Review: Google Nexus 4 – Part 1
It seems lately that I am really on a roll with reviews. The latest review that I have for you is the Google Nexus 4 provided to me by Telus. And I’ll get right to the elephant in the room. It’s running Android 4.2. But it’s doing so in it’s purest form. There’s no customizations like the ones you would find with Samsung or Sony phones. Now that’s going either be a non issue or a huge turn off. For me it was a bit of a shock as I’ve been reviewing phones from HTC and Samsung recently that were running heavily customized versions of Android. But I got over it quickly. You might want play with one and see what you think of it before whipping out your credit card.
It’s about the size of my iPhone 5 and it feels good in my hand. However, it’s yet another phone that attracts fingerprints like crazy. You’ll be cleaning this phone frequently. It feels solidly constructed and feels like a quality piece of hardware. One thing that caught my eye is the back of the phone. There’s glass panel protecting a dark shimmering dot matrix pattern on the back of the phone which looks really unique. Though I wonder how it will stand up to being in a pocket with change and car keys. Speaking of pockets, it fit in the pockets of my dress pants fine but it was a bit snug in my jeans. For the record, I’m talking about the front pockets as I never put phones in my back pockets.
The screen is absolutely stunning. It’s a 4.7-inch 1280×768 display which has razor sharp text and is viewable in all lighting conditions. Pictures are absolutely vivid. I would say that it is on par with the iPhone 5 at worst. It has a quick Quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor running at 1.5GHz along with 2GB of RAM. It does NOT feel slow at all. However, one area that you should make note of is the fact that it only has 16GB of memory and you can’t expand it. So you will have to be careful what apps you have and what else you store on the phone. It’s a HSPA phone that the specs say will top out at 42 Mbps. My testing with Speedtest.net says that I got 10 Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream. Not the fastest speeds that I’ve seen from a phone recently. But still faster than my DSL connection.
As for the built in apps that come with the Nexus 4, it’s comes with not much other than the basic apps that you find on a stock Android install. That leaves you to add whatever apps you want to the phone. Think of it as a very open canvas. For some users, that’s not a bad thing. But if you want something that gives you a more out of the box experience with a ton of preinstalled apps, Samsung or HTC has a phone with your name on it. Having said that, i will say this. Telus was smart enough to not do anything with this as there are users who will love the fact the phone comes with a stock version of Android in every respect. As for the navigation system on the Nexus 4 phone which as usual is provided by Google Maps, it does turn by turn navigation with spoken street names which is good in my books. I have no complaints on that front.
In part two of this review, I’ll cover the camera and battery life and wrap up a few loose ends. Stay tuned.
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