They'd just be spending money on FLASH that the vast majority of people are never going to use. Most of the normal people I know with iPhones wouldn't even fill an 8GB one.

I don't know anybody that would not fill an 8GB phone. Most normal people I know have a shitload of photos, video and music and blow out a 16GB iPhone in a couple of months of owning it. These are people who are not into computers whatsoever.

I think if my mom had an iPhone she'd burn through 32GB in no time flat. Normal people don't like to sync stuff back to their computers and manage the contents of their phones to try and keep them lean.

IMO, normal folks are the ones who need the most storage.

If I wanted to think outlandishly, I'd want 1TB on my phone to make sure I could keep all my music and still be able to shoot photos and video. I don't actually "need" to keep all my music on a phone, but I really hate the sync process. automatic sync isn't useful at al once you have more music than the capacity of the phone and manually syncing is extremely tedious - how do I know what I'll want to listen to a few days from now?

In addition to TomTom US+Canada (1-1.5TB), I also keep Wikipedia on my phone in English (4-5GB, no photos). Those are the two big ones. Most of the other apps are relatively small, the rest being photos and video, which I do have to cycle off regularly.

This has come up before, but I believe the two technologies that are holding back these devices are still storage space and battery capacity. Each of those is extremely underwhelming and neither have kept pace with other advancements like processing (G and C PU) nor screen/touch resolution.

The normal people you know are clearly different to the normal people I know

My 12 or so non techie iphone owning friend/family members all have 8GB/16GB phones and to my knowledge none of them are even close to running out of space.

I wasn't exclusively considering iPhone, because I also have a few friends now with Samsung phones (Galaxy 2 and Galaxy 3). These smartphone wielding friends all have kids, so that might explain the extra video/photos usage. And also corporate email with plenty of attachments. I still suspect that takes up an insignificant fraction of the space used by photos and video (and music) however.

In my mom's case, I drew my hypothesis by her digital camera usage. However, with that device I've been able to control the lack of sync (on her part) with an Eye-Fi card that I've pre-set with their endless memory feature and backup to her computer and my FTP site. Otherwise I'm sure she'd need an army of SD cards.

Many of the people I'm talking about also have kids.

The trick with an Android phone, versus iPhone, is that everything is rigged for streaming. I've loaded my entire record collection into Google Play, all of which I can get to from my phone or tablet. I have only a handful of albums "pinned" so they're available when I'm offline. It's a similar situation with videos.

That said, 8GB would be too cramped. 16GB is usable.

As usual, I'm happy that there are choices.

I am NOT one of those people who needs tons of space on their phone. I used to be, but then I was blessed with the wonders of rdio. Since then, I haven't stored a single MP3 on my phone and it fits MY usage perfectly. It won't fit everyone's usage, but once again, that's what choices give you. If the Nexus 4 won't suit you, you don't have to buy it.

I've attached a screenshot of my data usage. This is how it's been for almost a year since I got my Galaxy Nexus. Clearly, I will have no trouble moving to an 8GB phone.

I think I keep my current album on my phone, and whatever pics and videos I have taken that day, or sometimes that weekend. That's it. The only reason I have our album on it is to let people hear it and to bluetooth it to them in pubs as and when required. But there is no phone with decent audio playback so I wouldn't use it to listen to tunes unless I had to.

Similar with photos - I don't want local storage of photos on my phone. They serve no purpose on a small device. If I take a picture with my phone it is because I will be facebooking/tweeting it soon after.

But I never go more than 2 days without plugging the phone in to charge, and that automagically hoovers all the media files off into my terabyte storage disk.

My very non-techie wife forgets to dump her photos off for weeks at a time, so hers can fill up, but she doesn't look at them on her phone...it just happens. So she also wouldn't need much space.

Success!

Niiiice. Jealous!

Cool.

Mine arrived yesterday, but went to where my bank card is registered (my parents house)....

My dad is going to meet us tomorrow half way, so I'll get my hands on it soon!

That didn't quite go as smoothly as expected!

There is an official ClockworkMod recovery ROM for the Nexus 4 and that's what I used on my Nexus 7, so I thought I'd go that route.

Oh god.

Once I flashed it on it started going into a boot loop. I couldn't access recovery via the boot loader (loop again) so had to do it via fastboot command. When CWM started, it was showing mount errors and nothing would work.

Tried starting phone normally, but it seemed to take forever on the "Google" screen before heading to the nexus one....and then it just seemed to get stuck there.

Bit of panic at this point.

In the end I downloaded the stock image from the developer site and reflashed everything and hey presto, the thing started up.

The odd thing is that it would appear that I accidentally flashed on the CWM recovery during my full restore (judging from the filenames), so I think I have CWM installed and the phone is starting normally.

For the moment I'm not going to risk it again, I'll wait a while until these issues with CWM have been ironed out, reading the thread over at xda I'm not the only one who ended up with a device in this state.

Still, bootloader is unlocked now.

The newer Android versions normally try and restore the stock "recovery" partition after each boot, unless you have specifically taken action to prevent that. This could be what "saved" you.

So.. your N4 may (or may not) have the stock recovery on it now.

