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Google Announces New Nexus Smartphone and Tablets

Posted by samzenpus on from the brand-new dept.

TheBoat writes In with news that not even a hurricane can keep the Google product announcements away. "Surprise, surprise. It looks like Hurricane Sandy can't hold Google down, as the company has just gone ahead and unveiled the Nexus 4 smartphone and Nexus 10 tablet even though its press conference was canceled. Nexus 4 specs include a 4.7-inch True HD IPS Plus display with 1,280 x 768-pixel resolution, an 8-megapixel camera, a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2GB of RAM and Android 4.2. The phone starts at a shockingly affordable $299 without any contract or subsidies, and it will launch in the United States on November 3rd. The Samsung-built Nexus 10 tablet sports a 2,560 x 1,600-pixel display with a pixel density of 300 PPI, a dual-core 1.7GHz Samsung Exynos chipset, 2GB of RAM, NFC and a 5-megapixel camera. Pricing starts at $399 with 16GB of storage and tops out at $499 for the 32GB model, and both will launch on November 3rd alongside the Nexus 4. Both devices will be available through the Google Play store."

9 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. No Strings Attached? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    $299, no contracts, and those specs? Maybe it's time I finally paid attention to the smartphone market and finally bought one. I've not kept up though - will I have to have any kind of "google account" or "phone home to google" stuff enabled to use this phone properly? And if so, how hard would it be to jailbreak the thing and fully change that (without introducing additional issues)?

    1. Re:No Strings Attached? by Miamicanes · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The gaping hole in Android's security model is the fact that in order to have an app that fetches location-based ads over the internet, uses wi-fi (instead of GPS) for coarse location, and has the ability to pause when the phone rings or cooperate nicely with alerts and other apps, you basically have to give the app the right to do almost everything up to and including scrape your phone logs and dump them over the internet to the developer's server, then eavesdrop on your LAN's traffic and report it as well.

      I don't have time to repost the whole essay I've written a few times detailing a provider-agnostic framework for adserving that keeps apps from leaking private user info by moving responsibility by proxying the network calls to fetch the ad content through Android itself in a way that allows users to say, "I trust Android to not leak my private info, but not this specific app... I'll allow this app to treat Android's new adserver API like a semi-black box to fetch ads in a way that prevents apps from injecting values not carved into stone in android-manifest.xml, and has Android itself inject sensitive values so the app itself can't touch them, and makes the requests in non-realtime with somewhat randomized timing through Google's adproxy (or a trusted CDN, for larger advertising agencies with the resources to pay someone like Akamai) that masquerades the user's IP address (so developers can't comb through logs and match up ad requests with IP addresses).

      If Android did something like this, the laundry list of permissions that 98% of modern Android apps end up requiring could be concisely boiled down to:

      * Display anonymized, location-based ads fetched over the internet in a way that does not reveal your current IP address or personally-identifiable information to advertisers or the app's developer, and does not allow apps to use it as a back door to leak information over the internet by injecting runtime values specified by the application itself into the ad request or by varying the timing of its network requests to convey private information to a remote server.

      The requirement that values either be filled in by Android itself (in a black-box manner that keeps the values away from the app) or declared immutably via android-manifest.xml, and slightly-randomized non-realtime ad-fetching and timing is necessary to keep apps from using runtime values or timing attacks to leak information. If ads are fetched on demand by the app, the developer could modulate the request timing itself to convey one bit of data at a time, over a long period (ex: requesting new ad within 1 minute of last request == 1, requesting new ad after 2 minutes of last request == 0, requesting new ad after 3+ minutes = escape, resume as directed by the next few bits... over the span of an hour, you could leak 30-60 bits of data).

      The hard part would be making it vendor-agnostic and not handing an ad monopoly to Google, without excluding ad agencies who don't have the resources of Akamai (hence, the transparent trusted anonymizing proxy for fetching the ad data itself).

  2. Booyah!! by erroneus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I knew there was a reason I didn't buy the Samsung Galaxy S3. Among the reasons:

    1. To get it 'affordably' I would have to buy it from a wireless carrier... oh yeah and extend or buy a new contract with expensive data plan.
    2. To get it otherwise, I would have to pay about $500... that's an expensive toy.
    3. The darkest color I could get is blue...blue?! Really? Something wrong with black or grey? White is for chicks and Apple users.
    4. When you get a phone through a carrier which is carrier branded, unless it's an iPhone, then the carrier is responsible for firmware updates. In cases like that, you will either never get one or it will be extremely late in coming and will contain even more bloatware than before.

