If I get that $30 T-Mobile plan, the difference between my current plan would pay for that phone in two months.

...and yet I still wonder about a Nexus 5...

I recently acquired a ZTE Open to screw around with. Simply because it's an $80 phone and I'm interested in seeing new stuff (Firefox OS).

There is no question that the 8GB Nexus 4 is worth the added expense. The Nexus 4 is a premium device in every way, whereas the ZTE Open is meant for bottom-feeders. I appreciate what Mozilla is doing. But, if you have access to a Nexus 4 for $200, get that without a second thought.

I just might do that. Good advice. Besides, even if a Nexus 5 comes out in 4 months, I can still sell the Nexus 4 at a small loss and chalk it up to a phone rental fee

That's exactly how I live my life. I rarely keep a phone more than 3-4 months and I never lose my shirt. I can't see how a $200-250 Nexus 4 is a bad investment. Even if you sell it a year from now, how much less can it be worth? Earlier this year, I unloaded an international Galaxy S II for $200. That phone is ancient!

The Nexus 4 is just brilliant.

I have zero complaints about it since I moved from my iPhone 4S. It's such a quick phone, Jellybean is pretty slick as well.

It was a no brainer at the old price, it's even more of a no brainer now.

18 months ago I'd have told you there was zero chance of me owning an Android phone, let alone enjoying the experience.

Even the wife secretly likes my phone.

sn00p (and others here with the N4):

Have any of you gotten the 4.3 update yet? I had heard of problems. I know there's problems with almost every phone OS release (even on iOS sometimes), but these issues sounded pretty bad, and I hadn't heard if they'd been resolved yet. This is separate from the Nexus 7 issues I've heard about.

The problems seem not too serious and fixes are in the pipeline. Meanwhile there are workarounds.

tanstaafl.

FWIW, I went to CyanogenMod, installing the 10.2 nightly on my VZW Galaxy Nexus. I'm liking it a lot. Among other things, I love that I've been able to slap Privacy Guard on all the apps that don't need the permissions they ask for (my logs are full of denied location requests from Facebook). Another unexpected bonus is that there are "color calibration" sliders. I've dropped the green levels a bit and now my phone matches the calibrated colors on my screen. Huzzah.

The only downside seems to be that HBOGo refuses to install on my phone.

I've been running 4.3 on my Galaxy Nexus since shortly after it became available, and the only troubles were very briefly with apps that required root access on my heretofore rooted phone. That got fixed ages ago now.

Cheers

Still loving my N4 -- no regrets at all about not getting the pricier, fancier phones, especially considering how nice wireless charging is. At the new price, it's a total no-brainer, and given how Google changes these things at a moment's notice, I'd grab it right away before they come to their senses.

The one gripe I have about my phone has nothing to do with the hardware, and that's the new Google Maps. What a total train wreck that thing is. They hide all the useful things from the UI, they kill the navigation and local icons... The core functions are all still there, but they've made things a lot harder to access regularly, and all for what? A "streamlined" more Apple-like interface? Talk about "fixing" something that was never broken.

I actually like it, but I agree that they've made some weird choices. I don't particularly like the new practice of hiding the menu items in a hidden menu that slides from the left. GMail has the same thing.

I'm tempted and I don't even need one. I've got an S3, which I'm perfectly happy with. I can't even get one "for the wife", because she's only just got an S3 Mini.

Actually, I also think the new google maps sucks, mainly because (as I realised on train journey this week) they've removed offline maps.

What a useful feature that was, no dependancy on network availability for areas you've saved and brilliant for using google maps abroad without a data connection.

Big loss for me.

Zoom out to the area you want to cache, then type "OK Maps" in the search bar. It will save that area if it's under the previous size limit (about 80MB).

I realised that after I wrote the message, but it's still a pain in the backside.

The previous system where you dragged a box and if it was too big it told you dynamically was way better. Plus you could actually see a list of the cached areas....

This mechanism has me binary chopping in zoom levels and then I forget exactly where I've cached.

They're apparently adding a button, but this is just going to save you typing in "OK Maps", but it's still a pale imitation of its former self!

Edit:

The button is there in mine, you have to click in the search area, then click on the map to dismiss the keyboard and then you can click "make this map available offline".

