Galaxy Nexus Review (opens in new tab)

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.

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)

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.

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 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.

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.

Comparing form factors with the iPhone works because the iPhones have always been around the same size. Comparing displays to the retina display works because it's the most common smartphone display.

If they said "it's good" or "it's as good as the ObscurePhone X4", it would be harder for me (and probably others) to rate the Nexus.

Though I believe it was rumoured (and frankly would have made engineering sense) for them to use it when they quadrupled the resolution in the iPhone 4 but Samsung couldn't guarantee enough production to fulfil Apple's expected demand. I can easily imagine another world where Apple makes some slick videos explaining the benefits of Pentile and anyone who doesn't have it is mocked, similar to how the iPhone's Retina Display, which they admit in the very name goes beyond the point of visibility in normal use is considered the minimum benchmark for a good screen.

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.

Anyhow, we are in a free world where everyone can make reviews and I'm glad we are in that world.

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.

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.

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.

My biggest disappointment is that the comments suck already. A good comments section on a popular site requires a lot of work from the moderators, but it is possible. But crappy comments are like weeds -- once you let one or two through, they multiply quickly until they take over the site, which has already happened.

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."

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.

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?