Damn it Google. I thought I could count on you not to mess this up. I want to be able to tell my mom that she should get a galaxy nexus and not have to worry. Now I have to track down a GSM edition from abroad that has a particular software build on it? You're not making this very easy.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. This is exactly what you should do. Rewarding the current system Google has by removing bloatware from a damn phone (a crazy concept to begin with) and spending extra to get a phone that updates in a timely fashion is horrible.
I guarantee you, your mom could not care less about whatever qualms you may have with Apple. She would much prefer the phone that can run everything you expect it to run, gets timely updates and doesn't come full of bloatware. Giving her an Android device when you know it's not right for the job is like giving her a Bible when she asks for a specific cheesy book. Whatever the reasons you don't like the book, you're just pushing your preferences on her over what you know she would prefer.
My mom has been an Android user for almost three years now. She doesn't want to switch. She wants a new phone and she wants it to be mostly like her old one, i.e. the unadulterated Nexus One.
She comes to me for recommendations. I want to recommend her the Galaxy Nexus, but I don't see how I can. The iPhone is not an option. Hence my frustration.
She picked Android three years ago of her own volition without you pushing it on her, yet she owns a Nexus One, a phone almost exclusively purchased by geeks?
I somehow doubt that.
> she comes to me for recommendations
Then you know exactly who to blame for your current predicament.
The fact that if I buy a 64 GB iPhone, then I have to dedicate half of my 128 GB Macbook Pro's SSD just to keep a duplicate of the media on the iPhone (iTunes Library) that I only use on the phone - is a total deal-breaker for me as far as iPhone goes.
Another absolute deal-breaker is that I don't have a credit card - for online stuff I use debit cards from Payoneer and Moneybookers - and these are not accepted by the iTunes shop, and I won't bother with gift certificates.
So Android it is.
I also love the fact that as a C and Java coder, I can easily change every single thing in the system, should I really want to (OK except the baseband and few other things).
All things considered, I think Google is doing extremely good.
I love this. We all know he doesn't actually want to change the filesystem, won't do so, and frankly can't. However, Google's marketing and public line insists that he can, so he can, and this erroneous belief actually helps shape his purchasing decision.
This is a good lesson to keep in mind when encountering programmer-types that are arrogant enough to insist they are never swayed by marketing. Truth is, very little marketing targets them. When it does, it works just as effectively as it does with everyone else.
I've compiled AOSP from source and use that on my phone. In that case, I have the ability to change everything. The only barrier to this (since there are lots of good downloadable variants of this technique, like CyanogenMod) is being able to flash a new firmware on your phone. In many cases, this is explicitly supported (the Nexus One was a good example), and in the other cases, it's very easy to bypass the carrier's attempt at locking you out of your phone. As long as people keep paying the lowest bidder to write critical software in C, you'll be able to install whatever you want on your phone :)
The fact that if I buy a 64 GB iPhone, then I have to dedicate half of my 128 GB Macbook Pro's SSD just to keep a duplicate of the media on the iPhone
i don't understand, are you really complaining that there's a 64gb iphone? compared to the 32gb that comes with the galaxy nexus or the measly non-expandable 16gb that came with the nexus s? you can use icloud to store all of your media on apple's servers if you want, you don't ever have to sync it to a computer.
that I only use on the phone
you never play music on your computer?
conversely, try actually synching music from a computer to an android phone. how do you do it? you need some 3rd party apps and none of the solutions are as seamless as how itunes does it with wifi sync to an iphone (i say that as someone that has had many android phones and written android mp3 synching utilities).
No, I'm not complaining about the 64 GB, that's a good thing. What I meant is that the only way to put media on iPhone is iTunes on my Mac with 100% image of the media, which takes precious SSD space.
I wasn't up to date with the iCloud, I'm still running 3GS with iOS 3 (jailbroken with probably more functionality than iOS 5), so that's good to know. Although I'm not sure I want Apple to know (and by definition, sell) the information about all my media, by storing it to iCloud.
Btw. the problem is not to get media to iPhone, I can do that via SCP, the problem is getting them included in the iTunes library on the phone, so that they can be played "natively" using the iPod app.
On Android, there's plenty of ways to do this, AFAIK.
