Wow, there is dust stuck under the corner of my HTC One X's screen. Apparently it is a very common flaw with these phones, and has been for a long time. The best smartphone screen ever ruined by a nagging flaw such as this. Hopefully Rogers accepts to help me, and HTC cooperates as well. It's a fantastic device, but it's really souring me on this device, and on this brand. My future Android phone will probably be a Note 4.
How likely is that? Would that mean current Nexus 7 would see a price drop? It's one of the tablets I'm considering so I'm interested in how this all shakes out in the next few weeks.
The current consensus seems to be that the 8GB stays as it is, and the 16GB becomes a 32GB. Which makes sense, because $50 for an extra 8GB was extortionate, but $50 for an extra 24GB is... kinda still extortionate, but at least less so.
Ah, I didn't even think of the 8GB version. I don't think I've seen any Canadian retailers carry that, they always offer the 16GB version only.
Basically what it amounts to is, there's no profit on the 8GB version, so retailers mostly don't carry it, and you need to buy it direct from Google. The $249 one has some profit built-in (because 8GB of ROM costs $3, so there's $47 of margin), and third-party people sell it. When I looked at buying the 8GB from Google, taxes and shipping made it like $240, so yeah, better for me to wait for the 32GB from a tax/shipping-free vendor.
Google cancelled their event, but they still announced their Nexuses. The Nexus 10 is fucking phenomenal. Dual-core Cortex A15 with 2GB RAM and a 2560x1600 screen that makes the new iPad look chumpy and low-res, for $399. The Nexus 7 gets significant upgrades. 16GB is $199, 32GB is $249, and they now have a 32GB with 3G for $299. (The iPad Mini 32GB with 3G is $559. Literally $260 more.) The weird thing is the Nexus 4. It's the LG Optimus G, as rumored, but they're selling it unlocked for $299... in an HSPA+ version with no LTE. I don't know enough about frequencies to know which carriers it works on, but I assume both AT&T and T-Mobile? But seriously, who buys a high-end new phone with no LTE? They also have a T-Mobile subsidized-with-contract model for $199 (with more storage, equal to the $349 unsubsidized version). Seems like a great phone if you're on T-Mobile for some reason, but leaves regular people out in the cold. Maybe CDMA/LTE versions will come direct from carriers later? ALSO big news: Android 4.2 has multi-user support for tablets, which is 100% fucking sweet. And it has Swype-type functionality integrated into the default keyboard. For my part, I'm definitely getting a Nexus 7, and am strongly tempted to grab an N10.
lol DAMN THIS CHUMPY LOW-RES SCREEN! It's bad enough that I can't see individual pixels, now I'm gonna know that there are other screens out there with even more pixels I can't see!! It was nice of The Verge to put together a 15-minute promotional video for Google. Now that all the tablet announcements are on the table, the Nexus 7 is dangerously close to impulse purchase territory. (At least for those of us who are terrible at managing our money). If this weren't the Android-dedicated thread, I'd mention that I'd rather see an ~7" version of the Surface than either iOS or Android. But it is, so I won't.
The All-New iPad with Retina(TM) Display has a 260 dpi, which is certainly well into "good enough" territory, but obviously a 300+ dpi display is going to be sharper in a real way -- i.e., that people with regular good eyes can see, if they examine it closely and critically. I actually have a really solid idea of what the difference is like, because my old Evo 3D (960x540 4.3") was right around 260 dpi, and my newish Evo 4G LTE (1280x720 4.7") is 315 dpi. Neither of them ever looked bad, and I couldn't ever see any individual pixels on the Evo 3D -- but the 4G LTE is definitely sharper. Now, yes, nobody's going to be all "omg i can't stand this ipad 4, need a nexus 10" -- but still and all, the Nexus 10 has the better display. And of course, it's the same price as the iPad 2, whose 130 dpi is the worst of any device in existence, and looks legitimately godawful bad. Nice paralepsis, dude. Personally, I don't think a 7" Windows device makes much sense at all -- Windows almost makes sense as a convertible laptop-style device, but a 7" device doesn't play to its strengths. That does make me wish that there was a good keyboard accessory for the Nexus 10, though, whether a Transformer-style one, or a Surface-style one. Because the N10, even moreso than my Transformer, seems well-suited for laptop-replacement duty (it's the same hardware as the new Chromebook, but with a vastly better screen), but you can't replace a laptop with no keyboard.
