Galaxy Nexus

As I wrote in my last post I left Sprint for SimpleMobile a few months ago. The first phone I purchased was an unlocked Motorola Atrix. It was an excellent phone, except for all the unnecessary crapware that both Motorola and AT&T installed on top of Android.

MotoBLUR was such a complete clusterf**k that I cannot even begin to describe. Motorola’s adding another layer of icing to the Android experience was both poorly thought and poorly executed. Actually, the Sense UI on my EVO 4G wasn’t bad, but Sprint also added several crappy applications especially background processes that made the phone much slower than it was after rooting. Okay, so both my EVO 4G, and my Atrix 4G were pretty sluggish before rooting. After rooting and installing basic Android ROMs both phones were much faster.  So what if I bought a phone that didn’t have all of that carrier bloat and all those unnecessary applications?

A few weeks ago I wrote about Windows 8 and the impending backlash because Microsoft is developing, building, and selling their own tablet. Well that backlash is both real and well documented, but it has a lot to do with the same reasons that are wreaking havoc in the Android world. Once upon a time cellular phones were a lot more problematic than they are now. There were fewer standards, less interoperability, and there was that thing that few remember called Y2K. To deal with these challenges the carriers had to hire and maintain large staffs for testing and quality assurance.

Some years later these entrenched departments became unnecessary, however none of them saw it this way because they wanted to keep their jobs. First Blackberry, then Apple, and finally Google had made these steps superfluous. The software was smart enough to do this for the carriers. All those Executive VPs and Directors liked there jobs so they came up with bad science and big spreadsheets to rationalize their work. Unfortunately that also meant they had to do something. So now we have crapware and UI “improvements” invading our phones the same way that they invaded our desktops.

I ordered my Galaxy Nexus online from the Google Play store. The entire purchase took three minutes, and the phone was shipped to me overnight, and I signed for it. Unboxing was ridiculously simple and I charged the phone to 100% before I inserted the SIM card. The charging time helped. I used that hour to make sure my photos, music, and sundry was all backed up.

The Nexus lacks an SD card slot, but that isn’t a flaw. I think that the 16GB of internal memory are more than sufficient. Especially considering that Google Music and Google Video are cloud services. Having a huge bucket of internal memory is less important now than it used to be. Honestly, since 16GB SD cards became commercially available I have never had more than about 10GB of media on any phone. I doubt my habits will change much moving forward.

When I booted the phone for the first time I was asked to sign into my wireless network before signing into Google. Then I signed into Google and we were off. SimpleMobile does require a few minutes of additional manual programming for network and MMS access. Fortunately I could wait on that while my phone did the Android update dance. Once all of the standard applications were updated I added my personal applications; SwiftKey, Evernote, Kindle, BeyondPod, Astrid Tasks, AirDroid, Shazam, Tumblr, and Pocket. I also install pretty much all of the Google Android extras like Goggles, Translate, Reader, Chrome, Voice, Google+, Drive, and Shopper.

So getting everything signed in, updated, installed, and syncing took about an hour and then I got to play. This phone feels incredibly fast, fast, fast. Fast screen switching, fast animations, fast touchscreen. Even the Camera is great for my purposes and takes quick pictures. Searching and connecting seems fast for a 3G phone. WiFi speeds seemed about twice what I was used to.  Everything about this phone seems clean and fast. Google Now takes a little learning, but one you have the hang of it seems very nice. It makes me wonder what the next few iterations will feel like. Did I mention it was fast, okay, just checking.

The Tech rumor machine is now predicting five Nexus phones from different manufacturers in the pipeline for 2013. Once people start to see the utility of an unmuddied Android phone I think that the Nexus ideal will become the de facto user choice in the Android world. Just like I think that the Microsoft Windows Tablet will be a huge leap forward in the Windows user experience.

You can buy the Galaxy Nexus at the Google Play store. Buying it anywhere else just doesn’t make sense, but buy it. This is the best phone I have ever owned.