I bought the Nexus 4 shortly after it came out. I’d been living through a few bad years of the HTC Thunderbolt, which was probably the worst phone I’ve owned. Aside from being a bad phone, Verizon was extremely slow about updates for that device. I recall waiting over a year just for Android 4.0. Making a break from Verizon to a Nexus device sounded great, and having only consumed a few reviews of the Nexus 4, I made the leap.
It has been great, or at least very good. Yeah the camera is pretty much crap, and the lack of SD is annoying at times, but I don’t care. The phone is snappy, feels and looks good, and gets those wonderful, wonderful software updates oh so quickly. Combined with a sweet $30/month unlimited data T-Mobile plan, it’s been a excellent setup.
About those wonderful Android updates… Wonderful does not mean:
- Phone slows waaaay down
- Phone locks up randomly, multiple times daily, requiring hard reboots
- Bluetooth doesn’t work reliably
- Marquee new “Smart Lock” feature only occasionally works
- Phone can’t do phone things, like make/receive calls. (Seems I’m not the only one experiencing this.)
If I could just reduce the battery life to about 4 hours I’d have me a Thunderbolt all over again!
Android Lollipop is, in it current state, a huge disappoint for me, and a growing source of frustration. I have fears that Google may consider the Nexus 4 obsolete, as they do this Nexus 4 bug. But it’s not obsolete to me by a long shot. Overall it worked great, and should still be working great. I don’t want to even contemplate a new phone, nor do I have the time, patience, interest or energy to be reinstalling old images, non-stock ROMs, etc.
So please, Google, fix your damn software already.