I have a pretty big media collection and 512GB drive on my laptop, so I keep my iTunes library on a external drive. This allows me to have it on a RAID.
This is a ridiculous complaint. Transferring 64GB of music to an iOS device and then regaining that space is quite simple, and about one or two steps more than the equivalent action with an Android device.
Check the little box in iTunes that says "Manually manage music and videos". Drag your 64GB of music into iTunes. Drag the music from the iTunes library to your iOS device in the sidebar. Delete the entries from iTunes, delete the music from your SSD. Done and done. You seem to believe the media has to exist in perpetuity on the computer the iOS device is synced to. This is not the case, and has never been for either traditional iPods or iOS devices.
iPods and iOS devices are built on the sync model and don't use regular mass storage, so you need to use iTunes to interact with them. This has upsides and downsides, but if you wish to simply drag music to the device and then delete it from the source you can definitely do that with an iOS device.
On an Android device, you can download 64GB of music from the device and get it into the media player, but nobody is going to actually do that. Also, plenty of people carry Android devices and iPod touches as media players so I don't think this aspect is enough to make the Android media player a convincing sell over the iOS one. IMO the fact that Android uses a Linux filesystem and therefore forces me to use the Android File Transfer Utility on my Mac to copy anything to the device is 1000x more annoying than any issues I've encountered with iTunes.
Syncing music (in fact, any file) has to be the easiest thing on Android:
1) plug in via USB
2) copy files
3) unplug
I do not want to install any software to do syncs, so this is the way I want it to be. What value could syncing software add? Not much except maybe if you have many duplicates in your music collection.
File system access via USB will work on any computer with a USB port.
It's not a bad decision on Samsung's part, though. USB mass storage sucks because the computer and the phone can't use the storage at the same time. MTP is a standardized protocol for handling this sort of situation cleanly, and so it doesn't seem like a bad choice to use it. Also, it's hard to find ext3 drivers for Windows and OS X, so mass storage is rarely what users want anyway.
i don't understand, are you really complaining that there's a 64gb iphone? compared to the 32gb that comes with the galaxy nexus or the measly non-expandable 16gb that came with the nexus s? you can use icloud to store all of your media on apple's servers if you want, you don't ever have to sync it to a computer.
He's complaining about how iTunes works. No iTunes, no iPhone. Also, you can backup Android applications to an SD card very easily. A 16GB MicroSD card, probably enough for many people's needs, is only $15 these days.
Google also offers iCloud like syncing, and have for a longer time than Apple. And, you have a choice of cloud providers; use either Amazon or Google to store your music, if you're in to that sort of thing.
try actually synching music from a computer to an android phone
I use rsync. You can also use cp. cp is included in the default install of pretty much every real OS around these days, so you can copy music to your phone without installing any software. Amazing, isn't it...
He's complaining about how iTunes works. No iTunes, no iPhone. Also, you can backup Android applications to an SD card very easily. A 16GB MicroSD card, probably enough for many people's needs, is only $15 these days.
except the galaxy nexus has no microsd card expansion, just like the nexus s.
I'll make a deal with you. If you don't put flash or animations in your ads then I won't try to block them.
For Verizon and Google: let me remove bloatware from your phones, or I won't buy them. Pity; I was actually going to look into the Galaxy Nexus whenever it comes out.
So...if the ads are so unobtrusive that you don't see them then you won't block them?
More than a third of my current income is derived from "interstitials": After you play the game for a while, you have to watch something to continue. You don't like that, you buy the game (for a dollar!) and you get no ads. THAT's the deal. You don't like it, you don't play the game.
It's not meant to be. Google has sold their users down the river, including letting Verizon disable Wallet, in exchange for a piece of the action in mobile. So they can keep having a relevant platform for their ads.
It's been a mostly sharp move, but it wasn't done for reasons of user experience. And it shows with stuff like this. I wish they would take a harder line – enforce higher standards, fight the good fight on NFC. But that's not what they're after. Every phone that ships without Android, or a Google-free flavor of Android, is one more point where they can be left out in the cold when something like Siri comes along.
So as long as they can get most of what they want from these manufacturing partners, they'll take it.
This. User experience is not a real driver for Android, and never has been. It only has to be "good enough". It's open, which I applaud. But you are overly optimistic if you thought publicly traded billion+ dollar carriers and manufacturers weren't eventually going to subvert this.