Good job by Samsung. Apple just came out with the iPad4 which means they can't even respond with a "even more RETINA" product for a whole year. That's a huge head start.
lol No seriously, I laughed out loud after seeing "chumpy and low-res" again. It's the quote that keeps on giving. I'd hoped you were being sarcastic, but apparently not. But since your tenuous bond with reality has apparently snapped after reading the Google blog: no, the iPad 1 and 2 displays are not "the worst of any device in existence" and they do not look "godawful bad." (I've still got my OG iPad handy, and looking at the display makes my eyes bleed so little that it's barely noticeable). Making a big deal about the increased resolution of the Nexus 10 over the "retina" iPad is as ridiculous as Apple making a big deal about the increased pixels of the iPad mini over the Nexus 7. Reading you go into apoplexy about pixels per inch is pure gold, though, so thanks for the yuks. Getting back into opinion as opposed to where you're objectively wrong, though: I think a Windows 7" makes good sense for those of us who like the new UI, are happy with our current smart phones so don't need Windows Phone 8, and don't want a tablet that's trying unsuccessfully to be a desktop replacement. I think a huge part of why the iPad's succeeded where other tablets failed is that they specifically didn't try to sell it as a laptop replacement -- Apple made it clear from the start that it was an auxiliary device, a new market. Obviously, Microsoft is taking a different tack with Surface, by making sure it's always shown with the kickstand & keyboard. Back to Android, though: I don't know why Google's not making an even bigger deal of the Google Now. I mean -- of course I do know why, in that a big part of their audience are the people who obsess over the number of ports, the processor speed, and imperceptible differences in ppi. But Google Now is the one feature that differentiates it from everything else, and it plays to their already established strength of getting all kinds of information from everywhere and aggregating it in one place.
An Engadget hands-on is impressed with the display and build quality: "It's thinner and lighter than an iPad, registering at 8.9mm thick and 21.2 ounces (603g), but it doesn't seem to be cheaply built -- in fact, its soft-touch finish felt quite sturdy and solid to us. We also liked its rounded corners and slight curves." Nice. What's especially interesting to me is that video, which is the first I've really seen of 4.2 Jellybean. It looks MUCH different than 4.1, for all that they're keeping the Jellybean name. It's more like the Android phone UI, interestingly, with the tablet-specific stuff streamlined back out. And with neat edge-swipey stuff added, that I think is more of Matias Duarte's influence. I sort of wonder why they're branding this as Jellybean, when it's clearly a bigger jump over 4.1 Jellybean than 4.1 was over 4.0 ICS. Either it's for technical reasons (this is what Jellybean was supposed to be, and it wasn't ready when they released 4.1, so they had a mostly-ICS interim version) or for marketing reasons (they a huge, don't want to seem like they're coming out with two major releases in a year), but either way -- this looks like the major OS upgrade that 4.1 really wasn't.
Oh gods, not the fucking dpi dickwaving again... But the Android version-versus-codename thing is a bit confusing, to be sure - I thought 4.2 was going to be Key Lime Pie...?
Not quite as ridiculous seeing as the Nexus 7 also has a slightly higher resolution than the iPad Mini. Also, people have had how long of sneering about how nothing can possibly compete against Apple without the retina display? Give them a day of feeling superior, eh?
