Google's Nexus 4, 7, 10 Strategy: Openness At All Costs 359
MrSeb writes "There have been plenty of rumors about how the Nexus program was going to grow and change with this year's announcement. Now that we have all the details, it looks like almost none of them were right. There is no Nexus certification program, and the dream of multiple Nexus phones seems well and truly dead. What we do have is a range of device sizes with the Nexus 4, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10. However, the Nexus program has been altered in one important way: we know what Nexus means now. There can no longer be any doubt: a Nexus device is about openness first and foremost. Last year the technology sphere was busily discussing whether or not the Verizon Galaxy Nexus was a 'true' Nexus device. This year we have an answer: a Nexus controlled by a carrier is no Nexus. Rather than get in bed with Verizon, Sprint, or AT&T to produce an LTE version of the Nexus 4, we have HSPA+ only. Even the new Nexus 7 with mobile data is limited to this enhanced 3G standard. And then there's the pricing: The super high-resolution (2560×1600) Nexus 10 tablet starts at just $399; The Nexus 7 is dropping in price to $199 for a 16GB tablet; The Nexus 4 with 16GB of storage is going to sell for $349, exactly the same as the old Galaxy Nexus was until yesterday. To put this into perspective, the LG Optimus G, which the Nexus 4 is based on, sells for $550 without subsidy. Google is pushing the idea of openness with the Nexus devices, but it's not an entirely altruistic endeavor. By giving us cheap and open devices, Google is making sure it's in control — not the carriers. That's better for the consumers, but it's also better for Google."
Openness Bulshitness (Score:0, Interesting)
Their Google play has regional customized availability. i.e. many apps are not available due to some stupid error or censorship. I had to contact at least 2 app authors including Kaiten email to make it available in the country I am currently residing in. The app ranking is also region dependent...
Security is still a main issue. We used to ramble about Windows, and now Android acts like the old windows system, the swiss cheese of security.
Unfortunately the other alternatives are more sinister than Android so we don;t have other options. Other possible proposed alternatives are not commercially viable since only large companies can venture into this market.
Re:Screen size (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know about anyone else, but I think that the size of the Nexus 4 is too big at 4.7". I was hoping for a 4" to 4.3" screen, but Google have really pushed for that extra big handset.
Nobody not one person alive. The only people even suggesting such stupidity are those promoting Apple...and those would be better selling off their shares ;). Seriously Tiny screens are awful they always were. Just for reference dual core is not better than quad-core, Less memory is just that less memory, If you do proper multitasking and want to build next generation applications these things matter NOW! Apple phones last generation phone or as Apple shareholders say "Specs don't matter"
I think its kind of sad that your forced to post in Android posts in the illusion that Apple is still relevant. Its market share has dropped from 23% to 15% says otherwise.
Re:Openness Bulshitness (Score:4, Interesting)
Their Google play has regional customized availability. i.e. many apps are not available due to some stupid error or censorship. I had to contact at least 2 app authors including Kaiten email to make it available in the country I am currently residing in. The app ranking is also region dependent...
And the rest of the story? Did those authors make it available to your country? If an application author doesn't tick whatever box they need to in order to make it available in your location, whose fault is it? As far as censorship, you could argue that by allowing sideloading all they're doing is refusing to distribute it via their online store. Meanwhile, if Apple doesn't want your app to exist, you'll have to hack your device to get it up and running.
Security is still a main issue. We used to ramble about Windows, and now Android acts like the old windows system, the swiss cheese of security.
I don't recall Windows every explicitly defining the permissions a given application requires when being installed, letting me make an informed decision. The best it currently does is ask if I want to run it as Administrator, basically, don't trust it and close it, or trust it and give it access to everything and anything. The Android model is a pretty good one to copy, IMO.
Unfortunately the other alternatives are more sinister than Android so we don;t have other options. Other possible proposed alternatives are not commercially viable since only large companies can venture into this market.
What do you mean? If you didn't buy your Android device from a company that locked it down, you're free to write your own bootloader. Hell, Canonical is working on a distro now for current Nexus devices, maybe you can lend a hand?
Re:Too much sacrifice for openness (Score:4, Interesting)
fwiw, my one and only phone is the nexus one.
and (stupidly, I know) I still run the official google OTA image.
and you know what? its unusable due to one showstopper bug. the screen STILL loses the touchscreen location and needs a power off/on to reset it. happens about 10 times a day.
I ask honestly: how am I supposed to respect google when they won't even fix a showstopper bug on what was their best phone for quite a long time? abandon your flagships so soon?
not a classy move by a mega-power like google. can't they find just one person to fix this showstopper bug and get it off the p1 list? with all their people there, no one cares about the n1 anymore? really? sigh ;(
this is why I don't think a lot of google's engineering, overall. they are too fast to abandon their stuff and this leaves users high and dry.
