https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_4_8gb&feature=microsite

Looks like a fantastic phone and at an amazing SIM free price too! Will be interesting to see what it's like price wise once the carriers get hold of it, but I'm seriously considering one.

Looks like they've tried to heavily undercut the iPhone/S3 (£250 cheaper than an iPhone, £220 less than S3) too, while providing comparable (or better vs. iPhone) levels of hardware.

Only slight downside I can see on paper is the lack of an SD card. Will reserve final judgement until I've seen one, but so far it looks impressive.

looks to be getting sold at a loss, is that a good thing? real-world performance comparable to iPhone 5. no LTE though?

looks to be getting sold at a loss, is that a good thing? real-world performance comparable to iPhone 5. no LTE though?

For the peeps in the 16 4G cities with the inclination to sign up to overpriced contracts then the lack of LTE may be a downer but in all other respects it looks to be quite good.

true, but it's meant to be a flagship handset and they've cut costs??

true, but it's meant to be a flagship handset and they've cut costs??

Google will still pay LG their dues, and likely hope to make up the rest via apps and sponsored search results.

Alternatively, they're making a realistic and fair profit, rather than the usual mindset. Do you really think it costs £70 per handset to put 32GB of storage in an iPhone 5 rather than 16GB? To make the most efficient use of R&D and manufacturing, it's almost certainly an identical PCB that ships with a variable number of flash chips depending on demand.

I'm pretty much convinced to buy one, LG aren't really a cheap handset maker, it's made from Gorilla Glass so should be pretty sturdy. Plus it's the latest "virgin" AOSP handset so I should get a couple of years of new features without having to resort to third-party software. For the price, it's definitely got my interest.

Are they in any stores yet? Keen to have a play

Not as I know of. O2 have a 30 day exclusivity deal for subsidised versions, so I've read, so your local O2 shop would probably be a good shout to find out first given the lack of Google retail outlets (unless they get sold through PC World and similar like the tablets do).

Alternatively, they're making a realistic and fair profit, rather than the usual mindset. Do you really think it costs £70 per handset to put 32GB of storage in an iPhone 5 rather than 16GB? To make the most efficient use of R&D and manufacturing, it's almost certainly an identical PCB that ships with a variable number of flash chips depending on demand.

I'm pretty much convinced to buy one, LG aren't really a cheap handset maker, it's made from Gorilla Glass so should be pretty sturdy. Plus it's the latest "virgin" AOSP handset so I should get a couple of years of new features without having to resort to third-party software. For the price, it's definitely got my interest.

but Google are charging £40 to put 16GB on instead of 8GB. they're not selling the handset at or near cost out of any kind of altruism, they are just as evil as the next mega corporation. do any options/upgrades cost you what they cost add? of course not

does this have anything to do with handset though? on-paper specs look good, albeit slightly brute force but the software maybe isn't there just yet to take advantage? do apps make use of quad cores?

Yeah, I didn't say they were out for making no profit, just a realistic profit. There's no reason a high end phone should cost over £500 IMO, it's disproportionate compared to the cost of laptops and other computer equipment. Being honest, even £240 is a lot for my use as a phone, but my Desire is knocking on and this is the best value-for-money replacement as I don't want to sign up to another long contract.

Apps probably don't make use of quad-cores, as there's still a lot of dual and single-core handsets around so it's difficult to target quad-core properly, just like very few desktop apps that your home user would run make use of their dual or quad-core computer. But on a desktop it does let you run more single-CPU apps concurrently and multitask better, it'll be the same with phones. Navigating with Google Maps and playing back music with Spotify seamlessly? Might struggle with a single-core handset but get a dual or quad and you'll be laughing.

Im selling my Galaxy S3 for a Nexus 4, and heres my reasons (apart from having cracked the S3 screen)

1) DC-HSDPA - effectively double the speed of normal 3g - and three support it.

2) Price - Ill have money left over after trading in the S3.

3) RAM - Problem with the S3 is with 1gb RAM(768 usable) that it just aint enough. My use case is sat on the train in the morning, send a SMS, read a webpage, check FB. i cant switch between them without at least one of them getting killed due to memory constraints.

4) Developer support - much of the developer community are abandoning the Samsung platform because they wont release the source code for their CPUs - which means theres not much to be gained from different ROMS (ties into number 3 really)

I know ill be taking a chance with this - early indications showing the Nex4 as having crap batterylife and overheating etc but for my use i doubt itll be an issue.

