Google Nexus 4

My Nexus 4's speaker failed just after a year. I replaced it with a Nexus 5, whose speaker and microphone failed after 7 months. I did a warranty exchange and the refurbished Nexus 5 now in my pocket's speaker and microphone just went out about a week ago. They share a flex cable that runs under the battery and seems to go bad somehow. I messed with the connection but it didn't fix it. I've preordered the 5x, but this time with the 2-year warranty.

They're both emphatically not fine from any erudite informed perspective of what has been better in the past. I've used small-form factor DOS luggable-bricks, miniature Windows7 7" diagonal laptops (Fuji B112, B2131) obsessively since the epoch, also exotics like Fakespace NDOF dataGloves, yada~ and my usual combination of trackball magicMouse and 3D connextion SpaceNavigator on my desktops. Now I've got an Android tablet and an iPhone which are decidedly not 50 years better. Neglecting the exotics, UX experience in DOS sometimes was better than, e.g. explicitly touching (yes DOS could do that) somewhere in the middle of a paragraph only to have the cursor leap to the beginning, end, select the entire paragraph (iOS18 or so..) or invoke some unintended 'gesture', and then require twenty more touches of adjustments to getthe selection right. Using external near-fullsize BT keyboards which actually make typing tolerable on my iPh and DroidTab, I'm constantly taken 'aback' (to memories of the past) by having to remove a finger from the keyboard to the screen to accomplish some cursor positioning that might just as well be done with less trouble with a keyboard touchpad or mouse. I do use a tiny tactile feedback BT keyboard with it's own tiny thumb-trackPad which works nominally better than on-screen keybooards when I'm crunched for space and can't use near fullsize kbs. Oh.. there's speech-to-text these days. Something about my present set of afflictions is holding me back…

Google have burnt me twice by abandoning phones… first was Nexus 4, next was Pixel 4a Both were abandoned within two years of me buying… never buying a phone from Google again

The Nexus 4 camera was rubbish and the GPS was rubbish. It could barely ever get a decent lock meaning navigating with it was a awful. I was so glad to replace that phone.

The Nexus 4 was a nice phone but I thought the battery life was bad and it also ran hot. My Moto-X was truly next level. It was oled and could do always on display that didn't need to power the blacks pixels on the screen. It was the first phone to do this. It has voice recognition for unlocking (getting info that you couldn't when the phone was locked). First to do this too since I believe it uses dedicated hardware at the time. It also knew when I was driving to unlock the phone for voice commands also. It was small.

I loved my nexus 4! It's a pity that I at one point could not use it anymore because the updates made it unusable slow.

I have some seriously bad luck with spicy pillows. I had a nexus 4 and 5 that had their battery swollen. Also an iPhone 6 and a Poco X3 pro. Also, a ZTE z959 and moto E4. I don't want a spicy pillow. I'd rather the phone turn itself off before the battery swells up but ideally it should automatically disconnect the battery and keep running off of the wall unless it is too hot, in which case, it should shut itself off.

Back in the day when cameras still took better photos than phones, I've always wanted to backup vacation photos without bringing a computer. I still remember getting so close with the Google Nexus 4 to being able to connect an SD card reader. It supported OTG, but did not have the required charge pump to supply 5V of VBUS. (Supposedly you could hack together something using a 9V battery, some resistors, and a kernel patch, but that was a bit more than I was willing to risk for the convenience.) Finally, the Nexus 7 and Nexus 5 supported it out of the box, and while Android didn't offer a FAT32 implementation back then, there was (is?) a USB host API which let apps supply that instead, and I think somebody actually ended up implementing FAT32 in userspace to make it all work!

I hated the Nexus 4... it was slippery and broke waaaay to easily. I think the Moto X with the wood back was one of the coolest looking phones ever though.

Did not work for me with an old Nexus 4. This is a bad idea, but everyone gets to find out for themselves if they do it

I've owned several Nexus and Pixel phones and they universally sucked. Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Pixel 2. I think that's all of them. I sent the last one to be fixed under warranty and they basically ignored me for six months (which I spent with no phone) until I threatened to get consumer protection from my country involved. Yeah yeah, why did I keep buying them? I have no idea. I guess I assumed the rest of Android phones sucked more.

I am pretty sure ALL phones that are on sale today have better glass than my Nexus 4 which had a beautiful glass panel on its back. Gorgeous but not strong at all. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/LG_Nexus...

Your next sentence wasn't particularly useful, as there aren't any other choices. If I want what I consider a reasonably-sized phone (~4.2"), I have to settle for something with crap specs. I use a few apps that poorly implement the top-left button such that left-swiping doesn't do anything. Sigh. Yeah, just playing with mine, and noting how I readjust my grip to do various things. I just always feel like I'm about to drop my phone when I have to do that. And I just realized: I've never dropped and broken the screen on a phone until I got my Nexus 4 (which I've broken 3 times). My Nexus One and Nexus S lived happily break-free (well, ok, my S broke because someone [accidentally] violently elbowed it out of my hand, but that's hardly due to the size of the phone). We'll see if the market "fixes" this. I'm skeptical, as phones have been larger than my preference for at least 2 years now, and they're still growing.

I used the wireless charging on my Nokia Lumia for two years, every night. Loved it. Problem is, it's dog slow compared to how fast my iPhone 5s charges. And when I tried to charge my Nexus 4 on the same charger as the Nokia (they use the same technology, why not?) it would go haywire and never actually charge. Apple may be behind their competitors in some way, but they have a way of not pushing out technology until they're sure it's going to work the way the mass market expects it to (which is how the general public lets them get away with calling everything "magic". To a non-technical audience, it might as well be). My Nokia is full of cool features that don't work. If the battery dies, it takes half an hour before you can turn the phone on again. My Nexus 4 has a big screen but the camera is shit and it can't hold a charge through the day. My iPhone doesn't have a single "wow" feature to me, but then again there are no features that make me think "this would be so cool if only it worked". The last non-iPhone I didn't truly hate was my Palm Pre+.

I'm actually saddened by the fact that we consider 8 hours of battery life satisfactory, and 14 hours nothing short of astronomical . Anything less than a full day work for a mobile device should be unacceptable. Smartphones are particularly bad at it. If anyone remembers Palm devices, they could last for more than a week (!) on one charge. With my Nexus 4, even with light usage, I've come to a habit to plug it in whenever possible, it goes that fast. We all love feature-rich devices, but I think, currently, the promoted features and hardware are way ahead of the battery capabilities. And it's not OK.