    Something told me that if I were to just hold off a little longer, I could get my next phone without all the trouble, And there we have it... A new Nexus 4 heading to my pocket in the near future.

    As for the new tablet?? Well... that's kinda pricy. I've got a Nexus 7 and I'm pretty happy with it. But then again, the price was extremely reasonable. $500?? That's well within my "balk" range... the $200-$250 range is well within my "I'll strongly consider it" window. And a phone without obligations at $299? And likely to support high speed data options (which I will not likely use or pay for)? It's a no-brainer.

  3. Re:Still no microSD? by HTMLSpinnr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm not the OP, but in my case, At least 7GB of the ~13GB available on /sdcard (partition, not actual removable media) in my Nexus S is music which I listen to on occasion - mostly in my car or on a flight. The balance (when closer to full) is pictures before transferring to local network or cloud storage or Apps installed to USB (no longer required for Nexus 4's monolothic partition), etc. Amazon MP3 with CloudDrive storage solves the balance of my music problem (you don't have to marry yourself to Google Play for everything). For most, it's simply silly to carry around your entire collection. It's unlikely you'll want all of it available, thus learning to place effective selection criteria when picking what goes to your device helps manage the size constraint.

    Personally, I'd feel constrained by 8GB, but not by 16GB once you realize that even 8GB of "music" is more than anyone needs unless they're spending a TON of time away from the balance of their library. What will put the squeeze on things are 8MP photos and full HD video. Provided I can offload my photos to cloud storage (via Wifi thanks) or home storage, I can live with this level of storage. Thus, I'll be buying the 16GB version to replace my Nexus S.

    Now if they had 32GB at $429, this would be a compelling compromise/price point, and would shut down many of the "it's too small" comments.

    --
    $ man woman *
    -bash: /usr/bin/man: Argument list too long
  4. Re:Still no microSD? by clutch110 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't think that is the main reason as Android now uses MTP to allow concurrent access to the SD card. It is my belief that one of the reasons behind the lack of any sort of SD card is the possibility of it impacting the user experience. If you put in a cheap slow SD card then the apps located there slow to a crawl. With the built in flash storage, it should run to whatever standard Google demanded. I also believe this is one of the reasons Apple refuses to include expansion capabilities, the other of course the ability to charge a huge premium on upgraded space. For the Nexus 4 the bump from 8 to 16GB is only a $50 up-charge which isn't that bad in my opinion.

  5. Re:Ugh, Pentile displays by Enderandrew · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm literally holding an iPhone 4S and Samsung S3 in my hand at the same time (work phone and personal phone).

    The S3 has the supposedly crappy pentile display, the 4S has the non-pentile display, with a higher DPI to boot.

    Yet text is far crisper and easier to read on the S3 because Apple doesn't know how to do sub-pixel hinting for reasons I can't comprehend.

    --
    http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
  6. Google Voice by jerpyro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If I order the new nexus phone with no contracts, can I activate and use it as a wifi phone without it being associated with a carrier via Google voice?
    I would gladly pay $300 for that.

  7. how much does flash cost? by farble1670 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    can someone explain this to me?

    i can buy a 32GB micro SD card for $20. that's retail. but google charges +$50 for +8GB? that, and it has to be cheaper for them to add flash internally that for me to buy a retail-packaged micro SD card?

    even assuming retail prices, they should be able to ship a 32GB version for less than $20 more, and still make the same profit on the extra memory that would otherwise be made on selling the memory retail ... ?

    i understand that they might want to milk customers here ... but if they are really trying to beat apple on prices, offering a low-priced 32 or 64GB model seems like a no-brainer.

  8. Re:Ugh, Pentile displays by VortexCortex · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, that and if you don't do any sub pixel font drawing, then you can use the same exact code in portrait and landscape. However, if your display can be tilted then the vertical and horizontal sub pixel layout is swapped. Some Pentile displays are designed to be horizontally & vertically agnostic.

    MS also has several patents on some sub-pixel rendering tricks, and although MS cross licensed them to Apple, who knows if they did so for their mobile devices? Maybe that's why you even need a high res retina display? To mask the lack of sub-pixel rendering? (can't be troubled to try and find out, ATM)