Galaxy-Nexus VS iPhone 4S ?

[Darthdingo]

I do LOVE my Galaxy Nexus, it's just the battery life sucks pretty bad.

I will say Android 4.0 ICS is the best Android has ever been, they made the Android OS very very good now. But with a 4.6" HD screen it takes up a lot of power, and 4G/LTE doesn't help either, but I usually have that off.

I may wait to see the upcoming Motorola Droid-Fighter due out in April, will be Motorola's first ICS phone, still built thin like the Razr, but with the Maxx 3300mh battery said to give 21 hours of 3G talk time.

If the 4S does not have the killer battery life, and be much longer battery life than my Nexus, then no point picking up a 4S.

I use my phone a lot during the work week. I run my own Millwork business, dealing with Developers and vendors all day. On weekdays, I can make 20 - 50 short phone calls a day...tons of texts...check e-mails...surf the web...use Navigation once or twice per day...And the Nexus dies on battery life in 6 hours easily with that kind of use, some days I can 9 - 10 hours battery if a slow work day.

Now on weekends with light use, on WiFi, sure the Nexus can two days almost easily. But with heavy business use, no way.

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Not very conclusive. If that's your experience then I understand your decision and opinion.

I get 6-7 hours of usage out of my iPhone 4s. I should say 6 - 6 hours and 59 minutes. I've never been able to get to 7 hours.

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Close as I ever got.

My og razr can do the same maybe better. It's not activated anymore so I dont have a screen shot any playing with it on wifi wouldn't be very fair.

So does that screen shot mean you got a total of almost 18 hours of battery life ? You have like 6+ hours of actual screen use, and 11+ hours of standby, meaning 18 hours total ? If so, that is twice better than my Nexus.

 

[Buildbright]

better that iOS? Syncing with social is much better (Google+ integration). Contacts app is better (high res photos within the app). Maps Navigation is there and voice turn-by-turn. Chrome syncs with Chrome desktop (bookmarks, even open tabs). Gmail is much better.
.

Social network wise Google+ is not Facebook or Twitter. I don’t use it neither do most users. But integration should be built into the App first. So if the iOS Google+ app lacks thats Googles fault. This goes for Maps too. I agree the lack of turn by turn navigation is a big minus for iOS. I think Google should be held accountable for this not iOS.

On Contacts that’s a little bit silly. I find it to be perfect for my needs and have never said I wish this picture was higher resolution. Chrome is a moot point as my Safari bookmarks sync just fine and my reading lists, and quick link bars (Tabs are coming). A majority of internet browsers do not have sync feature with both platforms; such as IE, Firefox, Opera, ect.

Gmail does not mean anything to me as I do not have a Gmail account. I do think iOS and Android both need to work on their native email clients. Just like you I think iOS has the upper hand on a lot of features. Siri (overall voice control), Push Mail (better on iOS), Security, Touchscreen Responsiveness, App Interface Quality (Found a lot of apps on Android don’t scale well on bigger devices), Battery Life, Aftermarket Accessories, iMessage (automatic and built into the text app), Built in free visual voicemail, No Bloatware (most devices have it), Unified Experience, (Sence, Touch Wiz, Blur fail), Device Resale Value, Superior Device Support and more.

Now I think iOS fails at certain things. Being too closed at times, no larger screen option on phones, not taking advantage of multiplatform Apple apps (iMessage, Facetime, iTunes content on pc), Deeper Facebook Integration (match Twitter), No haptic feedback option, and more.

I can see where it is better for you as a phone user to use Android. I am the opposite as iOS is the best for me. I hope Android and iOS stay in heavy competition to make best user experience for both of us. I am happy that Android hired Matias Duarte who has really cleaned up the interface design.

 

[mbell1975]

I agree the lack of turn by turn navigation is a big minus for iOS. I think Google should be held accountable for this not iOS.

As usual, there is an app for that. The TeleNav app is 99 cents and I actually found things in there that Google Maps didn't have. Its quite good.

 

[cynics]

I do LOVE my Galaxy Nexus, it's just the battery life sucks pretty bad.

I will say Android 4.0 ICS is the best Android has ever been, they made the Android OS very very good now. But with a 4.6" HD screen it takes up a lot of power, and 4G/LTE doesn't help either, but I usually have that off.

