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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."
Pentile is a specific design type (ie IPS), retina is a marketing term for high resolution.
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.
Nope, it is optional. You cannot use the play store without associating the phone with the Google Account though. You could use Amazon App Store, which has most apps. You could side load apps (just copy them to the system apps folder), if you have the apk and you are rooted (I dont know of a reliable site, where you can get the apk file from though)
I don't think you need to be rooted to install APK files ... just drop them on the phone and run them.
You'll need a google account if you want to use the Google Play Store (the app market from google) but you can install the Amazon Appstore (which uses an amazon account) instead if you prefer. Otherwise no, you don't have to have a google account to use the phone. Because it's a Nexus device you should be able to unlock the bootloader in a simple process (usually as simple as checking a box in settings and rebooting) then you can flash it with any custom ROM you want. So if you don't trust the default ROM not to phone home you can use a community created one instead (and also since it's a Nexus device a community for producing these custom ROMs should grow quite fast once it's in people's hands).
All the leaks seemed to indicate the Nexus 4 would have no microSD slot, and none of the news this morning seems to contradict that. I'd pick one up in an instant if not for that fault.
My ancient Nexus One has an 8 GB microSD card in it, and that filled up ages ago. So getting the 8 GB Nexus 4 would be a non-starter, and i don't expect it would take me long to fill up the 16 GB version either. I don't care what Google says, streaming everything off the cloud is not an option. I'm happy with T-Mobile for the price i'm paying, but they don't have the best coverage. (And from what i understand other carriers that have better coverage have stricter limits on data usage instead.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
There's a bit missing in those details. $299 buys the 8GB version, and $349 buys the 16GB version. There is no 32GB version, and a CDMA/LTE version was not announced - these are solely Pentaband HSPA+ devices for now. Or... you can ultimately pay more and go T-Mobile subsidized if you can't handle that much out of pocket at once with $199 out of pocket and $20/mo in subsidies for at least 20 months (Value plan, or $20 more/mo for the plan in general over Value for 2 years if Classic plan).
$ man woman *
-bash:
http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/nexus-best-of-google-now-in-three-sizes.html
And Apple "Retina" displays are also IPS. Pentile basically means you can forget the resolution number they give. It's probably not going to look as clear as an iPad even though the resolution specs are higher.
negative. HD == 720p, which is ~1280x720px.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_television
1/2 the price of an iphone. win.
They managed to cram some awesome hardware into the Nexus 10. 2560x1600 at a $399 price point is very, very good.
But the physical design of the tablet – there's no way to sugarcoat this – is butt-ugly. Why did they have to make the bezel so huge? And asymmetrical? (I suppose that latter factor may have been a precaution against being sued by Apple.) Even though the hardware inside is great, the exterior just looks cheap. It looks like what you'd find on a $99 Archos tablet. Samsung's other designs are much more elegant than this.
I'm not at all impressed by the lack of a SD card slot. I loathe the "cloud" (and since this is a Wi-Fi-only device, it's not a viable solution anyway), and I'm not going to spend an extra $100 for 16GB extra of flash memory that cost the vendor under $10. Admittedly, this doesn't make Google/Samsung any worse than Apple on this front, but I had hoped they might actually do better.
Also, is there a physical home button? I can't tell from the photos. A tablet needs at least that one physical button.
Apple's retina displays are also a "lottery". They are not all from the same manufacturer. The lower quality ones have IR (image retention, kind of like short term (a few minutes) screen burn in). The samsung displays are superior to the lg ones, here is a 350+ page thread from fanboys as proof https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4034848?start=255&tstart=0
This is correct. Just check the "unknown sources" option under settings and you can install apps from pretty much anywhere (web, email, etc) -- the system will show what permissions the app needs and obtain permission to install it (or not) from the user.
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.
The common RGBG version of PenTile has green pixels on the pixel centers and red and blue between pairs of pixels. So you get only half the effective horizontal resolution for any border between black, red, blue, or magenta objects or between green, yellow, cyan, or white objects.
It's not that they don't know how to do it; it's that they choose not to.
Jeff Atwood gives a good commentary on why they choose not to here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-respecting-the-pixel-grid.html
I don't think any of the major US wireless carriers offer discounted monthly rates for buying your phone outright. You might as well reap the price of discounted phones if your bill is the same rate.
