Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Android 4.0 not quite a super duo
By ANDY IHNATKO ai@andyi.com October 19, 2011 4:36PM
The new Galaxy Nexus smartphone is displayed at a news conference in Hong Kong Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd on Wednesday unveiled its Galaxy Nexus smartphone, the first to use the latest version of Google's Android operating system. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
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Updated: December 8, 2011 11:07PM
Compared to the iPhone OS and especially to Microsoft Windows Phone, Android has always come across to me like an old house that’s been updated by a dozen different owners and a hundred different contractors over a period of decades. It might have the same basic list of features and conveniences as the others, but it doesn’t appear to have any of the elegance, efficiency, and clarity that comes when something massive and intricate is built all at once with just one pair of eyes overseeing everything.
When Google showed off Android 4.0 -- via Samsung’s new Galaxy Nexus phone, due in November -- they showed off a number of discrete new features. One in particular was tailor-made for a nice, easy-to-put-across demo: Face Unlock. Instead of unlocking your phone with a PIN or a unique swipe pattern, just hold the Nexus up to your face and let it get a look at you. Ping, you’re recognized and then welcomed.
That’s cute. But my first question is “Will it even work in the dark backseat of a cab?” and my second is “Can it tell the difference between a photo and a real person?” My third concern is that if I have to hold my phone up in front of my face to unlock it, sneaking a look at my Twitter feed during a wedding without my relatives knowing about it will become almost impossibly tricky.
Other new features are a little more practical. Google is following the dominant trend for contact management and transmogrifying the Android address book into something more like a “People” hub. Another trend: a Camera app that works fast enough that you can actually snap a picture of the Halloween pumpkin in front of you before it decays into a lump of goo.
Android’s familiar (and increasingly cumbersome) row of hardware buttons at the bottom of the screen are now soft-buttons that disappear when not needed, or which can adapt to the immediate function that’s being performed. And while Google insists that careful manual process management -- aka “Cripes, if I don’t force-quit some of these apps, I’m going to have to do a hard-reset in an hour” -- is no longer necessary, they’ve at least added a niftier way of switching between your most popular apps. 4.0 automatically populates a popup app list with running programs (complete with screen thumbnails) but unlike iOS’s app bar, you can customize that list so that only the three or four apps you dip into all the time appear.
4.0 also includes a feature that’s going to be essential in the new world of blazing-fast 4G networks and rate plans with teeny-tiny monthly data caps: bandwidth metering on an app-by-app level. At a glance, you can find out which apps are transacting the most data and impose your own caps.
Overall: nice.
The real meat of the upgrade, however, is to finally try to give Android some measure of consistency. It’s probably too late to make the user experience on Android as consistent as it is on iOS or Windows Phone, but the first step towards recovery is simply admitting that you have a problem and I and all of Android’s friends and family are proud that Android is finally taking control.
Vlad Savov from ThisIsMyNext.com was at the announcement in Hong Kong and spent some time in the event’s hands-on demo area. He reports “a good deal of stutter” in the interface, reinforcing a consistent problem with Android: the UI always seems to be about a half a step behind your taps and sometimes, presses don’t even register. This is still pre-release software (which Vlad notes) but I’m skeptical that within the next month, the Android team will solve a problem that’s existed since Day One.
I mean, it’s great that Android 4.0 now has a nice new system font. But a disconnect between the user and the interface should have been considered a five-alarm, all-hands-on-deck problem.
It was a joint event in which Google showed off Android 4.0 running on Samsung’s elite new handset, the Galaxy Nexus. It certainly looks like a neat and capable phone. It’s a 4G phone with a big 4.65-inch Super AMOLED display with enough pixels to run 720p HD movies, the de rigueur dual-core processor, and a radio set for near-field communication.
Are any of these things necessary? Which is to say: does the fact that the only thing on this list you’ll find in the iPhone 4S is the dual-core processor, put Apple -- or any similarly underequipped phone -- at a disadvantage?
Nah. 4G is amazing, particularly if your phone doubles as a personal Internet hotspot. But even on the biggest 4G network in the country, access to 4G is a roll-of-the-dice proposition, and data plans that allow you to fully take advantage of 4G are by no means affordable. A large screen is just a matter of personal taste. It creates a much nicer reading and viewing experience and it makes the cluttered UIs of many Android apps easier to work with. The tradeoff is size, battery life, and the ability to easily operate the phone one-handed.
As for NFC . . . it’s a fab demo (tap two phones together to exchange contact information, tap a pay terminal at a checkout stand to electronically pay for that six-pack of Dr. Pepper) but it won’t become a compelling feature until the world is littered with opportunities to use it. Until then, it’s just a bullet on a features chart.
If anything, the Galaxy Nexus demonstrates Android’s consistent core strength: diversity. You can have a phone with 4G, a huge screen, and NFC if you want one.
And yet this phone demonstrates that diversity is also Android’s biggest problem. In the Galaxy Nexus, we see an implementation of Android 4.0 that’s been groomed and managed by Google itself. The Google logo is screened on the back of the device, even.
But that’s no promise that any other Android phone that ships with 4.0 will work exactly like it, or anything close to it. Android 4.0 -- hey, I got all the way to the end without mentioning it’s code-named “Ice Cream Sandwich” -- is released to handset makers and networks, who then do whatever they want with it. Often, it feels like they’ve done things “to” the OS, while drunk and angry. There isn’t any easy way for a user to get the original, “straight from the mothership” Android 4.0 experience and existing Android phone users are dependent on the manufacturer for updates. Theoretically, 4.0 can technically run on any phone that can run Android 2.3, but if your handset maker isn’t interested in letting you run the new OS on your old phone, you’ll be stuck running 2.3 forever.
Ice Cream Sandwich looks like a big step up. Let’s just hope that the carriers and manufacturers don’t wind up tripping Android as it tries to move forward.
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