I may wait to see the upcoming Motorola Droid-Fighter due out in April, will be Motorola's first ICS phone, still built thin like the Razr, but with the Maxx 3300mh battery said to give 21 hours of 3G talk time.

If the 4S does not have the killer battery life, and be much longer battery life than my Nexus, then no point picking up a 4S.

I use my phone a lot during the work week. I run my own Millwork business, dealing with Developers and vendors all day. On weekdays, I can make 20 - 50 short phone calls a day...tons of texts...check e-mails...surf the web...use Navigation once or twice per day...And the Nexus dies on battery life in 6 hours easily with that kind of use, some days I can 9 - 10 hours battery if a slow work day.

Now on weekends with light use, on WiFi, sure the Nexus can two days almost easily. But with heavy business use, no way.

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So does that screen shot mean you got a total of almost 18 hours of battery life ? You have like 6+ hours of actual screen use, and 11+ hours of standby, meaning 18 hours total ? If so, that is twice better than my Nexus.

11 hours is total use. 6 hours and 59 minutes of that it was being used. Don't ask me why standby = total time.

 

[pirarre]

As usual, there is an app for that. The TeleNav app is 99 cents and I actually found things in there that Google Maps didn't have. Its quite good.

What did you find that Google Maps didnt have?

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2 Beta-4

 

[cynics]

As usual, there is an app for that. The TeleNav app is 99 cents and I actually found things in there that Google Maps didn't have. Its quite good.

Then it's 10 dollars a month. Using the trial I found it seriously lacking in features compared to google nav. Telenav would sometimes take me in pointless circles. I wouldn't recommend it to even someone I didn't like. Experiences vary I guess.

 

[Darthdingo]

OK let's wrap this up, 4S vs G Nexus for all day heavy use, who wins ?

 

[moonman239]

I just went through the same decision you are making so hopefully my comments will be relevant.

Pros:

iPhone

• Battery Life (6 hours of actual use)
• Screen Responsiveness
• Call Quality
• Notifications (Vibrate and Sound and Notification Light)
• Build Quality
• Accesories

Galaxy Nexus

• Notification Light (most missed feature for me)
• Customization (No current jailbreak for 5.1)
• Navigation

For me it was the fact that the iPhone won in my major areas of need that made me switch. Plus, once the jailbreak comes out for me it will be a wash in customization. I also use a lot of Google services but they have all always worked fine for me. It just takes more accounts on an iPhone.

Let me know if you have any further specific questions or need clarification.

I added a feature to your iPhone list. The iPhone sort of has a notification light. If you go into the Accessibility menu, the you can turn on "LED Flash for Alerts." How much different is this from the Galaxy Nexus's notification light? I haven't seen it.

 

[DodgeV83]

So so true. Even stock ics keyboard is better than iOS keyboard, much more so when you adapt to swiftkey or swype.

The iOS keyboard is actually one of the deal breakers that sent me back to nexus.

While I haven't used an Adroid device for any lengthy period of time, I have a story about someone who has.

An almost 60 year old co-worker of mine constantly complains about his onscreen keyboard on the Galaxy S II. He swears by his other phone that has a hardware keyboard, even though he prefers the Galaxy S II for all other tasks.

I handed him my iPhone 4S and asked him to try it. He grunted something like "it wont matter", but I was able to convince him. I told him to just keep typing, not to look up until he's done, and see how accurate it was. He tried on his phone first, and it was a mess.......you should've seen the shock on his face when the iPhone 4S got the message down PERFECTLY.

A week later he sent me a text saying he thinks it's because his screen is "too big". "I have to hold it at a weird angle so I can reach all of the keys while holding it". Personally, I think it's because the predictive text is better, as it seems to take context into account.

He's still quite anti-Apple, of course, but his *on-screen keyboard* complaints have since been limited to his Android phone, and not all on-screen keyboards.

 

[mbell1975]

Then it's 10 dollars a month. Using the trial I found it seriously lacking in features compared to google nav. Telenav would sometimes take me in pointless circles. I wouldn't recommend it to even someone I didn't like. Experiences vary I guess.

No its not, its $10 a year, not per month. I have been taken in pointless circles by Google as well. As for features Google Maps doesn't have...