Rubbish!

Agreed.

Well, I can finally answer the question posed by this thread title: no.

I ordered a 16GB Nexus 4 at the end of last week, and it just got here today. Yes, there's already rumors of a Nexus 5 coming out, but we'll see about that. For now the immediate benefit of cutting my monthly phone contract down from $140 to $30 is going to help my wife and I out a great deal.

So far I'm loving the phone. The immediate impression is that the speed is a huge improvement. Everything just works and I don't have any halting issues like I did with my Galaxy Nexus. This could just be the effect of having a new Android phone, but hopefully now that TRIM is in 4.3 I won't see another slowdown after a year.

Here are some more first impressions:

- I think I definitely like AMOLED more than LCD. The whole display looks relatively washed out when compared to the GN. I'll live with it, and probably get used to it and forget about AMOLED, but at the moment it's a bit of a let down. I'm also noticing a tiny bit of burn in, which is troubling right out of the box. I don't know if it shipped with the screen on the whole way, but I can see some definite yet slight burn in at the left and right edges of the screen.

- I don't know if it was an isolated thing, but the call quality isn't great. I had trouble hearing the TMobile rep, and he had trouble hearing me. That could be the particular call, the phone, TMobile, or the reception in my home.

- The loudspeaker is terrible. It's a waste. After hearing the HTC One's speakers, everything is a let down, but this one is just awful. The GN had a better one.

- I don't know if it's just me, but I don't have those little nubs that were supposedly getting added to the back of the phone to keep it from sliding around.

I'll update as I go along, but I'm very pleased. It's funny that I got this on the same day as the Apple announcement, but I'm very pleased with this phone.

I think you'll find that the yellowish tint will go away as the phone ages. Something about the glue used to bond the LCD to the glass.

I do agree about your preference for AMOLED. I've had multiple phones with both LCD and AMOLED displays and I have a strong preference for AMOLED.


I think the nubs were designed to give the speaker some breathing room so that if you place the phone on a table, it's not completely muted. I don't think they're very noticeable, but they shouldn't be microscopic. If you can hear the speaker when the phone is placed on its back on a flat surface, you probably have them.

AMOLED displays are beautiful. Primarily, when they're black, they're completely dark. The contrast ratios are just outstanding. Likewise, they have a much broader color gamut, with far more saturated colors than are possible with traditional backlit screens. The downside is that the Android software stack and graphics chips can't deal with this amazing color gamut. They just make all the colors more saturated. It's cool looking, but it's not correct. There's also a greenish color cast. Now that I'm running CyanogenMod, I can at least fix that with their "color calibration" setting. Very nice.

I have a question for the Nexus 4/Google Voice users out there.

I just noticed the downside to not being able to forward calls to my regular cell phone number to GV. On my Galaxy Nexus, if I wanted to dismiss an incoming call I could swipe the slider to the left and it would go straight to voicemail. On my Nexus 4, if I do this the call is instead sent to my TMobile voicemail, which I absolutely do not want.

So is there any way to fix this? Or is this just something I'll have to live with?

I'm not a user of GV but you know you can press a volume key whilst the phone rings and it will silence it and stop it vibrating? It will continue to ring of course but completely silently.

It doesn't have to do with the phone, it has to do with the T-Mobile prepaid plan. I talked quite a bit about it up-thread -- basically, sending calls to your normal cell number to your GV voice mail is a feature that requires conditional call forwarding, and T-Mo prepaid doesn't support this.

The absence of conditional call forwarding on T-Mo prepaid plans is a hugely annoying thing. Here's one blog post about why prepaid plans might be less desirable that gets into lots of details.

The magic date when my VZW lockin expires is rapidly approaching and I have no idea what I'm going to do. It looks like our family situation is going to change from how it is now (one LTE phone with a legacy unlimited plan and one crappy feature phone) to something quite different (two smartphones and a tablet, all LTE-capable), making my legacy VZW plan less interesting, never mind that it seems unlikely that there will ever be another Nexus phone on VZW.

In my dream of dreams, Google creates an MVNO where your GVoice number is the only number you have. Do voice-over-WiFi when you can (as with Republic Wireless), and otherwise fall back to GSM with a reasonable price (anything under $50/mo) and they'd kick ass all over.

