Official ICS & Galaxy Nexus Launch Thread

[Red Storm]

I alternate between the stock keyboard and SlideIT depending on what I feel like it at the time.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

The best tapping keyboard is probably SmartKeyboard Pro. I don't understand why Swiftkey has to force you to use its stupid arrangement for 0-9 and other than that while its prediction is great, all I want is a normal tapping keyboard.

BTW, I believe that ICS' data management thing is interesting, but at the same time it's not a true solution. In my experience Android just gobbles more data. Was it Facebook or Twitter that I can get push notifications, but in order to do so I have to force sync to be on. iOS on the other hand uses plain push and only refreshes data when you finally open the app. Huge data consumption difference. I find it quite impossible to stay under 200mb a month on Android.

This new ICS trick in disabling data for certain apps is interesting, but at the same time it's not getting to the root problem. Let us have more sync options in apps so we aren't constantly draining data. This also helps to reduce wake situations and improves battery life as a whole. Disabling data is just a cheap hack to prevent data usage, but if each app had better fine tuning, we wouldn't have to worry so much.

 

[trmiv]

So to help my battery issues I disabled Latitude, wallet sync, gallery and books. I also reinstalled maps with let me get rid of the Google Traffic widget update that was running even though I wasn't using it.

After all that today at 4:40pm I'm at 70% battery after 9.5 hours of use. That's about 3.1% per hour. I was at 6% per hour before I disabled all that stuff. That's quite a significant improvement for disabling a lot of stuff I didn't use.

 

[vshah]

4. I don't know about this. But I know with TMO you will need a newer sim card to get on the 21mb connection.

what? i'm using a 6 year old tmobile sim card and i'm getting 21mbps hspa+ just fine.

 

[Red Storm]

Was it Facebook or Twitter that I can get push notifications, but in order to do so I have to force sync to be on. iOS on the other hand uses plain push and only refreshes data when you finally open the app. Huge data consumption difference. I find it quite impossible to stay under 200mb a month on Android.

I don't use Facebook or Twitter so I can't speak for those apps, but push essentially is live syncing. Having an app only refresh when you open it is not push AFAIK.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

I don't use Facebook or Twitter so I can't speak for those apps, but push essentially is live syncing. Having an app only refresh when you open it is not push AFAIK.

Push isn't syncing. Push only pushes a notification to you when its relevant. Syncing means pulling data which means periodic polling. Push won't get all the tweets/wall posts since you last opened it. It will only push through something you want to be pushed through.

The iOS apps all push, and they only fully refresh when you open it. You will get the notification without the app open. Someone on this board had a discussion with me before. He likes it when Android apps have the option to also pull data because that way when you open the app, you're good to go. I can see that advantage, but on the other side of the argument you eat up more data. On either Facebook or Twitter, you can enable push but disable syncing. This is how iOS does it. I believe in choice, so it'd be nice to allow pulling and also disable syncing. Pulling will always use more data.

But like I said, because so many apps do full syncing on Android, it's easy to go haywire with data usage. iOS forbids a lot of background tasks which is why you can never use that much data unless you sit in front of Facebook and hit refresh every 3 minutes or you leave Youtube on 24/7. Because we have so many background tasks on Android, it's VERY easy to go overboard with data consumption.

Edit: I think the word I was looking for is refresh interval. Facebook has a "refresh interval" option in the app that lets you select "Never" even while receiving push notification messages/mentions, etc. Twitter has a Sync Data option that has to be checked to get push notifications of messages/tweets. However in refresh interval, you are not allowed to choose never, meaning you are forced to poll and pull new messages in.... so even if you select 4 hours, you can get real time push notifications of mentions, but your client will also poll every 4 hours to download messages. It would be nice to turn that off...

 

[hans007]

Push isn't syncing. Push only pushes a notification to you when its relevant. Syncing means pulling data which means periodic polling. Push won't get all the tweets/wall posts since you last opened it. It will only push through something you want to be pushed through.

The iOS apps all push, and they only fully refresh when you open it. You will get the notification without the app open. Someone on this board had a discussion with me before. He likes it when Android apps have the option to also pull data because that way when you open the app, you're good to go. I can see that advantage, but on the other side of the argument you eat up more data. On either Facebook or Twitter, you can enable push but disable syncing. This is how iOS does it. I believe in choice, so it'd be nice to allow pulling and also disable syncing. Pulling will always use more data.

But like I said, because so many apps do full syncing on Android, it's easy to go haywire with data usage. iOS forbids a lot of background tasks which is why you can never use that much data unless you sit in front of Facebook and hit refresh every 3 minutes or you leave Youtube on 24/7. Because we have so many background tasks on Android, it's VERY easy to go overboard with data consumption.

