My first New Years Resolution: start writing on my blog again.
When I posed to folks on Google+ what they would change about the Galaxy Nexus I got a mixed bag of flame bait, fan boy (and girl) warfare and generally snark. I did get a few good posts that were constructive to my synopsis. Â Generally what I gleamed from the feedback was a couple of area:
- The camera ain’t all that
- Why the fuck does it not have an expandable SD card slot?
- The speaker is kind of weak
- The hardware itself feels kind of cheap and flimsy
I have lived with this phone for about two weeks now and I’m inclined to agree with all the observations.  I love the phone, but there are some aspects of it that drive me a little crazy.
First, the media management is disjointed and awful.  Moving media on and off at first was kind of a pain in the ass. I have gotten over that (I had to break off my iTunes training wheels) now but boy was it hard. I hate iTune with a passion, but I have to give it to that slow, bloated ass piece of shit program, it works.  Now before you all start screaming Double Twist stop.  Double Twist can’t see my phone when I hook it up because it mounts as something other than USB storage so it renders the program worthless until I can find a work around (anysuggestions?).  I ain’t going to buy Air Sync. Fuck that!  I ran into the same problem when I connected the phone up to my friends Volt. It didn’t recognize it. Google decsion to use a MTP for media management has fuck those used to using Double Twist for now. Google should just buy Double Twist to make the media management component complete. Problem solved.
Google Music does work pretty well for what I need it to do, but it’s just a bit clunky to do what I am use to doing.  It randomly stops playing a track for odd ass reasons and that does irk me, but all-in-all it works as advertised.  Audio quality is great, but I do miss my pearly white iPhone earbuds with volume control and pause.  I’m sure that is coming soon in future updates. Right?
I don’t find the camera all that awful. What it may lack in quality for the image quality concise it more than makes up for with stupidly fast shutter speed (almost too fast) and instant uploads to Google+ photos. Couple that with the sharing, filters and effects and there is no contest.  I must grudgingly admit that my Wife’s iPhone 4 does better images in certain situations, but I get my picture up to Facebook and Google+ faster.  This came in really handy when I enable instant upload during Christmas.  That, in my opinion, is the camera’s killer app.
The Google services integration with the phone is like…….   It’s mother*&^****AWESOME!!  Everything is just there. The contacts with pictures and phone numbers, the Gmail archive, the smooth as silk Google Voice integration, Google talk, Google+, Reader, Music, YouTube, Picasa ,Photo’s and Calender. In a word: WOW!
When the Verizon 4G network is working, the phone is slick as snot and responsive as my iPad.  When I first activated the phone and began syncing with Google services in the Verizon store I was completely done when I left the store 20 minutes later.  I average 10-18 Mbit/s Down and 6-10 Mbit/s up and this makes life so much better when your doing things around town. However, that performance comes with a caveat; battery life simply sucks dick.  Get the bigger battery. It not only gives more heft to the phone, but it buys you a least 2+ extra hours of LTE usage.  The screen is gorgeous, but it ain’t helping that battery life either. Hopefully with some software updates this may improve slightly, but this is a radio problem and more specifically a problem in how Verizon implements its hybrid LTE/EV-DO network .
An lastly there is ICS.  I have played with many Android phones over the years and this is the first UI I’ve seen that made me happy I left the iPhone.  Even my friend, who is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple Inc., loved the design and layout.  He’s creative you know. There are some areas for improvement. Not all the apps are optimized for it as of yet. The soft buttons need some tweaking and the menu structure is a bit disjointed. All things that software updates (or custom ROMs) can and most likely will fix.
So, I still have my Google+ thread open for what you would change about the phone so feel free to keep commenting.