Google Announces New Nexus Smartphone and Tablets

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."

Comments

Booyah!!

[erroneus]

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.

Re:Still no microSD?

[clutch110]

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.

Re:Ugh, Pentile displays

[Enderandrew]

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.