Sigh.

I knew you talked about this, Tony, and I was prepared for it. But if you'll notice, I said that calls to my GV number are not sent to GV voicemail if I do it manually. Only if I let it ring through. If I swipe the call away, whether the call was made to my cell or GV number, it always goes to my T-Mo voicemail. If I let the call ring, calls to my cell number go to T-Mo and calls to my GV number go to GV. I don't know why swiping GV calls doesn't make them go to GV voicemail.


This is what I do, but it's not ideal. Frequently I'll need to put the phone back in my pocket, and I'm always worried that I'll pick up the call accidentally.

...except there's almost no details about why it might be a bad thing. The article only mentions two downsides. The first is lack of LTE, and the second is throttling.

I've not noticed any problems with data speeds on HSPA+. It's pretty great, actually. So far I don't miss LTE one bit. Perhaps it's because I moved from a slower phone with faster internet to a faster phone with slower internet. In all it's either a wash or perhaps a little better because rendering times have improved.

Throttling isn't a problem for me because I know it's not unlimited data. It's 5GB then I get throttled. I prefer that to having 6GB on Verizon (for 4.5 times the cost) and getting hit with overages. I just make sure I stay under my cap, just like I did before.


My VZW date was approaching (December). Even with the ETF, I still saved money by bailing out only a month ahead of it. I wish I'd done it months ago.

Ah, I see. I rarely swipe away calls, so I don't know if this will fix your problem, but one option is to do what I did and call T-Mo to tell them to deactivate your voicemail with them. The downside is that people who call your T-mo number will never get any kind of voice mail, but everyone calls me on GV so that's no big deal

Thinking out loud here:

When my VZW lock-in ends, I'll need three active lines: my phone, my wife's phone, and a tablet. (My wife figures she wants a tablet for really using when she's out and about, and doesn't expect to use the phone as much.)

My employer has a 15% discount negotiated with T-Mobile and AT&T, 20% at Verizon, for its employees. This may or may not apply to the prepaid plans.

T-Mobile's recent family plan has three tiers for each device: 500MB, 2.5GB, and "unlimited". Let's say we want two devices on 2.5GB (my phone, her tablet) and one at 500MB (her phone). Total price: $110/month ($93.50 after discount). In T-Mobile's new world pricing, they don't subsidize the phone any more. Instead, you can spread the cost over a two year period. I'd buy the phones on the side, unlocked, making it easier to move around. The rules on tethering are complicated, and it's unclear if they enforce them on the server side. If you bring your own gear, you can apparently tether at will.

Factoid: when I'm traveling on business and staying in a hotel that charges for WiFi, I just tether to my phone and go on with life. I've found that my regular usage in this mode is roughly 2GB/week. This suggests that I don't need any more than the 2.5GB plan since I'm rarely on the road for more than a week a month, and I'm otherwise surrounded by good WiFi (home, office, etc.).

T-Mobile prepaid offers a bunch of tweaks to this. The tablet could run on a $25/mo "mobile Internet" plan with 1.5GB/mo, but the proper answer seems to be the exciting $30/mo plan that gives you 5GB. Three of those would cost $90/mo, and might not be eligible for my discount. Furthermore, I'd have the whole conditional call forwarding issue. Given the close price difference to the post-paid plan, that seems like the winner.

AT&T is complicated. On the prepaid side, they offer a 3GB data plan for $30/mo, suitable for the tablet. and a $60/mo. smartphone plan with 2GB of data. Grand total: $150/mo. for 7GB of total data use ($127.50 after discount, if I can even get it). On a 4GB shared data plan (post-paid), the grand total comes out to $160/mo ($136/mo after discount).

Verizon is where I am now, and I'm one of the few, the proud, the grandfathered unlimited 4G, but I've only got it on my phone. To add my wife's phone, I'd have to get a new family plan, and then I lose my awesome plan. Furthermore, the whole CDMA lock-in thing is kinda annoying versus the freedom of the GSM universe. A new shared plan with 4GB of data, two phones, and one tablet? The very same $160/mo as AT&T ($128/mo after a better discount). Verizon's prepaid plans: $60/mo for 2GB on a smartphone. $30/mo for 2GB on a tablet. Again, exactly the same at AT&T. Yee haw.