If I understand correctly, the premiere Google handset is not going to ship with a premiere Google product. In fact, with Google's acquiescence it is going to be actively blocked. Google will bow down to carriers in an effort to maximize their ad dollars.
The problem isn't that Google is letting carriers (and hardware manufacturers) mess with Android -- they were always free to make Android phones with bloatware and restrictions. What Google (supposedly?) did here that was destructive was let them them mess with a Nexus branded Android phone.
No matter how you slice it, marketing value will be lost if this story is true because this will cause the Nexus tag to mean nothing to those who it was originally created to court.
I think it really depends on what "this story" is. If the story is that there are local variations on the Galaxy Nexus, well, duh, of course there are! At the very least there will localization differences, regulatory differences (e.g. WiFi channels allowed) and the like, even for a Nexus.
To me, the real question is whether or not anything has changed about the defining attributes of a Nexus phone:
(a) prompt updates
(b) "fastboot oem unlock"
Note: I'd add "no bloatware" but given the controversy over the Verizon apps and having come across a developer who considered Gmail bloat (on an Android phone!), I've given up on having a meaningful discussion about it.
I don't understand why Wallet is a big deal. For users, it wouldn't be much of a difference from Isis. How is this selling users down t he river? What exactly is the good fight on NFC?
Every phone that ships without Android, or a Google-free flavor of Android, is one more point where they can be left out in the cold when something like Siri comes along.
What does this even mean? Google-free? Show me an Android phone on the market that's Google-free. And, at least as far as I can tell, Siri seems to have been a dud. I certainly don't know anyone that uses it regularly, and I don't know anyone who uses it at all for anything other than simple voice commands, which are not really Sir's value prop.
So as long as they can get most of what they want from these manufacturing partners, they'll take it.
Manufacturing partners? This is about Verizon, isn't it?
I also wish that Google would take a harder stance on stuff like the Nexus experience, and UI consistency, and update frequency. But I don't really see what Google is bargaining with here. What can they withhold from Verizon at this point?
EDIT: I know one person who uses Siri regularly. His name is Nicholas. He seems like a pretty nice guy. A bit snarky.
It's apparently messier than that --- the imported GSM phones are showing up with several different builds, only one of which is the official Google version. (And some of the variant builds are not getting official Google updates, most notably for the "volume bug" that was reported on early shipped units.)
It seems to be possible to reflash the official Google build onto units that shipped with some of the variants (some xda-forum posters have reported success), but it might pay to wait a few days for this to settle out before ordering if you're really worried about this.
I have an imported GSM Galaxy Nexus. It updated itself to ITL41F which, to my understanding, is the build that fixes the volume bug. Out of curiosity, is there a straightforward (i.e. without unlocking the bootloader) way to check whether I have a "Google build" or a "Samsung build"?
According to the twitter conversation linked in a message here (http://twitter.theinfo.org/146020135109533696,) mysid, which is the Verizon GN is built by Google, like yakju (the Google GSM build,) and unlike yakju.+ (which are built by Samsung)
Companies in a given market sharing many of the same practices does not automatically violate the Sherman Act, nor does vertical integration by a non-monopoly or non-coercive monopoly.
Doesn't it bother you that there is only 1 retailer in the world who sells software for the iPhone? It is very possible that 3-5 years from now literally every byte of information flowing to our portable devices will be 100% controlled (or approved) by the big 3: Google, Apple and Amazon. Wintel domination pales in comparison.
P.S. In my comment above I used wireless carriers but forgot Google. In reality they all try to do the same thing: google/apple/amazon are using the platform, while carriers are using the pipe, but in the end they all want to own the whole enchilada.
Lots of things bother me, that doesn't necessarily mean I think they should be illegal. Laws affect society as a whole, that means they should be made carefully and with restraint, and applied in the same way, because there's a lot of variation within society as to what is viewed as right or wrong.
I don't like that iOS is as closed as it is, but I do have other choices. Apple is not a monopoly, they don't control the market, they didn't make it more closed, or less consumer-friendly. On the contrary, they're directly responsible for the smartphone market's rapid advance, and a renewed focus on the needs and wants of end-users.
