04/01/2012, 03:44 AM
The Galaxy Nexus I ordered back in mid December arrived today, a few hours ago.
As this is actually my first ever phone (much less anything Android), have been hoping to discover a lot of new stuff.
Firstly, the size of the screen was a little less than I had expected - I thought there'd be more noticeable a difference between the PSP's 4.3in and this 4.65in screen, but really, unless you line them up, they look about the same size.
However, the size of the overall device is much smaller and lighter, and feels pretty good in a pocket (unlike the PSP-1000 which has a fair amount of bulk) - I'd probably feel comfortable having this in my pocket all day.
The device doesn't seem to power on plugged into mains power without a battery (unlike PSP) though I guess, since the battery isn't exactly easy to switch out, it's probably not that much of an issue.
One thing I did find a bit disturbing was that there's no form of charging LED, neither is there really any indication when charging is complete. Well, the screen does turn on momentarily to say it's charging, but that's it.
Only later discovered that you had to hold down the power button to turn on the device (which gives more info about charging).
This phone doesn't come with any pouch, protector or otherwise. It would be nice if the initial plastic film stuck on the screen didn't have any text - that way you could actually use it as a screen protector. For a $700 device, I would've thought that including a $1 pouch/protector shouldn't be too much to ask >_>
For the software, I'm a bit dismayed at the lack of settings available, although I guess it is meant to be dumbed down for casual users.
Me being familiar with desktops made me realise that having no tooltips or right-click menu (or a "?" contextual help button) can make figuring out some things difficult...
Took me a while to figure out how to set up the ADB USB drivers, but once done, you can install apps without going through the market. Speaking of which, it's somewhat annoying that finding .apk files isn't always easy. I guess apps generally aren't big, but then, I have a limited wireless data cap...
The music player looks neat from my quick test, mainly the fact that it can be controlled from the notifications area, but haven't tried it much yet.
Having a 720p screen, had to try some videos, but this seemed to be a bit problematic.
Stuck a 720p MKV, H.264 High@L4.1 video, which played back, but was really laggy.
As Youtube 720p uses H.264 in High@L3.1 (from memory), I tried that, but same result. Then tried Baseline@L3.0 and still lagged.
Suspecting that the software decoder was kicking in, I looked at CPU usage, but it was pretty low, so weird... Tried mVideoPlayer but same result.
Then tried muxing into MP4 and it seems to play back fine. Weird that Android doesn't like MKV (not to mention that it doesn't support MKV header compression at all, which is enabled by default in mkvmerge).
Now for a custom video player, most don't seem to hide the on-screen menu buttons of Android 4.0, so I'm guessing they just need to be updated. Out of the ones I tried, MX Video Player was the only one which had the functionality. Although a decent player (certainly better than stock), it seems to be a fair bit less flexible than I had imagined. My main wishes would be that touch-to-pause wouldn't always invoke the ICS on-screen menu buttons regardless of where you touch, and perhaps customisability of the player buttons (I would never use the next/previous video buttons - would prefer to have some sort of 'jump forward/backward 5 secs' button instead).
Browser also seems to be less flexible than I had imagined. I'm supposing the default browser is Chrome-like, so not surprised at its lack of options, but Firefox Mobile seems to be in a similar league (unless you want to trawl through about:config). I suppose that add-ons may help rectify the latter, but have yet to try.
Doesn't seem to be much of a method of controlling an app's permissions (eg control whether they have network access or not). Quick search shows that Cyanogenmod can do it? but doesn't support the Galaxy Nexus yet.
Not all apps seem to have a quit functionality, and I'm not sure how to exactly quit from these. One would assume that pressing the Back button would close it, but it seems to still be running if you look at the Apps section under Settings (and Force Stop there seems to be the only way to close it).
Perhaps it's time I looked into custom ROMs.
Back to playing around with the device...
As this is actually my first ever phone (much less anything Android), have been hoping to discover a lot of new stuff.
Firstly, the size of the screen was a little less than I had expected - I thought there'd be more noticeable a difference between the PSP's 4.3in and this 4.65in screen, but really, unless you line them up, they look about the same size.
However, the size of the overall device is much smaller and lighter, and feels pretty good in a pocket (unlike the PSP-1000 which has a fair amount of bulk) - I'd probably feel comfortable having this in my pocket all day.
The device doesn't seem to power on plugged into mains power without a battery (unlike PSP) though I guess, since the battery isn't exactly easy to switch out, it's probably not that much of an issue.
One thing I did find a bit disturbing was that there's no form of charging LED, neither is there really any indication when charging is complete. Well, the screen does turn on momentarily to say it's charging, but that's it.
Only later discovered that you had to hold down the power button to turn on the device (which gives more info about charging).
This phone doesn't come with any pouch, protector or otherwise. It would be nice if the initial plastic film stuck on the screen didn't have any text - that way you could actually use it as a screen protector. For a $700 device, I would've thought that including a $1 pouch/protector shouldn't be too much to ask >_>
For the software, I'm a bit dismayed at the lack of settings available, although I guess it is meant to be dumbed down for casual users.
Me being familiar with desktops made me realise that having no tooltips or right-click menu (or a "?" contextual help button) can make figuring out some things difficult...
Took me a while to figure out how to set up the ADB USB drivers, but once done, you can install apps without going through the market. Speaking of which, it's somewhat annoying that finding .apk files isn't always easy. I guess apps generally aren't big, but then, I have a limited wireless data cap...
The music player looks neat from my quick test, mainly the fact that it can be controlled from the notifications area, but haven't tried it much yet.
Having a 720p screen, had to try some videos, but this seemed to be a bit problematic.
Stuck a 720p MKV, H.264 High@L4.1 video, which played back, but was really laggy.
As Youtube 720p uses H.264 in High@L3.1 (from memory), I tried that, but same result. Then tried Baseline@L3.0 and still lagged.
Suspecting that the software decoder was kicking in, I looked at CPU usage, but it was pretty low, so weird... Tried mVideoPlayer but same result.
Then tried muxing into MP4 and it seems to play back fine. Weird that Android doesn't like MKV (not to mention that it doesn't support MKV header compression at all, which is enabled by default in mkvmerge).
Now for a custom video player, most don't seem to hide the on-screen menu buttons of Android 4.0, so I'm guessing they just need to be updated. Out of the ones I tried, MX Video Player was the only one which had the functionality. Although a decent player (certainly better than stock), it seems to be a fair bit less flexible than I had imagined. My main wishes would be that touch-to-pause wouldn't always invoke the ICS on-screen menu buttons regardless of where you touch, and perhaps customisability of the player buttons (I would never use the next/previous video buttons - would prefer to have some sort of 'jump forward/backward 5 secs' button instead).
Browser also seems to be less flexible than I had imagined. I'm supposing the default browser is Chrome-like, so not surprised at its lack of options, but Firefox Mobile seems to be in a similar league (unless you want to trawl through about:config). I suppose that add-ons may help rectify the latter, but have yet to try.
Doesn't seem to be much of a method of controlling an app's permissions (eg control whether they have network access or not). Quick search shows that Cyanogenmod can do it? but doesn't support the Galaxy Nexus yet.
Not all apps seem to have a quit functionality, and I'm not sure how to exactly quit from these. One would assume that pressing the Back button would close it, but it seems to still be running if you look at the Apps section under Settings (and Force Stop there seems to be the only way to close it).
Perhaps it's time I looked into custom ROMs.
Back to playing around with the device...
don't have one myself...