Verizon and the Galaxy Nexus - Two Worthwhile Upgrades

Being the Android fanboy that I am, I had my eyes on the latest "pure Android" device, the Galaxy Nexus, ever since it was launched a few months ago.   The device comes pre-loaded with the latest and greatest Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) version of Android, with lots of new bells and whistles and a much improved user interface.   But alas, it was only available on Verizon and I had been a dedicated (and mostly satisfied) T-Mobile customer for the past 7 years.  In addition to that I felt that this trend towards larger and larger handset screens was not to my liking, and so when I saw that the Galaxy Nexus was sporting a 4.65-inch screen I figured I really didn't want to deal with anything that bulky.  So, given these two issues I decided I would just stand pat for awhile and see how things were going to play out.  And as it turned out, Google did start rolling out ICS to existing Nexus S users such as myself, and since the Nexus S is no slouch of a device I figured I would just hold onto it for awhile and wait for the ICS update.  And sure enough, back in December I was able to download and install ICS without a hitch, so I thought I was golden.

Well, I quickly found out that ICS on the Nexus S had a couple of major issues, notably excessive battery drain and a general sluggishness with most applications.  In fact, shortly after Google started deploying ICS to Nexus S owners they abruptly halted the deployment, probably because everyone was having similar problems to mine.  It was around this time that I also started losing my patience with T-Mobile, as there were just too many places I was going that had little to no reception, and even in the places where there was reception it was often the case that all I could get was 2G....WTF, that just doesn't cut it in today's world.

I waited and waited for Google to address the ICS issues, but no dice.  And then I heard about this great deal that Amazon had for the Galaxy Nexus, just $99!  So, I immediately jumped on the deal, had my phone in a couple of days (with number ported) and I was in business.  And boy, I can't believe I didn't switch to Verizon sooner.  I'm getting spectacular 4G coverage in most places....check out this speedtest report which I ran near my office:

ICS on the Galaxy Nexus doesn't seem to have any of the battery issues I experienced with the Nexus S either.  I consider myself to be a pretty heavy smartphone user, but despite that I am able to go nearly a full day with the device off of a single charge; noticeably better than my Nexus S even before the ICS upgrade.  And the dual-core processor in the Galaxy is so damn fast....it's night and day compared to any other phone I've used in terms of the speediness of apps.  This, along with Verizon's great coverage and speedy 4G network have me in smartphone heaven at the moment.  Do I still think the phone is too big?  Yeah, it would be perfect if the screen was closer to 4-inches even...but I'll overlook this given all of the phone's other advantages.

Oh, but now it's time to play with my new "retina display" iPad...so stay tuned!

My Ice Cream Sandwich is Quickly Melting

You know you're a tech/gadget geek when you decide to perform a major OS upgrade while on vacation...and in Sin City of all places.  But that's exactly what I did while I was in Vegas week before last.  I caught wind of the fact that the latest version of Android, 4.0 (aka "Ice Cream Sandwich") was slowly being released over-the-air for the Nexus S.  Of course, being my impatient self I couldn't wait for that and instead found a download link off of Google's servers and manually upgraded myself.  In typical Android fashion the upgrade process was very straightforward and in less than an hour I was up and running with the latest and greatest from Google.  So how's my Ice Cream Sandwich experience been since then?

Well, let me start out by saying that if you are current Nexus S owner and have not yet upgraded....please don't!  Google pulled the plug on the upgrade shortly after it was released due to a number of issues that were reported by early adopters.  In some cases the upgrade never completed and essentially bricked the phone, in other cases certain functions stopped working post upgrade (e.g. WiFi), and in a lot of cases, myself included, battery consumption has simply been atrocious since the upgrade.  Right now I'm lucky to get half a day of normal use out of my battery before it dies.  Some people say that turning off WiFi or disabling the Google+ app helps, but I've done both and it doesn't seem to matter.  I'm crossing my fingers that Google does something about this soon, and it's been such a royal pain in the ass that I'm even thinking of switching to Verizon and buying a Galaxy Nexus just so that I don't have to deal with it anymore.  And in addition to the power issue there are a couple of other major annoyances with ICS. Text rendering in Gmail and the browser seem to take forever sometimes, and some of my apps just appear to be more sluggish in general.

But despite all these issues there are some really nice enhancements with ICS.  The Gmail app is a lot more refined and intuitive, and some of the more commonly used functions (e.g. labels, mark as unread) have dedicated icons now instead of your having to pull up the options menu.  The notifications pulldown has also been enhanced to allow you to remove individual notifications by swiping them to the left.  This new swiping gesture has been applied to a number of other places within ICS as well.  Within Gmail you can swipe to go to the next/previous message, and within the "running apps" list you can kill specific apps by swiping them away - very nice.  There's also a really cool new feature which allows you to send one of five preconfigured (and customizable) text messages to a caller during an incoming call when you can't pick up the phone.   Ice Cream sandwich also seems to have addressed a couple of major issues that I often encountered with the Gingerbread OS.  Sometimes when I press on the "home" button it would take at least 15 seconds for the icons to appear, and even worse, sometimes the home screen itself would become totally unresponsive and I would have to power cycle the device to fix it.  Fortunately ICS addressed both of these issues.

Please Google, fix the damn battery issue and allow me to enjoy my Ice Cream Sandwich.