The nice thing about having non physical buttons is customization. I have a Gnexus with AOKP rom(the best rom out there). You can customize the navigation bar to your hearts content. I honestly prefer the old layout where you actually long press the home button for recent apps. That way I have room for three additional buttons(back, settings, and search with long press voice search). I'm used to the og droid so that's probably why I prefer this set up. But thats the beauty of the nav bar being displayed on the screen. You can make it the way you want.
custom kernels/roms for the win. The Galaxy Nexus has so much dev support. These devs have done wonders to the Nexus's battery life and performance. The best combo I have experienced is franco's kernel/AOKP rom. At heavy usage I just have to charge my phone once at night before I hit the rack. Plus the performance is buttery smooth.
Another benefit of that kernel/rom combo is the custom color controls. Stock galaxy nexus had issues with displaying whites. They had a heavy yellowish tint. Luckily the problem was with just the calibration settings. The screen on my gnex is honestly probably the best looking screen I have ever seen on a phone now.
Picked mine up Monday evening from Best Buy... went ahead and 'pre-ordered' it Sunday night, and bam it came in the very next day, pretty nice. And all I can say is: Wow. Going from the EVO 4G to this, holy moley. Bigger, lighter, faster, smoother, exceptional battery life, just better in every way it is possible to be better. And the EVO 4G was no slouch, but this just blows it completely out of the water. I iz impressed.
Think of how much extra battery life you can get if you start doing that on the GS3 . As it stands it looks like the GS3 could go at least a couple of days w/o a charge. 10 hours of straight video and web browsing (stock). Pretty sure the dev support on the GS3 might even be greater considering how many will be out there. I have the VZ Galaxy Nexus. I'm just a little more than content with it. It's my 1st nexus phone since I usually go for hardware vs software, but the GS3 is better in most categories than the GN at this point. Battery life being the biggest worry for me right now. As it stands I get roughly close to 3.5 hours of screen time w/o a charge.
GS3 is definitively going to be a better phone since it has brand new hardware, but the leap between the Gnex and the GS3 is not big enough for me to replace what I have now. I would rather wait for the next version of android and quad core lte chips.
i want to switch to android..but most phones I tried have that "android lag"..just doesn't feel snappy. is it still true these days? i remember reading something about that's just the way android was developed.
android 4.0 def improved on that. IOS will probably always be smoother because of how bare and simple to os is. Android is a much more powerful mobile os but the drawback is it can be more laggy than IOS. However phones like the galaxy nexus have plenty of dev support. These devs work on making the code run more efficient and thus my phone is just as smooth as any iphone out there. There is zero lag in between launching apps, transitions, or unlocking the phone now. Surfing on the browser and viewing full desktop version of websites is actually smoother on my gnex.
Yeah, I totally understand where you are coming from. It's sad that unlimited data is coming to an end. I still have a Verizon phone, but I'm currently on a white GSM Nexus and it's great. Even with the limited data I'm getting from Red Pocket (AT&T MVNO). Luckily, I'm always around WI-fi. What I really wonder is if Verizon will receive another Nexus? I honestly think this is the first and last, but you never know.
I would say this would be true a few years back, but now they're pretty snappy. iOS is pretty fluid in certain area's , but nowadays Android phones can handle extremely heavy multitasking with ease.
Android lag is definitely still there. Even with a good rom, my dual core phone becomes unusable if it is updating an app from the Play store. There's constant lag in opening up apps, the app drawer, etc. I have to restart my phone everyday because it becomes too laggy and slow. I'm tired of all the maintenance work to get it to run properly.
Definitely agree. Love the color controls in the ROM control section of AOKP, as well as Franco Kernel.
May I ask what device you have? When updating an app through the play store my Nexus lags a tiny bit but if i exit and go onto another application it works perfectly. That, and the Nexus is an EXT-4 file system device with an internal memory. I've never experienced that, and I was using a Snapdragon S1 phone for a few weeks (HTC Incredible)
I just find it really ironic that as time goes by the faster the data speeds get and the more hd content becomes available the more limited these data plans become. I mean why the hell would I need unlimited data back when EDGE was the fastest mobile network? But now that it actually is possible to run through 2-5 gigs of data in a month they restrict our data usage. If I want to stream ONE 2 hr HD movie over LTE it will use up about 1 gig worth of data. That's right... If you have a 2 gig data plan you just used half of your months data in 2 hours. What the hell is the point of having these 720p screens and 40mbit/s data speeds!?!? And about another nexus heading to Verizon. Google is changing their way of dishing out Nexus phones. It is rumored that Jellybean will be launched on all the major phone manufacturers simultaneously and each phone will be that manufacturer's version of the nexus. So there will be a HTC nexus, Samsung nexus etc. So Verizon will not miss out on the fun. They def should at least snag one of them.
hmm i think its just your specific handset... What do you have? I never have issues with the play store.
G2x running a CM7 based rom. It lags every single time I'm updating or downloading. I don't know if this is still the case, but if I were to click Update All, does it try to update every single app at the same time? That's poor design.
No the play store goes down the list updating one at a time. Like I said it is an issue with your phone. Maybe try changing kernels.
I went from G2x (CM7) to a Galaxy Nexus (Stock, followed by AOKP), and there was a pretty big difference in performance. Much smoother. Not sure how much of that was better hardware with the Nexus, or just better performance/optimizations with ICS. I never did try the CM9 G2X build to see how that might have improved things.
and also how can you say android lag is still there when you are have a previous generation of android running on your phone When you say it is still there I was assuming you have android 4.0.4 and it was still there.
Well, maybe back when it was the Market, it used to do that. This Rom is supposed to have one of the best kernels for the phone. That's besides the point. These types of problems should not exist this late in the development of Android. And for it to require me to spend time on reading through forum posts about different ROMs and Kernels is even more ridiculous. But maybe a quad core phone will solve everything