Hmm, I was kind of looking forward to the battery life being reasonable. The battery is 33% bigger than my Desire (2100mAh vs 1450) and although the CPU is quad core and the screen is bigger, there's also been 2 and a half years of developments to get the battery life down on these things. Hopefully the N4 can't get any worse, I already have to charge the Desire at the end of most days...

Apps probably don't make use of quad-cores, as there's still a lot of dual and single-core handsets around so it's difficult to target quad-core properly, just like very few desktop apps that your home user would run make use of their dual or quad-core computer.

It won't be down to the app to decide which core (and how many) it uses - it will be down to the operating system and how it chooses to schedule all of the system's running threads/processes. Cores should just be seen as a resource pool so the more you have, the greater capacity for processign instructions you have and it's easy enough to write an application that would be eligible to have its threads/processes running on multiple cores concurrently if the OS decided to farm them out.

Forgot to add - the new handset certainly looks very interesting and a very attractive price!

Chris

Edited 5 November, 201213 yr by ScoobyChris

Sorry, I didn't word that too well, all I meant is that there are no apps yet which strictly require a quad core CPU because that limits the market too much. Of course they will run on a quad core CPU, but won't necessarily be designed to take full advantage of one. Realistically, developers pretty much still have to write apps to run on single core CPUs because there's still a huge number of them around.

The 16GB storage ruins it for me otherwise I would have been tempted.

Great price though for the spec.

Anyone interested may also find this interesting:

http://www.xda-developers.com/android/nexus-4-battery-shot-reveals-potential-quality-issues/

Phil

Sorry, I didn't word that too well, all I meant is that there are no apps yet which strictly require a quad core CPU because that limits the market too much. Of course they will run on a quad core CPU, but won't necessarily be designed to take full advantage of one. Realistically, developers pretty much still have to write apps to run on single core CPUs because there's still a huge number of them around.

I think there could be some confusion about how developers create apps. An app is core-agnostic and all (well written!) apps which have any kind of GUI will have at least two threads and probably a few more if there are background tasks to be processed. This app will happily run on single, dual or quad core processors and if the OS thread scheduler decides at runtime to farm my threads out to multiple cores then that is a bonus. However, the second time I run my app, it might decide that there are higher priority processes running and so my application runs all its threads on a single core. From an application perspective, I can't really code to take advantage of the number of cores and the only thing I can do is divide the work into multiple threads which are eligible to be farmed out if the OS decides to and most likely, I'd be doing this anyway.

The flip side to consider is that the more threads and hence more parallelism you have in your code, the more "glue" you need to manage them, especially if they are working on the same data, and it's very easy to negate any advantages over doing everything on a single thread.

Chris

I know ill be taking a chance with this - early indications showing the Nex4 as having crap batterylife and overheating etc but for my use i doubt itll be an issue.

Its been one case of overheating and i can most certainly say Testing units and software do have a tendency to carry heavy logcats and monitoring software.

The Nexus 4 apart from LTE which i dont see being that great for a year or more is going to be a great phone.

13th Nov is official release, i dont use much space i have dropbox for files and apps wise will be very little, 8Gb will do me.

Well I failed miserably at buying one. Had one in the basket, then numerous checkout errors, then an empty basket that I couldn't add one to, and finally back to "email me when available". Don't suppose anyone on here managed to get one ordered?

I also failed in getting one. :(

I tried to buy a nexus 10 and failed,got to put it in the basket,wouldn't recognise my post code,not happy,have hung off buying a tablet because it was due out today,who knows when more will become available,may just wait until there out in the shops.

I tried to buy a nexus 10 and failed,got to put it in the basket,wouldn't recognise my post code,not happy,have hung off buying a tablet because it was due out today,who knows when more will become available,may just wait until there out in the shops.

But the shops are currently charging a £100+ premium for them!

Never seen them in the shops,pc world said there negotiating with google and should have them within 2 weeks,I'm beginning to wonder if its worth it,wife has the Samsung galaxy tab 2 and I find it really good,I considered the Toshiba at 300,but read reviews for the nexus 10 and instantly liked it.

With the recent release of the Google Play Music app one of these could actually be a viable option for me with just 16GB of storage.

I get unlimited data so could use a lot of cloud based storage etc.

Shame they've sold out.

Having said that my HTC Sensation is still doing well and it's on it's way back from HTC for dust under screen warranty repair.

Phil

Orders are open again this evening, if anyone's interested. Landing page says 1-2 week lead time, checkout says 4-5.

Got a 16gb tonight at 17:20pm spoke to customer services and was told 1-2 week delivery over the moon to have got one.