Re:No LTE, less space than a nomad (Score:5, Interesting)
HSPA+ is just as 4G as LTE is, according to Wikipedia (which is to say, it was decided that while they weren't technically 4G they advanced 3G enough to be called 4G).
What advantages does LTE have over HSPA+ that would make the latter "lame" by comparison?
Re:This Slashdot post is brought to you by Google. (Score:4, Interesting)
MS.. high margin on OS.
Google.. high margin on ads shown on subsidized hardware plus free OS.
Google model is so disrupting here, MS and Apple do not know it yet, but they are history.
Re:Openness (Score:5, Interesting)
Several reasons:
1) It's supposed to guide carriers/mfgs away from partitioning the memory on their phones (apps/music/etc). The Nexus standard is for a single volume that the user can fill with whatever they like. Remember, the Nexus line is a "do as I do" standard.
2) Mixing EXT and FAT is silly, since the benefits of EXT are lost when users shift their stuff to the FAT SD card. Since most people think FAT is what you are when you're overweight, and EXT is a trim level on a Chevy truck, they don't realize what they're giving up (like filesystem security) by moving apps and data to their SD card.
3) Forcing MTP mode means the phone can keep it's entire filesystem mounted without having to hand it over to whatever computer it's plugged in to, as well as keeping control (permissions) over the actual data on/written to the disk. It also means that when you trip and yank the USB cable out in the middle of copying files over, you haven't corrupted your data.
4) It saves on hardware (cost, thickness, etc)
5) Fewer interoperability headaches. Not all SD cards are created equal, and someone trying to run a read/write intensive app off their slow-as-dirt cheap SD may blame poor performance on "my piece of shit phone"
When I first got my Galaxy Nexus, I too was concerned about the storage limitations. After all, I wanted to put my entire music library on my phone... never mind that my entire library is literally weeks of playtime, or that there are apps perfectly capable of streaming my own media off a home server for me on demand (with the caveat/concession that I am normally away from WiFi for no more than 30 minutes), or that if I *really* wanted to go gung-ho with music for some reason I had a perfectly capable MP3 player that was even better than my phone (battery life, etc) for that purpose. Nope, I wanted to put the whole thing on my phone because it would make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. The reality is that I don't need to do that, I just wanted to. Once I shifted my expectations to match my reality, it ceased to bother me.
I compare the lack of an SD card to the "range anxiety" you see in EV cars. It bothers us that it's not available even though the majority of trips are well within an EV's range. Once you prove to yourself that you don't really need it (and can work around it in case you do), it's not such a big deal.
Re:Openness (Score:5, Interesting)
> What has openness got to do with a micro sd slot!?
Internal SPI expansion bus that's trivially easy to program directly with minimal ceremony?
As an embedded hardware guy, I totally get warm fuzzies from SPI. It's just about the easiest low-ceremony bus on planet earth to use, and in a pinch you can even bitbang it with minimal effort. I know there's no room inside a microSD card for useful hardware thicker than a silicon wafer, but you could always use a fake microSD card connected to a ribbon cable to feed hardware built into a thicker replacement back.
Google is laying a smack down (Score:4, Interesting)
You can quibble all you want about details like not having LTE, I mean really, most markets don't deliver full LTE speeds anyways, and most data plans are not going to let you take full advantage of LTE speeds by capping out at some absurdly low amount (maybe its just Canada, but our telcom sucks). Also lack of Micro SD slot and low capacity models is hard to accept. But the reality is that Google is setting a precedent that an unlocked phones should no longer cost $800+.
Its about time someone like Google smacked down the cost of unlocked handsets. We all know Apple makes 2 - 4x profit on an iDevice, its time for a company to set more realistic expectations of what profit on a mobile device should be.
Same goes for their tablets, considerably cheaper than iPads, and if Google (re Samsung) starts offering more features for less money, like uber-high resolutions, Google will be setting the trend for pricing of ALL mobile devices in the very near future.
Its a shame Microsoft chose to follow Apple's pricing and marketing strategy, I think this will hurt Microsoft. When the Lumina 920 is more expensive than an iPhone 5, and Microsoft choose to lock their devices to specific carriers on roll out, this is a huge decision for me not to even bother with the Windows Phone platform. Had Microsoft offered a "Surface" phone, unlocked for $300 - $400, I might have considered.
So, in spite of limited storage and no LTE, the phone is good enough for most people and the unlocked price is attractive to get a near top end Android device. If you feel you can't live without LTE, then enjoy your $800+ phones and your 3 year data plans.
Re:you have no control in the US (Score:2, Interesting)
CDMA allows every phone to transmit simultaneously. Each phone transmits using an orthogonal code - kinda like writing on a sheet of paper, while someone else writes on the same sheet rotated 90 degrees from your writing. If some phones aren't communicating, that decreases noise floor thus allowing higher bandwidth use by the phones which are communicating. That's why the CDMA carriers rolled out 3G service before the GSM carriers. Ramping up data bandwidth on CDMA was trivial. GSM on the other hand was stuck with its timeslices. GSM had to graft on an extra radio using a non-TDMA spec in order to compete with CDMA (which incidentally is the reason you can talk and use data at the same time on GSM - it has two separate radios for these functions vs CDMA's one). If the US hadn't allowed CDMA to compete with GSM, we would've all been stuck at 2G speeds simply because it was normal everywhere, and there would've been no competitive pressure to improve it.