Edit: I think the word I was looking for is refresh interval. Facebook has a "refresh interval" option in the app that lets you select "Never" even while receiving push notification messages/mentions, etc. Twitter has a Sync Data option that has to be checked to get push notifications of messages/tweets. However in refresh interval, you are not allowed to choose never, meaning you are forced to poll and pull new messages in.... so even if you select 4 hours, you can get real time push notifications of mentions, but your client will also poll every 4 hours to download messages. It would be nice to turn that off...

i used to be an iOS dev well for a few months. I can try to explain the difference in ios and android push.

push effectively just some socket open blocked on input. its part of the reason some android devices drain battery like crazy becuase you have say 5-6 services all awake , some in a horrible fashion (ebay app was really really bad about this when it first came out) and some will also do a poll at some interval.

anyway, when you write an android app, if you have say a polling service and a UI intent when the app is off screen the UI process is idled, but the service is still on waiting for data.

anyway, with android you can get X number of services. the nice thing is as an app developer you have a lot of control about how this gets done since you can effectively do whatever you want. android has real multitasking so all the services can run at the same time.

now iOS , apple doesnt want to give devs this kind of freedom and it really doesn't have real multitasking. the way "push" and multitasking works on iOS is there is an apple service which handles all push notifications. as a dev you have to register a special certificate, and guid and things with apple. and there is an API so your app's UI can be waked up by this apple service (i think its called the APNS , apple push notification service). the service is used both do to things like wake ups based on timers, and also external things from say the internet.

so as a developer, you'd register your special guid and certs with apple. send apple a special packet to apple's cloud. apples cloud sends a packet to the iOS device, the service gets it, wake up the app, and it looks like its "multitasking" when in fact they were sleeping. now the good parts of this are the service is tightly controlled and there is only one of them , so usually this is the reason why battery life is affected (i.e. when you have say a htc sense device with like 8 extra BS htc services , they all do use some cpu even just sitting there doing nothing). now what sucks about this is its much more annoying as a dev to setup APNS plus it is "fire and forget" apple has no acknowledgements or timeouts or anything if say your packets get lost. I have heard windows phone 7 works in this way too , but windows 7 phone is dead anyway so who cares (ok i kid i kid ahhahaha)


so now , the thing is, using APNS on apple doesn' ti dont think save data. just the amount of data used for an APNS push is probably smaller than having 8 different services using whatever data formats every app uses to get pushed data. but generally apps would so something like, get an Apple push notification packet , the APNS wakes up the app, then the app does a pull anyway. so i dont think it really uses less data because of push vs pull, just that the devs have to use less data during the push part because of the apple push service's limited data format.

 

[you2]

Hum. One thing that I'm not clear about is why (on andriod) a proper written app that is waiting for data would use cpu time? (this is a question). I have not programmed for andriod; but I have programmed for linux and java; and in both cases you can wait for I/O and be suspended until the I/O arrives at which time the process is 'woken' up by the kernel. I could see ways that the andriod layer might not be efficient about this (but those are implementation details that coudl be fixed in andriod).
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Anyways is the issue with poorly written andriod apps; or a core inefficiency in the andriod api ?

 

[hans007]

Hum. One thing that I'm not clear about is why (on andriod) a proper written app that is waiting for data would use cpu time? (this is a question). I have not programmed for andriod; but I have programmed for linux and java; and in both cases you can wait for I/O and be suspended until the I/O arrives at which time the process is 'woken' up by the kernel. I could see ways that the andriod layer might not be efficient about this (but those are implementation details that coudl be fixed in andriod).
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Anyways is the issue with poorly written andriod apps; or a core inefficiency in the andriod api ?

i think some of them are just extremely poorly written.

i know the company i work for had a consulting company write our android / iphone apps, and we have another consulting company maintaining them.

given most companies do not have in house devs and had to rush things to market i'd assume a lot of apps are written the same way. it is very hard to hire android poeple in general.

i have only written a few apps in my spare time, and looking at the code the consultants wrote i can tell you , uh it is not so great. and writing services takes some though. some apps do not really waste any power having the service running, but i remember the original ebay app for example was god awful on android if you had its service running. its a lot better now... i figure consulting companies freelance consultants have had quite a bit more time to get familiar with iOS programming so it might just be a matter of that. not to mention the programming guides apple puts out (though not exactly great) are still a lot better than the ones google used to put out (they have been getting better but still they are worse)

 

[BrandonT]

Am I the only one not looking forward to ICS update on my Epic Touch 4G due to the way smaller font? The font is already tiny on a phone, this can't be step forward for those with eyes like mine or older people. Will there be a way to change this?