Shake to go
Speed limit for the road you are on
Ability to search for things along the way while navi in progress
Listing of airports in the area
Ability to input two intersections to navigate to
Ability to navigate to a contact's address without having to add it first.

 

[TheBigKing]

if u know how to setup ur galaxy nexus u can get 5:30 hours on screen time with stock battery

 

[Buildbright]

As usual, there is an app for that. The TeleNav app is 99 cents and I actually found things in there that Google Maps didn't have. Its quite good.

I use the Tom Tom App and heard great things about TeleNav. I was speaking of built in Navigation which is not Apples fault Google does not offer that feature.

 

[DodgeV83]

As usual, there is an app for that. The TeleNav app is 99 cents and I actually found things in there that Google Maps didn't have. Its quite good.

I've always preferred Navigon on iOS vs anything else, as it shows up to 3 different routes, and let's you choose which one you want. I hear Google Maps on Android just got that feature, so that's a wash. The main difference then, is Navigon has the maps built-in, where Google Maps has to download them. Yes I know it can prefetch, but I've been in the car where someone took a wrong turn using one of those prefetching devices, and unfortunately had no signal to download new maps for the rest of the route...we had to switch GPSs to get to our location.

Standalone apps offer other advantages too, like showing a big photo of the exit/fork in the highway, showing you which lane to be in, or being able to explicitly search for POIs on your route (Garmin's app is the best at this).

Maybe Google Maps has all of these features already, but if you haven't tried all of the offerings you can't say you prefer Google Maps to everything the iPhone offers

 

[Darthdingo]

if u know how to setup ur galaxy nexus u can get 5:30 hours on screen time with stock battery

LOL, nope. Try making 25-30 phone calls during day...send 50+ texts...read dozen emails...use navigation...and surf the web...no stock Nexus will ever get 5.5 hours screen time with that kind of use.

 

[MattMJB0188]

I had the Galaxy Nexus on both AT&T & Verizon and quite honestly I found it to be awful. The GSM version though is much better and perhaps if AT&T had their own version my thoughts would be differrent. My only beef with the GSM version was the horrible data speeds. I couldn't get the right APN settings to work. I also was not crazy about the form factor.

The Verizon version was a total nightmare of a cell phone. The phone's signal was so bad that in an area with moderate to good coverage it was fluctuating between 0 bars and 1 bar. Data would cut in and out and calls sounded like crap. When transitioning from 4G to 3G it would take a good 4 minutes and even longer when the device is booting up. Sometimes data would go out for 15-20 minutes and forcing airplane mode would not help.

LTE speeds with Verizon were nice though. But the phone needs some serious work. IF they can fix the lag throughout the app drawer and signal issues it might actually be a very nice phone.

Do not get me wrong, I really love Android and Samsung phones; I just found this phone to be really bad in the phone department.

 

[mbell1975]

I had the Galaxy Nexus on both AT&T & Verizon and quite honestly I found it to be awful. The GSM version though is much better and perhaps if AT&T had their own version my thoughts would be differrent. My only beef with the GSM version was the horrible data speeds. I couldn't get the right APN settings to work. I also was not crazy about the form factor.

The Verizon version was a total nightmare of a cell phone. The phone's signal was so bad that in an area with moderate to good coverage it was fluctuating between 0 bars and 1 bar. Data would cut in and out and calls sounded like crap. When transitioning from 4G to 3G it would take a good 4 minutes and even longer when the device is booting up. Sometimes data would go out for 15-20 minutes and forcing airplane mode would not help.

LTE speeds with Verizon were nice though. But the phone needs some serious work. IF they can fix the lag throughout the app drawer and signal issues it might actually be a very nice phone.

Do not get me wrong, I really love Android and Samsung phones; I just found this phone to be really bad in the phone department.

Yea, just another reason why Google has shown favor towards the GSM Nexus line and pretty much cast aside the CDMA versions. The Nexus S 4G from Sprint still hasn't even been updated to ICS

 

[TheBigKing]

LOL, nope. Try making 25-30 phone calls during day...send 50+ texts...read dozen emails...use navigation...and surf the web...no stock Nexus will ever get 5.5 hours screen time with that kind of use.

i have something wrong with it mine works perfect and battery last good

 

[DakotaGuy]

With my RAZR MAXX I am going on 1 day 12 hours and still have 20% battery remaining. This is with 1 h 11 mins worth of voice calls and just over 2 hours and 20 mins of the display actually on and the phone doing something other then voice calls. The phone has remained on 4G LTE the entire time. I also streamed SiriusXM for about an hour during this charge cycle.