In Europe, you have the option of a contract subsidizing your phone, or no contract and a cheaper rate, but buying an expensive phone outright upfront.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I dont know of a reliable site, where you can get the apk file from though
Ideally, the publisher of a Free, free, freemium, or ad-supported application would distribute an APK on the application's web site, usable by anybody who has turned on "Unknown sources". A reliable site will use HTTPS with a well-known CA or HTTPS + DANE (public key fingerprints in DNSSEC).
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.
Under that criteria, i could label the power button a 'gaping security hole'
Good-bye
T-Mobile does, unless that changed recently. I still have the cheaper non-subsidised plan.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
You mean that gaping security hole that still requires the user to confirm their desire to install things after they've been shown a fine-grained list of permissions that said things require?
Unlike Apple, other phone manufacturers don't believe that locking you in a padded room with children's safety scissors is an acceptable practice.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
With my Nexus 7 there was no option to boot the first time without first setting up a Google account. I don't think this is such a big deal, I set up a separate throwaway account with each of my devices, but that annoyed me.
I'm also a little annoyed that I got my Nexus 7 just a month ago... Would certainly have waited for one of these here Nexus 4's.
If you want a phone with a small screen, just get an iPhone.
Sir!
This is slashdot! If there's one place on the internet spec-wankery and taking potshots at marketing misusing terms of art are not only permissible, but good form, this is it.
0 1 - just my two bits
I realize they're cheaper to produce... but that's probably because the result is cheaper looking. Just do it the standard way and save us from the misery of the pentile display.
None of the Nexus devices have a Pentile display - the Nexus 4, 7, and 10 all have regular RGB subpixels.
The tablet is a Pentile display.
Nope, RGB subpixels - standard LCD layout. It is *NOT* pentile. Hence the "RGB Real Stripe", which is Samsung marketing for "we didn't fuck with it"
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).
This application wants to send a text message (_content_) to _number_. How should I handle it?
[ ] Deny, and ask me for permission next time.
[ ] Deny, and disable this app ([ ]until (*)tomorrow, ( )next week, ( )next month)
[ ] Deny, and uninstall this app
[ ] Allow this time
[ ] Allow until tomorrow
[ ] Allow until next week
[ ] Allow forever
[ ] Allow if (_click to select app_), which implements IGatekeeper, says it's OK to allow.
Whether or not pentile sucks depends on the PPI. If the PPI is too low, then you can see the individual sub-pixels and pentile (RGBG) sucks relative to RGB. But if the PPI is high enough, then you cannot see the individual sub-pixels and RGBG is indistinguishable from RGB while using fewer sub-pixels. The reason is a quirk in the human visual system - our eyes' resolution in green is much better than in red and especially blue.
Pretty much every recorded image we see takes advantage of this. Nearly all digital cameras use a Bayer filter (RGBG overlay), so the images they capture have half the red and blue resolution as they do green. Unless you flip certain JPEG options, a JPEG image you create from a pure RGB scan will do the same thing - reduce the red and blue information that's stored relative to green. Same for MPEG and NTSC. Basically, nearly all the recorded images you've ever encountered in your life were brought to you in RGBG. That you never noticed is proof that it's indistinguishable.
It's only displays which were typically RGB, but that was because there were no "pixels" on CRTs, and LCDs typically had low PPI. Once the display's PPI becomes high enough, RGB becomes a waste. When the G sub-pixels in an RGB array are dense enough to surpass the the threshold of visual acuity, the R and B sub-pixels are far too dense and way past that point. That is, you have way more R and B sub-pixels than are actually needed. If you're at this point, then an RGBG display like pentile with the same pixel density (but lower sub-pixel density) will create an image that's indistinguishable from RGB but using fewer sub-pixels.
Yes, that's what I got. If you click "no", it prompts you to create an account. There's no way to continue without either signing in with an existing account or creating a new one. That's a particular problem if you don't have a Wifi network to connect through - you pretty well can't use your device at all without connecting to Google at least once.
(That isn't completely true - you can root your tablet and install a third party ROM without connecting to Google, but that's kinda outside the spirit of the question.)
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)
You can of course just make a Google account for that device, using a disposable email address to sign up and never entering any personal info. You don't need credit card details or anything like that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Apple's retina displays are also a "lottery". They are not all from the same manufacturer.
Just to be clear, the "retina" issues identified above are all related to the Mac Book Pro (retina) not the iPad.
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