That's the thing, though; it was dumb of Apple to compare the mini to the Nexus 7 based on screen size in the first place. (I mis-typed "number of pixels" instead of screen dimensions earlier). Apple wins when they don't talk about specs, even when they do have an edge. Because as soon as something else comes along, you've got the more excitable people fapping over pixel density and GHz, and saying that your best-in-class display has within a day become "chumpy and low-res." (okay, that's still awesome, so I'll give it a pass). Google seems to get that even better than Apple, seeing as how they don't drill down into specs on the Nexus 7. For the 10, the talk about "highest resolution display" which just puts them back in a one-upmanship situation with the whole "retina" marketing push. Again, it's just weird seeing the two companies trying to emphasize the things they're arguably worst at. The Nexus pages just make it seem like they're playing catch-up with iOS, even for the features that Google does indisputably better, like Search, Maps, and GMail. But the Nexus 4 page gets it right, in my opinion. Emphasis on Google Now and better Maps at the top, save the dumber stuff for the bottom. It's also good to see them finally taking care of the brand differentiation problem and coming up with a consistent line with consistent branding. (I'm genuinely curious how they're going to handle the next versions of everything, though, assuming they're not planning on making them 5, 8, and 11 inches respectively).
I didn't see a post here about it, but Microsoft has released the smartglass app for Android. I tried it out tonight, and it is an ok controller for the xbox, I guess. I wouldn't say its better than the xbox controller so far. One thing I didnt' try but that would completely change my mind is if I can enter text on the android for the xbox, because that would be awesome.
I can't recommend one of those cheap xbox controller mini keyboards enough. It's been a ten dollar godsend in our household.
I tried out web-browsing with the smartglass app this afternoon, and thats pretty slick. Not better than a mouse, but as good as browsing with a tablet and with a bigger screen on my tv. The only bug I ran into was that when I tried to quote a post here, it made my text I tried to enter into the box disappear. However, that could be a bug with Swiftkey, a bug with Android, or a bug with Smartglass, so I have no idea who to say was at fault... So thumbs up for that!
I've been looking for a good SSH program for my Transformer, and I finally found it: Terminal IDE. It's billed as a development environment, and it includes javac and vim and git a bunch of stuff, but mostly it installs a busybox-laden shell with SSH that supports all the keys on a hard keyboard normally, so that I can run Emacs and get Ctrl/Alt handling like I'd expect/want. Only sadness is that it doesn't let me remap Caps Lock to Ctrl. Or at least not in an Android-friendly options thing, maybe there's some command in the shell that will. Relatedly, this is why I'm torn on the Nexus 10. I want it for the great hardware, but a 10" tablet with no keyboard feels like it's missing half its purpose in life.
I have the original Asus Transformer, which Asus won't upgrade to 4.1. I would love to get the Transformer Infinity but I can't find the keyboard dock any where.
My new Nexus 7 arrived a few days ago. I've had an iphone for many years, and there are many differences from ios that I am loving about android: The back button. I can browse twitter, open a linked article in a chrome tab, read it, then press the back button to automatically close the chrome tab and return me to twitter. Or I can switch to twitter any other way to keep the tab open for later. Chat services like skype and steam that I'm signed in to appear in the bar at the top, and the notifications menu. Not realising I'd been logged out of something because I hadn't opened the app for too long was rather annoying on ios. Being able to send things between apps. Twitter on my iphone has built in support for saving links to Instapaper, which is why I started using the service. But the android one doesn't, because you can simply hit 'share' and select Instapaper to do the same thing. Although it seems to always save twitter.com as well. I'm guessing because all twitter links actually go through twitter's link-shortening service. Is there any way to fix that, other than doing the sharing from chrome instead of twitter? Widgets. Just having a little google reader ticker on my most-used home screen means I'm actually reading things from my rss feeds far more than I used to. Opening chrome tabs from my tablet on my desktop or vice versa from the new tab screen. I just checked and I could have technically done this on ios, but because links didn't open in the ios chrome app, it really wouldn't have been very useful. I'm essentially moving almost all my web browsing to the tablet, so that I can keep my work open and on screen at all times on my desktop, even if I'm taking a break from it. That last point about opening tabs from other devices removes a lot of the awkwardness that might have resulted from trying to do this. If I find something that would have been much more useful to have open on the desktop, it is completely painless moving it over. Some negatives I'm noticing, though: Is there no way to make notifications do more than just make a little sound? I liked my iphone showing snippets from new emails on the lock screen. Editing on google drive seems to be lacking some important features. How do I set a style in a google doc? In ios you can tap the bar at the top to work like the 'home' button on a PC, to move you to the top of a list. I am really missing that on android. Workflowy, my note-taking + to-do-list productivity service of choice, doesn't have an official app, and the webpage version doesn't work well enough, so that has to stay open on my desktop.