I wouldn't trade this phone for any other 4G Verizon phone at the present time. I love the battery life!

 

[DodgeV83]

I find it interesting that the best advantage the iPhone has, is barely being touched upon here.

The apps!

If you're trying to compare the two phones in terms of specs, you're missing 95% of the story.

The apps have really opened up the platform, from the mainstream categories like photography that rivals a DSLR (I usually leave my thousands of dollars in photography equipment at home now) and games with graphics that rival consoles, to very niche categories like sending me push notifications whenever a certain script is run on my desktop at work, connecting very specialized hardware like the Jawbone UP/iRig audio products, or wirelessly sending audio/video to my speaker system/home theatre with the push of a button.

These things simply are either completely unavailable on Android, or are so buggy and unintuative that only the most technical of us can get it working (and even then, expect to use the Force Close button a lot).

Not to mention the Apple made apps like Siri, iPhoto, iMovie, Find my Friends, Find my iPhone, iCloud, GarageBand and FaceTime.

That's what I've seen through first hand experience. Anecdotally, I've read that the Android mail apps all differ from device to device, and none of them do mail conversations well. I've read that Android devices store your email password in clear text and don't encrypt the file system when locking the phone. I've read the Android camera app doesn't have hardware video stabilization. I haven't looked up any of that though, so I'm not sure if it's accurate.

In any case, the hardware trumps all Android phones in all hardware-related benchmark tests (not browser-based tests), so I'm not even sure why hardware is being discussed:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Smartphone11/369

The only reason to get an Android device, is if you value homepage customization above everything else iOS offers, or if you don't want to spend a lot of money. Widgets have been shown to reduce both battery life and performance, but hey, some people like them.

 

[cynics]

No its not, its $10 a year, not per month. I have been taken in pointless circles by Google as well. As for features Google Maps doesn't have...

Shake to go
Speed limit for the road you are on
Ability to search for things along the way while navi in progress
Listing of airports in the area
Ability to input two intersections to navigate to
Ability to navigate to a contact's address without having to add it first.

I use it on a tablet so my experience will vary like shake to go. As for other things, you are correct on the speed limit.

Search will show me things in the my area like restaurants, gas stations, etc. you can type search airports and it will show up other things in the area.

Navigate to Pine St and Oak St will navigate to me to that intersection.

And like I mentioned I use it on a tablet that I don't have any contacts on.

Sorry I thought it was a monthly fee and while ten buck over a year isn't anything really I'm still not thrilled with reoccurring fees.

 

[cynics]

LOL, nope. Try making 25-30 phone calls during day...send 50+ texts...read dozen emails...use navigation...and surf the web...no stock Nexus will ever get 5.5 hours screen time with that kind of use.

If set up right being the keywords. They had issues with not going completely asleep and/or constantly searching for signal. Battery life is normalish if operating properly.

 

[MattMJB0188]

If set up right being the keywords. They had issues with not going completely asleep and/or constantly searching for signal. Battery life is normalish if operating properly.

Image

Love your signal. Mine pretty much looked like that all the time.

 

[Consultant]

No comparison.

From App performance to HTML5 performance, iPhone wins.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/05/apples-ios-runs-html5-games-three-times-faster-than-android/

 

[Darthdingo]

If set up right being the keywords. They had issues with not going completely asleep and/or constantly searching for signal. Battery life is normalish if operating properly.

Image

Lets see on screen time too. That is very important in regards to battery life. On weekends I can have 18+ hours of use no problem, but with only 2 hours screen time. Now with 4 hours of screen time no way you get 15 hours battery.

 

[cynics]

No comparison.

From App performance to HTML5 performance, iPhone wins.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/05/apples-ios-runs-html5-games-three-times-faster-than-android/

Hmm interesting let me check out real world results.

Iphone4s

Old slow Motorola xoom, iphone4s kills it in benchmarks.

That's weird! Old slow Android has more the double the fps?! Strange!

Now that's from within a browser but both are for easy comparison of fps. Regardless who is playing html5 games? But with ios's lack of USB hosting its a no comparison in my opinion too but not for the iPhone.