That's right - CDMA won. If you use HSPA+ on AT&T or T-mobile, you're using wideband CDMA. GSM simply integrated it into its spec, resulting in people not knowing that it's CDMA and thinking that it's still vanilla GSM. The only part of GSM which is still TDMA is its voice comms.
LTE uses OFDMA, which functions similarly to CDMA except in the frequency domain. It requires more processing power than CDMA to untangle the overlapping signals from each individual phone. Processing power which until recently consumed too many Watts for use on a mobile platform like a phone.
Re:Screen size (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the screen size is a reflection of the market. People are migrating towards phones with larger screens. For example, I'm guess that the Samsung S2 and S3 owe their success, at least in part to their large crisp screens. I'm not saying that 4.7" hasn't gone a little too far for the average user, but I bet that screen looks a lot prettier than the competition.
Personally, I have huge hands, so my next phone will be humongous. I avoid texting because I can't help but hit like 5 characters at once. I'm even considering the monstrously large Note 2.
Re:Openness (Score:5, Interesting)
Forcing MTP mode means the phone can keep it's entire filesystem mounted without having to hand it over to whatever computer it's plugged in to, as well as keeping control (permissions) over the actual data on/written to the disk. It also means that when you trip and yank the USB cable out in the middle of copying files over, you haven't corrupted your data.
Of course the big drawback is that MTP was originally a Windows-only protocol that was only later standardized by the USB group and support is very flaky on any Linux-based OS I've used. You're no longer guaranteed that you can plug the device in to any host and have it recognized.
You also can't edit files directly using MTP; you must edit it locally then re-upload in its entirety back to the device.
Re:No LTE, less space than a nomad (Score:3, Interesting)
You're also totally ignoring the fact that even high-quality batteries have a limited life-cycle -- usually about 300 charge cycles. In other words, by sealing the battery inside, you've made the entire device disposable. I prefer to just replace the battery after about a year & get back the full battery performance I had with the device when it was new.
Finally, this is a Nexus device. By definition, the people who will be interested in this are tinkerers. This means they may run development software on it, including firmware. Guess what's a key step to reliably resetting the device in the case of bad firmware? You guessed it - battery pull.
Non-swappable battery is a dealbreaker, sorry.
Re:Missed Opportunity (Score:4, Interesting)
I was hoping to purchase a Nexus 4, and was very disappointed that I can't get one for Sprint. After a little research, I came across this article explaining the lack of LTE: http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/29/3569688/why-nexus-4-does-not-have-4g-lte [theverge.com]
In short, blame your greedy carrier.
I'll wait for Firefox OS (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately it does feel like Windows for mobiles. Linux hits it big on a consumer computing device for once and it's been less than stellar.
Re:Openness (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll me too this. I have a Galaxy Nexus, and when I got it I also had micro SDCard slot anxiety. It arose partially because I had no way to transfer stuff to and from the device as I use Linux and its MTP was less that stellar (before I could just mount the SDCard as a USB drive), and partially because I wondered if 16Gb was enough.
Turned out the transfer problem was a complete non-issue. There are apps that turn it into a Web Server, an FTP server, a RSYNC server, a CIFS (ie Samba, Windows Share) server, and clients for Drop Box and every other internet storage system known to man. All of these options are faster, more portable, more robust, run over more transports (cable, WiFi, bluetooth, NFC) and are less risky than mounting an SDCard. It's now a case of having to put up with an inferior alternative - its more of a case of hoping I will never have to mount a USB FAT file system again.
As for the storage issue, that is turned out to be slightly more of a concern. I have a whole pile of pod casts I automatically download, an ebook library of 100's of books, 10 or so movies, a couple of complete seasons of TV shows, and a reader application that downs a number of sites for off-line reading. Admittedly the movies and TV shows are transcoded so the play natively, which makes them smaller. (Turns out watching a movie using Android's native player draws less watts than reading an ebook - go figure.) This is enough to keep me occupied for a 24 hour international plane fight. As I said it is a mild concern tight, as I only have a Gig or so spare. But it is difficult to imagine what else I could possibly put on there that is useful on the phone.
Turned out not having an SDCard comes with one huge plus. It makes the whole thing run faster. Even if you aren't using the SDCard, Android has to check it every time a file is opened in case it might be on there, and this ends up making a noticable speed difference. So much so that now I remove the SDCard from any device I own.
So I've gone from having SDCard anxiety, to ripping the bloody thing out in every device I own. Good riddance I say.