In other words, your call for an antitrust case against Apple, besides being a serious perversion of antitrust law, is proposing to harm Apple for the good they've done for consumers. What kind of sense does that make?
Certain markets have long been dominated by a handful of large companies. That's always been the case with telecommunications and consumer electronics, and to some extent, it will probably always be the case.
On the other hand, technological advancements, some of which came out of these very companies you're vilifying, have made it more practical for smaller players to enter markets that have had prohibitive costs of entry. It is increasing competition -- the very goal of antitrust law.
Everybody sees the danger of a few large companies controlling a market, that's why the FCC and Department of Justice have been, shall we say, less than receptive to the idea of an AT&T/T-Mobile merger. That doesn't automatically mean that those companies should be torn to shreds because some of us don't like their business model.
You are arguing against the points I did not make: I am not "vilifying" these companies, and I am not proposing they to "be torn to shreds". Paramount Pictures with other movie studios aren't evil either.
Users should be able to freely exchange software/information (which they paid for) between their devices (which they paid for).
This is all about consumer protection, not about how evil/awesome/innovative these companies are. Nobody is going to be "torn to shreds" if the practice of companies locking and controlling access to devices that don't belong to them becomes illegal.
Look, Apple selling you the phone which only runs software they approve is no different from, say, Toshiba selling you a TV which only shows FOX News, but refuses to show you the video which you bought here: https://buy.louisck.net
I disagree with none of your principles except the one that apparently says legal intervention is necessary. The walled gardens are not a secret, people are making the decision to buy these devices knowing they won't be able to do certain things. They do have other reasonable options.
This isn't fraud, and it's not a hidden problem hard for people to grasp. There's no apparent collusion to block new competitors. If the masses conclude it is intolerable, the companies will stop making money and that's the end of it. If not, it shouldn't be illegal in the first place.
If you're upset about it, well, this is a site targeted at people into startups...
So basically Google just ruined the nexus brand? It was the one constant in Android they'd created that you could supposedly rely on and they just killed it in only the third generation.
i was pretty disappointed with the nexus s as the successor to the nexus one. cheaper-feeling hardware, all plastic instead of rubber and metal, no sd-card expansion (i think that was on purpose to push google's cloud synching), no notification light, and a bigger footprint with no bigger screen resolution.
What would stop people from removing crapware that VZ enjoy crippling their phones with? I know it's not as easy to remove apps on Android than it is on iOS but still...
Here's a conversation on twitter with Jean Baptiste Queru, who works on AOSP for Google. It's not completely illuminating, but there are interesting details:
So again, what is the problem when you can "flash" the phone with the OS variant you want? I noticed there already are floating various user builds for Galaxy Nexus. I'm much more worried about the frequent hardware build quality issues that German users are reporting about so much. I hope I won't have to send mine back. Let's stay optimistic!
It sure does seem like Verizon likes to add their 2 cents to everything rather than leave it as intended. To have a clean phone without all the bloatware that Verizon adds on would be great.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadI guarantee you, your mom could not care less about whatever qualms you may have with Apple. She would much prefer the phone that can run everything you expect it to run, gets timely updates and doesn't come full of bloatware. Giving her an Android device when you know it's not right for the job is like giving her a Bible when she asks for a specific cheesy book. Whatever the reasons you don't like the book, you're just pushing your preferences on her over what you know she would prefer.
She comes to me for recommendations. I want to recommend her the Galaxy Nexus, but I don't see how I can. The iPhone is not an option. Hence my frustration.
I somehow doubt that.
> she comes to me for recommendations
Then you know exactly who to blame for your current predicament.
Ok why don't you start removing Verizon's bloatware on this Nexus phone.
This is a good lesson to keep in mind when encountering programmer-types that are arrogant enough to insist they are never swayed by marketing. Truth is, very little marketing targets them. When it does, it works just as effectively as it does with everyone else.
i don't understand, are you really complaining that there's a 64gb iphone? compared to the 32gb that comes with the galaxy nexus or the measly non-expandable 16gb that came with the nexus s? you can use icloud to store all of your media on apple's servers if you want, you don't ever have to sync it to a computer.
that I only use on the phone
you never play music on your computer?
conversely, try actually synching music from a computer to an android phone. how do you do it? you need some 3rd party apps and none of the solutions are as seamless as how itunes does it with wifi sync to an iphone (i say that as someone that has had many android phones and written android mp3 synching utilities).