AIO Wireless, which uses AT&T, charges $55/mo. for 2GB of data on a smartphone. So it's $5/mo cheaper than AT&T. The tablet price is $15/mo for nearly no data and another $10/mo for 1GB more. Rough bottom line: $135/mo, and no discount. Not interesting.

Straight Talk Wireless, the Walmart plan, is $45/mo for "unlimited" everything (save a few bucks if you prepay for the whole year). Multiply by 3 and we're talking $135/mo. No discount. Also, they don't seem to do very well on the conditional call forwarding issue, either.

Net10 Wireless wants $125/mo for three devices, "unlimited" everything. No discount.


I didn't expect I'd reach the conclusion that I want to get a T-Mobile "post-paid" traditional contract, but that looks like the best way to go, given how I expect we'll use our devices.

(All of this related to the postpaid plans only.

There may be some cap somewhere on the unlimited, but as far as I can tell, they mean proper unlimited. The only conditional is that it's unlimited on device only. Tethering gets cut off at 2.5GB. Each data plan also comes with a (very small) amount of data roaming.

Tethering rules, you get tethering if you have a data plan.

The new postpaid plans have no contract at all service side. The only conditional is that you will sign a contract if you buy a phone from them and choose the installment plan. Then the contract is only in place to indicate the phone will be paid off should service end.

Update: Republic Wireless has a new plan. They'll sell you a Moto X for $299, and then you pay only $40/mo for "unlimited" 4G or $25/mo for 3G (and much less if you only want mobile voice, doing your data purely over WiFi).

The discount on the phone is the real news here. Still, very interesting.

Does anyone here have any experience with Miracast? When this feature was first announced I was really excited about it. But then I started reading the reviews of the available receivers, and it sounds like they're all terrible! The next thing I know the Chromecast is announced and there's no more talk about Miracast.

While I think the Chromecast is a great product, I definitely see uses for Miracast as a technology. For example, on our upcoming trip to Greece, I know we'll have access to TVs with HDMI. I wouldn't expect Chromecast to work in those situations, because I'm sure the clients connecting to those WiFi networks are isolated (at least I hope they are). But Miracast is a peer connection so I don't have to worry about networking.

Has anyone tried it or know of a device that's any good?

I do own this dongle, but I have never used it. The reviews are terrible, as with most of these products. I think a lot of it has to do with user error or the underlying technology just sucks.

If I hook it up within the next few days, I will post here.

Thanks, Rob. I'm curious to hear your impressions. It sounds like these things are almost all terrible. I think it says a lot that since Google announced Miracast support as a part of 4.2, I haven't heard a single thing about it. Not from Google, not from the tech podcasts I listen to, not anywhere. Strange...

For my trip, I ended up just buying this thing, which unlike the Miracast devices gets good reviews. It's not as convenient because you have to plug it in, but that's okay. It'll work with my Nexus 4 and with the Nexus 7 2nd gen that I'm hoping to pick up before we leave. I'm not sure what's different about this from the MHL adapters, but it looks good.

New from T-Mobile: sane international roaming charges -- free SMS, free 2G data, $0.20/min phone calls, and in 100 countries. You can pay additional dollars for blocks of higher-bandwidth data, which falls back to 2G speed when the block is used up.

When I'm on a typical international business trip, I only really need the local phone network while I'm in transit. The destination hotel or university typically has perfectly functional WiFi, and I'll typically not bother with local service, for all the pain of dealing with getting a local SIM card, keeping it charged up, etc. This new T-Mobile thing seals the deal for me. The only missing feature is T-Mobile's WiFi calling, which is only supported on devices you get from them. There's no app or whatnot to enable it in general on devices you bring yourself.

Yeah, this is a pretty amazing offering. Wish they'd announced it *before* I just got my 5S from AT&T, as I probably would have switched just for that. Being able to use a smartphone with data roaming enabled when traveling is very liberating...

(Apple used to have the old "unlimited data anywhere in the world, pretty much" AT&T data plan, which was $20/month extra, but unsurprisingly it was never promoted, and didn't work with tethering. I picked up tethering and dropped that plan, then they stopped offering it. Grrrr).