Hell yes. I've never understood why people talking about Android -- both regular users and tech blog writers -- seem to spend more time talking about expansion ports, external storage, and app store "openness" as opposed to the general usability features that distinguish Android from iOS. Your post makes it sound like they're really addressing problems with mobile OSes. Have you had a chance to try out the "Google Now" stuff? That's the feature that's most compelling to me, but I haven't seen many people talking about its real-world usability. I'm wondering if it's that it's still in progress so it isn't fleshed out yet, if it's more useful on the phones than on tablets, or if it's just not all that remarkable except for its future potential.
Google Now is the shit. This morning I swiped down the notification tray to see what had been updated, and it threw in the score of last night's Bulls game because I filled in my favorite teams a little while ago. Just now, I pulled it down and it's giving me directions to the movie theater I'm going to in an hour because I was just searching on my laptop to give directions to somebody coming from the other side of town. And when I tap on it to bring up the full Google Now thing, the top card is "Crisis Response Information" that promises to show "a map of gasoline availability and power outage information" because it knows I'm in NYC and things are still a bit fucked. Totally seamless and really useful.
Most of the Google Now stuff is dependent on your location, so it seems it would be much more useful on a phone than a wifi-only tablet. All I get is weather reports. Edit: I hadn't actually realised until sinfony's post that the weather entry in my notifications was a Google Now thing. I thought Google Now cards just showed up in the search app.
When they talk about Google Now, they talk about the whole "random info popup" aspect of it, which is one part of it; but what I didn't realize until after I watched a Siri-comparison video is that Google Now is also the voice command stuff massively enhanced and made accessible again. (Basically, in Gingerbread, you could long-press the search button on the phone to get a voice command prompt that would let you talk to the phone and do a bunch of handy things like texting, emailing, etc. ICS phones take that away by virtue of not having a search button. Google Now adds it back in by making Google Now available from the lock screen and by swiping up from the home button.) From a voice command aspect, it's sort of interesting, because it definitely is more useful than the old voice command stuff, but also less predictable. For instance, I'm traveling right now, and wanted to know what breakfast places are available here. With the old voice command I would have said "map of breakfast," and it would have launched the map thing, gotten my location, and done a search for breakfast, showing me results. With GN, I said "where can I get breakfast?" and it did basically the same thing in a better UI -- but I wasn't sure if it would work or not until I tried it. The well-defined verbs were more limited, but also more guaranteed.
The first time I tried using my nexus' voice input, I tried to search for Broken Forum. After about six attempts, with ever more hilarious interpretations, I gave up, and haven't touched it since.
I solved this problem by switching to using Pocket instead of Instapaper, which also seems to have a nicer interface and a search function.
Yes pocket is awesome. Supposedly it can save all sorts of different media although I've only tried webpage news stories.
I've long been impressed with how great the voice parsing is. I actually quit trying to even talk stilted to make it easier for the thing, and just talk normal now. It rarely gets words wrong, and when it does, ICS+ has a better correction engine than Gingerbread did. (The voice keyboard also works in real-time, rather than in Gingerbread where you'd talk, it'd parse, and then come back with a wall of text.)