I wasn't up to date with the iCloud, I'm still running 3GS with iOS 3 (jailbroken with probably more functionality than iOS 5), so that's good to know. Although I'm not sure I want Apple to know (and by definition, sell) the information about all my media, by storing it to iCloud.
Btw. the problem is not to get media to iPhone, I can do that via SCP, the problem is getting them included in the iTunes library on the phone, so that they can be played "natively" using the iPod app.
On Android, there's plenty of ways to do this, AFAIK.
Check the little box in iTunes that says "Manually manage music and videos". Drag your 64GB of music into iTunes. Drag the music from the iTunes library to your iOS device in the sidebar. Delete the entries from iTunes, delete the music from your SSD. Done and done. You seem to believe the media has to exist in perpetuity on the computer the iOS device is synced to. This is not the case, and has never been for either traditional iPods or iOS devices.
iPods and iOS devices are built on the sync model and don't use regular mass storage, so you need to use iTunes to interact with them. This has upsides and downsides, but if you wish to simply drag music to the device and then delete it from the source you can definitely do that with an iOS device.
On an Android device, you can download 64GB of music from the device and get it into the media player, but nobody is going to actually do that. Also, plenty of people carry Android devices and iPod touches as media players so I don't think this aspect is enough to make the Android media player a convincing sell over the iOS one. IMO the fact that Android uses a Linux filesystem and therefore forces me to use the Android File Transfer Utility on my Mac to copy anything to the device is 1000x more annoying than any issues I've encountered with iTunes.
1) plug in via USB 2) copy files 3) unplug
I do not want to install any software to do syncs, so this is the way I want it to be. What value could syncing software add? Not much except maybe if you have many duplicates in your music collection.
File system access via USB will work on any computer with a USB port.
except when using the galaxy nexus on a mac.
http://www.theverge.com/android/2011/11/22/2579691/galaxy-ne...
He's complaining about how iTunes works. No iTunes, no iPhone. Also, you can backup Android applications to an SD card very easily. A 16GB MicroSD card, probably enough for many people's needs, is only $15 these days.
Google also offers iCloud like syncing, and have for a longer time than Apple. And, you have a choice of cloud providers; use either Amazon or Google to store your music, if you're in to that sort of thing.
try actually synching music from a computer to an android phone
I use rsync. You can also use cp. cp is included in the default install of pretty much every real OS around these days, so you can copy music to your phone without installing any software. Amazing, isn't it...
except the galaxy nexus has no microsd card expansion, just like the nexus s.
Not that the standard ad-block techniques will work with my next app anyway, but if everyone blocked ads, there would be no more free apps. [1]
[1] Google Categorical Imperative if you're not familiar with the term.
For Verizon and Google: let me remove bloatware from your phones, or I won't buy them. Pity; I was actually going to look into the Galaxy Nexus whenever it comes out.
Seems fair all round to me.
The number one best feature of my Nexus One is that it is pure Google Experience.
I can justify the outrageous amount of money I spent on that based on the ease and frequency of OS updates.
Just when I thought I was back in, they push me back out. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPw-3e_pzqU)
More than a third of my current income is derived from "interstitials": After you play the game for a while, you have to watch something to continue. You don't like that, you buy the game (for a dollar!) and you get no ads. THAT's the deal. You don't like it, you don't play the game.
if everyone blocked ads, there would be no more free apps.
If nobody blocked ads, we'd still be bombarded with popups and flash ads on every site.
It's been a mostly sharp move, but it wasn't done for reasons of user experience. And it shows with stuff like this. I wish they would take a harder line – enforce higher standards, fight the good fight on NFC. But that's not what they're after. Every phone that ships without Android, or a Google-free flavor of Android, is one more point where they can be left out in the cold when something like Siri comes along.
So as long as they can get most of what they want from these manufacturing partners, they'll take it.
If I understand correctly, the premiere Google handset is not going to ship with a premiere Google product. In fact, with Google's acquiescence it is going to be actively blocked. Google will bow down to carriers in an effort to maximize their ad dollars.
No matter how you slice it, marketing value will be lost if this story is true because this will cause the Nexus tag to mean nothing to those who it was originally created to court.