Wifi calling is built-into the Google Nexus handsets. Do they block that somehow?

My understanding is that T-Mobile does a proprietary GSM-voice-over-IP protocol. Every Android phone you get from T-Mobile has this baked in, but I don't believe it's available on stock Nexus phones. Typical discussion thread. The standard workaround seems to be to install a third-party VoIP client. If you're using a VoIP client that connects to Google Voice and your friends are calling you on that number, then everything seems to work, except you can't roam seamlessly from WiFi to cellular and back like the proper T-Mobile WiFi calling stuff.

Edit: It's not actually proprietary. It's a standard. T-Mobile apparently licenses the relevant code from Kineto.

See also, detailed Verge article.

I bought a Nexus 5 today. That is all.

I bought two: one for me and one for my wife.

The most interesting hardware feature of the Nexus 5 is the amazing list of frequency bands and standards that it supports.

Really, what's not to like about that? I suppose I could find odd things to complain about ("what, only 9 different LTE bands?"), but really, this is very impressive.

One thing I'm wondering about KitKat is that they've apparently gotten rid of the grey/blue transition on the signal strength meters, which previously indicated that your phone was successfully connected to Google's backend servers. I don't know if they've found some other way to indicate this or not.

Oh, is that what the grey/blue means.

Hm, it turns out we actually do have T-Mobile LTE here in Pittsburgh, though I can't vouch for how good the speeds are. Still, there's really nothing about my N4 that needs a spec bump, and I'm a bit disappointed they didn't upgrade the camera sensors in the N5, so I'll probably skip this generation and wait for the next one.

The wireless charging setup does look nice, though -- yay, magnets!

Oh, good question. I wasn't aware they'd done that. I find that extremely useful at the moment. Oh well, it's something I could live with.


Though the camera at least has OIS now, which is nice for my shaky hands. I'm hearing completely mixed things about the camera so far, though. Google really doesn't have a good track record with the cameras in their phones, so I'm not holding out much hope that this one will blow me away. As long as it isn't worse than the N4 I can live with it.


One thing I haven't been able to suss out from the news about the phone: does it have the same always listening that the Moto X has? It appears that the Nexus 5 has auto-listening when the phone is turned on and unlocked, but I haven't seen anyone mention whether it can listen for your keyword when the phone is off...

Anyone know what the deal is with T-Mobile's plan changes and teterhing? I've read conflicting stories about prepaid plans having a limited amount of tethering. I've had no problems tethering on my $30 plan until today, when I got the walled garden "please pay $15 to tether" page. I also can't find anywhere in the T-mo site to see how much tethering my plan has or how much I've used.

On the plus side, I flashed the Nexus 4 LTE enabler, and it seems to be working, so if I do get tethering working, it should be pretty speedy.

Postpaid plans all include tethering (though the unlimited data plan will cap the tethering at some point). Not sure what happened on the prepaid side.

Postpaid, I see my data usage right on the My T-Mobile portal after logging in (https://my.t-mobile.com/). Does prepaid also work to sign into that page?

I can sign in, but I think I get a stripped-down version of the page. I can see minutes and data usage on the front page, but can't find anything for more detailed usage. There is an Android app that shows usage, but it doesn't break out tethering usage separately.

I emailed a Google buddy. Apparently there's a setting, buried in there, to make the signal indicators turn orange when you're *not* connected to the Google mothership. It's just not on by default.

That's interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about that as a design. I feel like the orange would look like the "good" state, but I haven't seen the effect for myself. I guess I don't see my phone doing this a lot anyway. It's usually when it gets back into a good signal area and is re-establishing a connection.

I haven't seen the phone, so this is purely a guess on my part. Orange is pretty close to red, which is used to stand out and let you know 'something isn't right'. That would be my guess why they used orange, to draw your attention to it, as an alert.

I don't see this setting. Not even in the hidden developer menu.

I did notice the signal bars were orange in the "quick settings" toggles when connection with Google was lost. Hopefully this isn't all we get.

Re-reading the email, that looks like it's indeed all we get. I wouldn't be surprised if the CyanogenMod people come up with something more configurable and such, but Google has apparently decided to keep it simple.