First impressions:
- Light (I'mm afraid im going to break it compared to my DroidX)
- Fast internet (4G is crazy. 22mb down, 19mb up on my last test)
- Fast performance, but still some of the classic android lag, such as coming back to the homescreen from an app - widgets take .3 seconds to reload (vs several seconds on my DX on occasion)
- The auto brightness kinda sucks, its really bright outside, but SUPER dim inside.
- Battery life sucked hard yesterday. Lasted about 4 hours, but I had done some video chatting via gtalk and about an hour worth of navigation - and lots of app installing. Today I am going to leave it connected to the wifi at work and see if its any improvement (vs using 4G)
- Uses the same power cables as the DX!
- I have seen only a handful of app compatibility problems, which I am sure will be fixed in time. Some apps crash unexpectedly, or their graphics look a little fuzzy because they weren't designed for such a high res screen.
- Camera is super crazy fast, and the pictures seem to be okay so far. Better than my DX, but certainly not on par with a standard point and shoot camera.
So what's changed after 5 days?
So the battery life isn't fantastic- with lite to moderate I am seeing about 9/10 hours of battery life. Lite for me is:
- Lives in my pocket for most of the day.
- Take it out every once and awhile to check email, Twitter, Facebook.
- Take it out when-ever it vibrates due to a notification (maybe once every hour?).
Moderate for me is (differences underlined):
- Lives in my pocket for most of the day.
- Take it out every once and awhile to check email, Twitter, Facebook.
- Take it out when-ever it vibrates due to a notification (maybe once every hour?).
- Google Reader browsing in the morning while walking the dog (30 minutes).
- A couple 15 minute internet surfing sessions.
- One or two 30 minute phone calls.
- 1-3 photos taken.
- A few Google Talk conversations throughout the day.
- One or two Google Maps lookups.
Unfortunately I decided to watch Netflix while at the gym this morning - the battery dropped about 20% in 40 minutes. (Outlined in green below - note that I left it off the charger all night long, and started using it around 60% charge.). Granted, I have auto-brightness disabled and the screen is set to about 60% brightness. (I find that the auto-brightness setting really sucks, tending to make the screen too dark).Issues that I am currently having...
The speaker volume
The speaker volume on this thing is horrible. On the scale of 1 to 10, its max volume seems to be stuck on 2. There are various threads on the internet discussing this, and it seems that installing Volume+ seem's to help a great deal (albeit still not perfect).
I purchased Volume+ - but there's a free version available to try it out. The free version is limited to +4 for amplification, but you can still tell the difference (its difficult).
Here's what I did: start playing an mp3 in music player, open Volume+ and slowly increment the speaker volume setting... you will notice that +4 is quite a bit louder than the default max volume of the device. The paid version let's you tweak the max volume a lot more, but anything above +9 seems to have no effect.
You can get Volume+ here. (FYI: You can get the paid version for free from the author's website)
Application crashes / compatibility
For the most part, applications designed for Gingerbread (2.3) seem to be running fine on ICS - but I have encountered a few apps that don't.
- Facebook. Love it or hate it, it's still an important application for the platform to have. Works most of the time on ICS, but sometimes crashes with a black screen when resuming from the background.
- Calendar Snooze. I think the calendar reminders in Android leave a lot to be desired, thankfully Calendar Snooze exists - but its not compatible. I have reached out to the author, an ICS beta is available and an update is coming soon. (The beta seems to work perfectly on my Nexus)
Battery life: How about 3G only?
I tried disabling LTE and using only 3G for a day - but its hard to get an accurate usage graph since my phone gets plugged in often throughout the course of a day for development.
So instead I have a graph of the phone mostly idle sitting on my kitchen counter over night unplugged. Outlined in green is approximately the time during which I was sleeping. Notice the dip in battery life right when I got up in the morning?
I took this screenshot about 2 hours ago - the battery is at roughly 20% now.
So what do I have running in the background?
I do have 3 email accounts, TweetDeck (every 15-30 minutes), Facebook, and a weather widget (Beautiful Widgets) running. GMail is the only one making the battery usage list (not shown), at a hefty 2%
Note: This is the standard battery, but I do have the extended battery on order.
In summary..
Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is simply amazing. I don't think I could ever go back to a pre-4.0 build of Android.
There are so many nice touches, simple things like it "knowing" that I really like to upload pictures from the gallery to Dropbox, so Dropbox is one of two choices available immediately. (You can get to the others by touching the tripple colon).
The phone isn't that bad either, and I havent had any of the 4G issues on Verizon that others are reporting. Sure the battery life could be better, but thats the case with any smart phone.
My biggest issue is definitely the volume - fingers crossed that a software fix can remedy this.