Note that all you really "need" to do right now, is unlock the bootloader. Rooting and ROMs can wait, but unlocking the bootloader wipes the phone and thus is best done at the earliest.

Fortunately, it's simple, and doesn't require any custom recovery images or anything.

Just: fastboot oem unlock

Do you mean "no Android phone?" I thought that most should have at least the same audio quality of an iPod or iPhone. Which is, without stepping too far into the obscene, probably at least as good or better sound playback device than any other devices 95%+ of the population own - things like Walkmans, discmans, radios, car stereos, boomboxes, other digital audio players, etc.

Very few people actually have good, let alone great, sound systems - in the home or in the car.

Just my opinion, but I don't really see any advantage to ROMing a new Nexus phone. I'm curious why you're doing that. Do you just like CM a lot? Nothing wrong with that, I'm just interested.

Rooting, on the other hand, always has advantages.

I run stock Android, unlocked and rooted, but I can see the appeal of CyanogenMod. Notably, it has some nice / nerdy controls that let you crank back on permissions given to apps. Yes you require access to my contacts list, but you're not getting them.

So far as I can tell, the bulk of people installing third-party distributions are either interested primarily in getting away from vendor crapware or they're just interested in some of the crazy skins and such that the third-party universe offers.

That all makes sense. The vendor crapware, however, wouldn't really apply to the Nexus devices, and in any case should be removable with just root access.

Also, I've got an older Samsung 10" tablet (the freebie given away at Google I/O two years ago). Samsung doesn't support it. Google doesn't support it. CyanogenMod, however, supports it just fine.

(EDIT: Samsung is apparently releasing Android 4.1 very recently, at least to German customers. CyanogenMod had it running back in July.)

(EDIT #2: Seems that CM10 hasn't got the permission revocation feature any more. Hmm.)

I was installing CWM into the flash so that root could be redone without the need for access to a computer, so for example after a ota update.

It's the method I used on my nexus 7. I have no intention to use anything other than the stock android rom!

I assumed everybody rooted android devices this wasn't until after it all went wrong that I realised that they didn't and that root can be done by booting an image while connected to a computer.

I'm new to android, be gentle!

No worries! I was honestly just curious about what you were doing.

...and actually, I really must apologize to you. For some reason I read Clockwork Mod as Cyanogen Mod - even after I typed it myself! Yikes! I don't know what's up with me... Yeah, CWM is great, especially the touch version.

Wow, sorry about that

I have to say I am loving this phone, it really highlights for me how far apple have fallen behind the game with iOS.

A few more quality apps in the store and apple may well start to feel the heat from Google.

Apple need to put a lot of work into iOS, that's for sure. No one is more vocal about that than me as far as I'm concerned. But at the same time, I can't say I've seen that Android is ahead - or rather that it has a large amount of what's missing from iOS - IMO, it needs a lot of the same work, and in fact needs a lot of core work yet, if even only to bring some consistency, performance and refinement to the platform.

What kind of things specifically are you thinking about with respect to that comment?

I'm really hoping that Scott Forstall's departure is going to bring some positive change to iOS. But I'm also worried it could be a "be careful what you wish for" situation.



I don't think that a few more quality apps is going to make a difference over night. IMO Apple aren't likely to feel any heat for a very long time. They still have a great market share for a manufacturer. Google has a great OS market share, and that's significant for developers, but it doesn't help to bring much money in for Googleand will probably continue to be a big money loser for a while. It's done wonders for Samsung though. There must be people at Google wishing they were in Samsung's position wrt to phone sales.

I'll be interested in this too, but after the honeymoon period is over with the new Nexus 4. I don't think one can have an honest opinion of an ecosystem until they have lived in it for at least a few weeks.

Ah, but there's an app for that: Voodoo OTA RootKeeper

Mmm.. looks like Android 4.2 is available (sort of) for the Galaxy Nexus now too.

Installing it the hard way..

Bruno, go hunt out somebody with a nexus 4 and see how smooth 4.2 actually is. I'd have agreed with you about smoothness and general clunkyness prior to jellybean, but this is good, this is way faster and smoother than my iPhone 4s ever was.

Things like the data warnings and counters and battery graphs and such like make such a difference to the whole experience. The battery life on my 4s was shocking by the way, although it seems very hit and miss whether you have battery problems.

I loathed my 4s after I'd put ios6 onto it, it turned what was a dull experience into something that was awful.

With regards to the my comments about the apps, its particularly this hardware that I feel has the chance to really push android into spotlight, sure it night already have a huge market lead, but this phone is quality, runs a stock kernel and is cheap. Its a wolf (iPhone) in sheeps (android) clothing.

I'll keep you updated on my experience! Maybe it will change but its looking positive at the moment!

Just rooted it, did the "fastboot boot recovery.img" and was able to install the su and busybox binaries.

Phone started as normal after, but as expected is now rooted!

Okay, now go into "Settings", "About Phone", and click 3 times in quick succession on the "Android version" line.

After a short spell, you should be able to press-and-hold on the icon that "pops up". Click-and-drag works after that.

Oh my god its full of beans!