To me, the real question is whether or not anything has changed about the defining attributes of a Nexus phone:
(a) prompt updates (b) "fastboot oem unlock"
Note: I'd add "no bloatware" but given the controversy over the Verizon apps and having come across a developer who considered Gmail bloat (on an Android phone!), I've given up on having a meaningful discussion about it.
I don't understand why Wallet is a big deal. For users, it wouldn't be much of a difference from Isis. How is this selling users down t he river? What exactly is the good fight on NFC?
Every phone that ships without Android, or a Google-free flavor of Android, is one more point where they can be left out in the cold when something like Siri comes along.
What does this even mean? Google-free? Show me an Android phone on the market that's Google-free. And, at least as far as I can tell, Siri seems to have been a dud. I certainly don't know anyone that uses it regularly, and I don't know anyone who uses it at all for anything other than simple voice commands, which are not really Sir's value prop.
So as long as they can get most of what they want from these manufacturing partners, they'll take it.
Manufacturing partners? This is about Verizon, isn't it?
I also wish that Google would take a harder stance on stuff like the Nexus experience, and UI consistency, and update frequency. But I don't really see what Google is bargaining with here. What can they withhold from Verizon at this point?
EDIT: I know one person who uses Siri regularly. His name is Nicholas. He seems like a pretty nice guy. A bit snarky.
Hi, my name's Nicholas, I use Siri regularly. Nice to meet you, Joe.
Nook & Kindle Fire are examples of Google-Free android devices, though you specified 'Phones' so I guess that excludes them.
It seems to be possible to reflash the official Google build onto units that shipped with some of the variants (some xda-forum posters have reported success), but it might pay to wait a few days for this to settle out before ordering if you're really worried about this.
http://www.xda-developers.com/android/is-the-galaxy-nexus-st...
To get the build fignerprint, use adb to cat /system/build.prop, or getprop ro.build.fingerprint
I guess it takes the selling power of the iPhone to ink a deal like that with Verizon.
We need this to happen to:
P.S. In my comment above I used wireless carriers but forgot Google. In reality they all try to do the same thing: google/apple/amazon are using the platform, while carriers are using the pipe, but in the end they all want to own the whole enchilada.
I don't like that iOS is as closed as it is, but I do have other choices. Apple is not a monopoly, they don't control the market, they didn't make it more closed, or less consumer-friendly. On the contrary, they're directly responsible for the smartphone market's rapid advance, and a renewed focus on the needs and wants of end-users.
In other words, your call for an antitrust case against Apple, besides being a serious perversion of antitrust law, is proposing to harm Apple for the good they've done for consumers. What kind of sense does that make?
Certain markets have long been dominated by a handful of large companies. That's always been the case with telecommunications and consumer electronics, and to some extent, it will probably always be the case.
On the other hand, technological advancements, some of which came out of these very companies you're vilifying, have made it more practical for smaller players to enter markets that have had prohibitive costs of entry. It is increasing competition -- the very goal of antitrust law.
Everybody sees the danger of a few large companies controlling a market, that's why the FCC and Department of Justice have been, shall we say, less than receptive to the idea of an AT&T/T-Mobile merger. That doesn't automatically mean that those companies should be torn to shreds because some of us don't like their business model.
Users should be able to freely exchange software/information (which they paid for) between their devices (which they paid for).
This is all about consumer protection, not about how evil/awesome/innovative these companies are. Nobody is going to be "torn to shreds" if the practice of companies locking and controlling access to devices that don't belong to them becomes illegal.
Look, Apple selling you the phone which only runs software they approve is no different from, say, Toshiba selling you a TV which only shows FOX News, but refuses to show you the video which you bought here: https://buy.louisck.net
This isn't fraud, and it's not a hidden problem hard for people to grasp. There's no apparent collusion to block new competitors. If the masses conclude it is intolerable, the companies will stop making money and that's the end of it. If not, it shouldn't be illegal in the first place.
If you're upset about it, well, this is a site targeted at people into startups...
> If the masses conclude it is intolerable, the companies will stop making money and that's the end of it.
so companies choose between not making money immediately, or waiting for "the masses" to get an act together and vote with their wallets? ha.
http://twitter.theinfo.org/146020135109533696