Last night with time to kill before seeing Skyfall, a friend and I went to the Samsung store in the mall and played around with a Galaxy S III for awhile. My friend recently wrapped up his phone contract, has an iPhone 3GS and is contemplating a new device. Afterward he said he was 99% certain he'd be getting the Galaxy. I don't know how much a factor iOS being the same old thing for me is (I've had my iPhone 4 for 20 months) but I found myself seduced by the Galaxy's saucy large display, light weight and interface. Unfortunately I still have 16 months left in my contract so I won't be upgrading anytime soon but I'm now firmly of a mind that a quality Android phone like the Galaxy S III can meet or exceed the iPhone for my needs. And who knows what sort of nutty Android phones will be out by the time April 2014 rolls around. As a semi-interesting aside, the Galaxy S III overtook iPhone sales in the third quarter, though iPhone is expected to be #1 again in Q4 thanks to iPhone 5 sales.
The Galaxy is kind of huge. Maybe I'd get used to it, but it seems slightly too big to be a cell phone.
It is pretty big but I didn't find it overly so, which surprised me, as I have smallish hands. I really like the extra screen real estate, though. As I was toying around with it, I felt the same way ChuckJ did when he was looking at an iPad mini in the Apple store. There was some strange effect that just made me want it. Left to right: iPhone 4, iPhone 5, Galaxy S III:
Any reason why that phone over other android phones? What are the differences from the Nexus 4? That there were loads of different android phones and no easy indication of which was better was one of the main reasons I ended up with an iphone several years ago.
Just got a Nexus 7 (after Lady Fortune smiled upon me in my table sessions in Las Vegas last week) and after years in the iOS world, am pleasantly surprised at how far Android has come along and how superior it is to iOS in many aspects: I like the Android task mechanism better (though to be fair, it just a difference of hitting the bottom right icon v. double tapping home button) Chrome > Safari, and love that it has a pulldown to go "desktop" mode. iOS much more polished but some Android UX preferable to me, namely, global "text size" setting. Though other things have frustrated me, though for many, I have puzzled through a solution -- for instance, device, by default, has rotation blocked, and it took me awhile to figure out how to enable. As I gave my iPad to a family member before the summer, been lost for note taking (as it was the only think I used the iPad for, spare occasional AirPlay and/or gaming) and actually bought some moleskin notebooks and a fountain pen. And have not gotten use to pen & paper ;( Which brings me to the downside: app quality much lower on Android in the aggregate and many missing apps. I realize it might be a matter of getting clued in to the proper apps in the sea of mediocrity and valley of lameness, but I struggled today to open up an ePub, loading up a half-dozen (why can't the Google Play Book reader do this?) reader apps until Kobo did the trick (and no Stanza in the Google Play store). Also, lots of apps are incompatible with this device (like the official Tumblr app and another notable one that eludes my thoughts in this moment). * Using Evernote (which is overkill for my usage) for note taking -- what does everyone here like? * Other ereaders? Tried Moon, FBReader, and others I cannot recall precisely; they all blow. * Podcast and/or audio app? Any other Android tablet tips? Weird that once again I end up on the platform that is missing most of the games.
I've actually come to android with a large library of meaty games waiting for me, due to all the Humble Bundles that I've bought in the past. Some of them are classics that I've already played on PC, like Uplink, Osmos, SpaceChem, Crayon Physics, World of Goo. But I haven't played most of the highly-praised ones from the currently running bundle, so I shall probably be trying those first.
Aldiko is my Android e-reader of choice. Evernote is great, dunno what I'd suggest as an alternative. Do yourself a favor and check out Currents. I love the hell out of it, glorified RSS reader or no.
Aldiko is indeed pretty great. Along with PlayerPro and Root Explorer, it's one of my most used apps that I've never had a problem with.
