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.

Bloatware No More, aka Goodbye Microsoft Outlook

I've used Microsoft Outlook as my preferred email client literally from the day the first beta was released back in the late 90's - I think the initial version was called Outlook 97.  To me it was a breath of fresh air, as I could do all of my email and calendaring from the same window.  My company was in the process of rolling out MS Exchange across the enterprise, and so Outlook was a huge improvement over having to use the kludgey combination of the MS Exchange client along with Schedule Plus - anyone but me remember that one?

Over the dozen plus years since then I've used each and every version of Outlook. Functionality-wise it keeps getting better and better, especially when you've got an Exchange server on the back-end.  However, at the same time its footprint seems to get bigger and bigger with each release...sometimes I go into Task Manager and see that it consumes half a gig of RAM...WTF does it need half a gig for?  And the time it take to load the software on my machine seems to increase the more I use the product...somehow all these plug-ins get installed on my behalf and I'm forced to stare at the Outlook splash screen waiting for each of these to load - a real exercise in patience. And finding out how to disable these plug-ins is no easy chore, and also can only be done within Outlook itself.   This ended up being a major headache for me a couple of months ago when my Outlook was hanging every time I launched it and the culprit was this antivirus plug-in that had been recently updated.  Suffice it to say that it was quite the challenge to finally fix this problem - it took multiple attempts before I could disable the plug-in within the short time window between launching Outlook and having it start hanging again.

I've written in the past about how I've reduced my dependency on Microsoft over time, and now I'm pleased to report that I've finally ridden myself of this overly engineered, bloated piece of software called Outlook.  I've been using Gmail and/or Google Apps mail for the most part anyway these past few years, and the native web versions have also gotten a lot better over time.  Offline viewing has been available for the past couple of years; a few months back they finally allowed you to disable "conversation view", which for the life of me I could never get used to; and they even implemented a few new features such as notification pop-ups that you'd normally only find in traditional desktop applications.  And I've also come to appreciate the way Gmail uses labels as an alternative to folders - it's actually a much more elegant solution than having to manage a folder hierarchy.  Since I've made the switch I've never found a need to go back, and my laptop thanks me for it!

As far as the other functions of Gmail/Google Apps go, I think it handles my calendaring and contact management needs just fine.  A weak point in my opinion has always been its task management.  There have been some recent improvements here as well, but features I've grown accustomed to in Outlook such as the ability to create recurring tasks are still not supported - not a show stopper, however.  Getting rid of Outlook has also made it easier for me to synchronize data to my mobile devices.  Since I've been using Android for awhile it's great never have to think about synchronizing my mail, calendar and contacts to my Nexus S, and there are some great 3rd-party solutions for  syncing other types of data such as tasks and notes.

So goodbye Outlook, my old and dear friend....I don't think I'll be missing you.  But despite all the frustrations I've had to endure, I guess it could have been worse.

Just Became a Gingerbread Man - My Nexus S Upgrade

I received an unexpected gift yesterday, the latest and greatest "pure Android" phone, the Google Nexus S and its interesting curved screen. When it was announced a few weeks back I wasn't sure if I was going to upgrade or not - I had planned to drop by a local Best Buy to check out a demo unit. But receiving a freebie certainly solved that dilemma for me...and boy, now that I've used it a bit I would have gladly paid for the upgrade myself.

Probably the biggest improvement is the overall speed of the device. My Nexus One was and still is no slouch in this regard, but the Nexus S puts it to shame in just about every way. I'm not sure if it's the upgraded hardware or the optimizations that were made in the latest Android version (Gingerbread) that made the big difference - probably a combination of both. But routine tasks such as web browsing and downloading/installing applications are much faster than ever before.

The other major improvement is the substantial increase in the amount of available "Internal Storage". The Nexus S ships with 16GB of flash memory and devotes a portion of that to "internal storage", which hold apps and app-related data; and the bulk of it to external "USB Storage" - this is in lieu of allowing for a user-replaceable SD card. Some people have griped about the lack of an SD slot, but 16GB is quite a bit of storage and so I don't think this is a very big deal. But what's really nice about this is that the amount of internal storage the Nexus S sets aside (~1GB) is so generous that I never have to worry about overloading my device with apps and running into the dreaded "low memory" errors. On the Nexus One I always tried to always stay above 20MB of free memory so that I didn't run into this problem, but after setting up the Nexus S and installing the exact same set of apps it showed me that I still had over 800MB of internal memory available. So now I can go on my merry way and start installing new apps with reckless abandon again!

Some of the other niceties on the Nexus S are:

• The Super AMOLED screen is not only gorgeous but actually usable in bright sunlight. This was one of my biggest gripes with the Nexus One's screen, especially when attempting to shoot daytime photos and videos.
• The call quality through the headset seems to be stellar, better than on the Nexus One.
• Real (vs. quasi) multi-touch capability allows me to take advantage of some of the newer apps such as the uber-cool Google Maps V5 with its 3D rendering.
• The new Gingerbread keyboard works better and is more user-friendly than the prior Froyo version, though probably still not in the same league as the iPhone 4.
• Built-in support for 3rd-part VoIP (SIP) providers - this is useful mostly for geeks like me, but now I don't have to install a separate SIP application when needing to do Wi-Fi calling while traveling overseas or if I'm in a bad reception area.
• Near Field Communication (NFC) support. This is the first device I'm aware of that supports NFC, so we'll wait and see how useful this will be over time.
• Oh, did I say the Nexus S is fast? :-)

Okay, now a few Nexus S downsides:

• The omission of an LED light and a trackball/trackpad - the latter is not a big deal to me since the only time I ever used the Nexus One's trackball was when I needed to position the cursor within a block of text - Gingerbread handles this pretty well now without that need for it. I do, however, miss not having the LED notification as it was a very useful way of letting me know when I received an email or text without having to turn on the screen.
• Because it uses a plastic vs. metal backing it doesn't feel quite as solid as the Nexus One, but I don't find this as bothersome as some of the other reviewers. Also, taking off the back cover in order to get to the battery or SIM card takes more work than on the Nexus One.
• Lack of 4G support - This is the major reason why I would not have purchased the phone on my own. Though 4G availability on T-Mobile is not yet widespread, it would have been nice to include this support in order to make the device more future-proof. On the other hand, 3G speeds are pretty good and noticeably faster than on the Nexus One, and I guess not having 4G saves me the $15/month that T-Mobile inexplicably dings their customers for using that service.

Overall I'm very happy with the device and will definitely hold onto it for awhile.