And I see the keyboard buttons are smaller, which isn't going to help me fat fingering it, and I don't even have fat fingers! From Anand's comments I wonder how much time he spent with a Moto Android phone versus Samsung, because I had a Bionic for 2 weeks before sending it back (Verizon service sucks) and going to Sprint, and one thing I noticed was how much smoother the Bionic was for touch action, and how well the keyboard captured my typing without mistakes. A lot of things he says are improved with ICS seem to me to be more of a Samsung issue. The Bionic was pretty slick in the short time I had it, even the orientation sensor worked quickly and accurately, the Samsung is a little laggier.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

Am I the only one not looking forward to ICS update on my Epic Touch 4G due to the way smaller font? The font is already tiny on a phone, this can't be step forward for those with eyes like mine or older people. Will there be a way to change this?

And I see the keyboard buttons are smaller, which isn't going to help me fat fingering it, and I don't even have fat fingers! From Anand's comments I wonder how much time he spent with a Moto Android phone versus Samsung, because I had a Bionic for 2 weeks before sending it back (Verizon service sucks) and going to Sprint, and one thing I noticed was how much smoother the Bionic was for touch action, and how well the keyboard captured my typing without mistakes. A lot of things he says are improved with ICS seem to me to be more of a Samsung issue. The Bionic was pretty slick in the short time I had it, even the orientation sensor worked quickly and accurately, the Samsung is a little laggier.

There are font size settings in ICS

 

[sygyzy]

Fyi betterbatterystat app is free if you get it from XDA. You have to pay if you download at the Android market. That said if you use it and find it helpful, you should buy the app to support the developer.

6% drain an hour is totally unacceptable.

Do I need to be rooted to use the XDA version? I downloaded both 1.5.0.0 and 1.5.1.0 to my GN LTE and it says it can't open either file. Yes, I have "install non-Market apps" checked in the security settings.

 

[rh71]

any way to disable verizon backup assistant? Other than resetting and choosing not to use it.

 

[trmiv]

any way to disable verizon backup assistant? Other than resetting and choosing not to use it.

Go to Apps>All. Find the VZ Backup Assistant, click on it then hit Disable.

 

[destrekor]

Do I need to be rooted to use the XDA version? I downloaded both 1.5.0.0 and 1.5.1.0 to my GN LTE and it says it can't open either file. Yes, I have "install non-Market apps" checked in the security settings.

What is the file extension?

And from what app are you trying to open/run the file?

 

[sygyzy]

What is the file extension?

And from what app are you trying to open/run the file?

.apk and I click it from the downloads app

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

[ponyo]

.apk and I click it from the downloads app

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

I just download it to test and it installed and ran fine. I uninstalled it since I have no need for the app.

 

[destrekor]

.apk and I click it from the downloads app

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

Use a different file manager, Downloads might not have the necessary handling methods for apks.

Perhaps root is required for sideloading... I'm not entirely sure. I didn't think so...

If you haven't tried another File Manager, do that first.

 

[cyclistca]

For those that have a Nexus how is it for talking? I'm concerned about the sound quality and the form factor. I tried holding it at BB and I can not imagine holding it for an hour call.

 

[Spoooon]

For those that have a Nexus how is it for talking? I'm concerned about the sound quality and the form factor. I tried holding it at BB and I can not imagine holding it for an hour call.

I don't have any problems with it, though the longest call I've had was around 25-30 minutes.

 

[trmiv]

For those that have a Nexus how is it for talking? I'm concerned about the sound quality and the form factor. I tried holding it at BB and I can not imagine holding it for an hour call.

It's fine for me. I don't often make hour long calls on my cell phone though. If I'm on a longish call at home I just use the speakerphone, but I'd do that even with a small phone.

 

[rh71]

it's the same as any other smartphone in my opinion. You're talking to a brick, it's only weird if you've never done it before.

 

[KillerCharlie]

Here's my review after using the nexus for a week:

Good:

-phone fits absolutely great in pocket

-screen is beautiful

Bad:

-battery life could be better. For longer use (during a multi-hour trip) I might use an external battery.

-The phone is uncomfortable to hold against my ear (the plastic bezel/frame sticks up a bit) Does anyone have this problem?

-The biggest issue I'm having is call quality. Everything sounds slightly garbled and distorted. When I left my voice greeting for google voice it sounds the same way. This happened when I briefly tried Verizon 2 years ago. Does anyone else have this? I could live with this but I don't know if I can accept this call quality. I might return the phone because of this. I have a feeling it's not the phone but Verizon in general. However they have a really great network in this area so I'm a bit confused

 

[azazyel]

Got my Nexus this weekend and have really enjoyed it. I got one for my g/f as well and she was really impressed. What was nice is that she had a blackberry and since she had a gmail address, gmail had synced all her contacts so right when she turned on the phone all of her contacts were on the new phone.

 

[Soapy Bones]

I have not had any issues at all with call quality. In fact, I think the quality and clarity is even better with the Nexus than it was with my original Droid. There is no feedback or static at all and its perfectly clear. Others have stated its really clear on their end too.
I bought the case recommended above from Amazon and the extended battery finally came from Verizon. This phone really is the perfect package. The case/battery looks and feels great and it really is ready to go.