Wish me luck! Switching from iPhone to Android.

All of that to me is "meh" except for the expansion slot. I'll have to see how that goes. The camera will probably do enough and if I want to take good pictures, that's why I have my Canon point and shoot. If I want awesome pictures I have my DSLR. One thing that grabbed me about both the Galaxy Nexus and the Rezound is the fact that I can swap batteries or get extended batteries. Motorola can bite my shiny metal ass when it comes to that. Honestly that bugs me quite a bit as Motorola has the best radios in them.

Oh and Im currently having spasms of ecstasy. Ice Cream Sandwich is damned nice.

Home screen





Showing the history


You rang


All is not perfect with ICS / Galaxy Nexus. I was having a problem with auto resizing / zooming the text on websites but may have it working now. So far so good. Next up are the ring tones or speaker. When I play music it sounds loud and clear like on my Droid X and the wife's iPhone. However ringtones and notifications play very softly. I thought it was a speaker issue initally. However it now appears that it may actually be how the stock sounds were encoded. In the morning I am going to take the ring tones out of a system dump from the Droid Razr and the ones I did of my old BB Storm2 and see how they work. I was about to return the phone based on these issues. However a bit of investigation has (probably) solved them.

The last two remaining issues are Facebook and the CDMA/LET radio antenna. If you are running stock android then there is a snow balls chance in hell of being able to sync with Facebook. The reason for this is that starting with the Nexus S Google refuses to allow Facebook to integrate unless Facebook uses the Google APIs. To be honest it's not that big of a deal when you think about it. You mainly lose your friends pictures in your contacts. For me not being able to see an integrated listing of what your friends are doing on twitter, google+, AND Facebook aint that big of a problem. I still have Facebook notifications and the app itself.

For folks that use a phone with a manufacturers skin this isnt a problem as HTC (Sense), Motorola (Blur), and Samsung (TouchWhiz) allow the connectivity through those skins. For stock Android users there are work around.

So that leaves one issue in my book. The radio. Lets face it, no one makes a radio like Motorola. This, of course, is not a Motorola phone. Sitting in my house my DroidX gets about -90 dBm, 0 asu. My Nexus is getting about -98 dBM, 2 asu. I am going to have to go into the woods and test out the connectivity for voice. I know of a few places where no phone but a Motorola or a Black Berry can get a signal. I'll have to see how this phone stacks up.

I will also be testing the GPS and camera tomorrow.

Version 4.1 of ICS is due to be launched soon and it is believed that the radio will be one of those items getting a good change.

ETA: Big mistake on my part...not rooting the phone as soon as I got it. Now if I want to do that, I am gonna have to spend several hours reinstalling / reconfiguring the damned thing.

The first screen uses beautiful widgets for the clock and I love it. I am using Android Pro Widgets. It gives me all of the features of Launcher Pro Plus with out using LPP. As for my comments after a few days. This phone is first and foremost a phone. The radio aint great. Signal strength, though better than the iPhone ain't great and cant compare with a Motorola phone. Unless there is an update in the next 28 days this will probably be the deal breaker and I'll just return it and grab a Bionic and wait for this summer. Battery life too, even with the extended battery, aint great. One of the killers is the time the phone spends looking for a signal. I'll monitor the phone over the next week and see if it improves. Again it's a deal breaker.

In the annoying but not deal breaker category they did a completely stupid thing and copied the iPhone by tying notification volume into the ringer volume. This means no ability to turn off your notification sounds at night while still being able to receive a call. Volume of the notifications are weak. These are annoying and not deal breakers because there are apps and rooting to address this.

The GPS was spot on and the camera took decent enough pictures.

Over all I think this phone is fantastic. However it's gotta be a phone first. If it can't do that well then I'll have to wait for a better solution.