I just got a Nexus 4. This is not a stealth brag or something; my last phone was a T-Mobile MyTouch Slide 3G that was already a two year old design when I got it. The old phone came with Android 2.1, which was by far the best operating system I’d ever used on any device. It was nice to look at, brilliantly intuitive (for example, holding your finger down on things generally gave you a context menu). It did crash a lot as the phone got older, but I assume that was because I was using newer apps that weren’t really designed for it.
My wife got a Samsung Galaxy something-or-other 4G a few months ago and it has Android 4.something on it. I’ve found it completely mistifying the two or three times I’ve tried to use it (though that might be because she’s a total Luddite and still has the tutorial widgets cluttering the home screen).
The Nexus 4 comes with Android 4.2, which looks more or less the same as the OS in her phone, though a bit prettier. After 8 hours of fooling around with the phone, I’m not a fan. It looks nice and hasn’t crashed, but it’s not intuitive at all. Finding a menu is totally hit-or-miss; sometimes there’s a softkey at the bottom of the screen, sometimes there’s a button in the program itself, and sometimes there’s no menu at all. Features from 2.x seem to have been changed or removed just because; the “remove icon from homescreen” function used to make you drag it to the bottom of the screen. Now, for no apparent reason, you drag it to the top - where occasionally the phone will forget you are dragging an icon and open the status bar.
Same thing with widgets. Before, if you wanted to place a widget on the home screen, you held your finger on the spot where you wanted it. You’d get - you guessed it - a menu asking you why you were doing that. If you do that now, it just lets you change the wallpaper. You have to activate the programs list and drag and drop a widget/program icon from there. Why? This is not an easier task.
Anyone else tried it? Anyone else think there is way too much change for the sake of change?
I love the phone, for what it’s worth, but then I don’t have much to compare it to.