Yet are still likely to feature needless UI “enhancements,” outdated versions of Android (with slow upgrades), and locked bootloaders. Note, I base this entirely off of the complete history of non-Google Experience phones prior to Now; I know nothing about the Vigor and HD directly :)
My upgrade period starts in a month or so, but I’m still in contract till February. I’m no longer at the job that got me my initial monthly discount, and I have no intentions of staying with Verizon any longer than I have to, lest they found out about that and start charging me the actual price, so I would love to cheaply jump ship if/when the Prime hits T-Mobile/Sprint. Anyone happen to know about Verizon’s ETF policies? :)
So apparently LG and various other phone makers have actually announced phones with 1280x720 screens 4.5" screens, which have the same DPI as Apple’s Retina display while obviously having a lot more real resolution and screen real estate available.
Meanwhile, I was reading Daring Fireball today, and it looks like Gruber’s latest obsession is proving that the iPhone’s now-smallish screen is actually the perfect size, and that anything bigger is ungainly.
This is the sort of argument that seems true if you’re used to using a smaller screen (I used to think it about the iPhone’s then-large 3.5" screen), but the way you can tell that it’s not true is that nobody who has a 4"+ phone ever complains about the size of the screen. People who have the bigger screens almost unanimously love them.
So I’m pretty excited by the part where it looks like 720p 4.5"-ish screens are going to be the new standard. Between that and ICS and Sprint’s alleged LTE deployments starting in early 2012, my phone upgrade next year should be pretty sweet.
In advance of the launch, specs and pictures have leaked. The curve on the full device looks a lot more mild than on that initial teaser shot. The specs are about what we expected, which means mostly conventional top-of-the-line innards, plus a giant 720p screen and LTE.
In terms of physical size, it’s pretty big. It’s 9mm taller and 2mm wider than my Evo 3D. But it’s slightly thinner at its widest, and with that tapered back, it’d probably feel smaller in the pocket and arguably less chunky in the hand. So I don’t think it’s crossing some crazy line, despite the 4.7" screen.
It actually weighs substantially less, which is nice in theory, but in practice means that people will say it feels “flimsy” and “insubstantial.” Some day, Samsung will learn that people want heavy phones, and start lining them with lead weights.
So, pretty great hardware, and now we’ll wait to see what ICS has in store. I’m particularly curious about whether it’s made the buttons legacy – they’re just part of the regular screen on the Galaxy Nexus, and I have to believe they can be disappeared when it comes time to watch movies, at the very least.
Actually, the hardware is only sort of great. The CPU is apparently downclocked to “only” 1.2ghz stock, which is liveable, but it’s also rocking a 2-year-old GPU–the same one, in fact, used in the Samsung Galaxy S 1. It doesn’t even measure up to the 2’s GPU, much less the iPhone4S/iPad2. Seeing as how the OS is now GPU-accelerated and the phone is rocking a 720p screen with far more pixels to push than any Android phone thus far, I am worried about scrolling around my homescreens, not to even mention top-end 3D games a year or two from now.
On the other hand, it’s got a notification LED; one of my favorite features. Different colors and blink patterns for every conceivable alert ahoy!
On the other, other hand, it appears to lack any removable storage and may not have a removable battery. Pooh pooh on all of that :-/
BGR likes it, certainly. It seems nicer than the SGS2 and Evo 3D, at a first glance. But… still just a standard Gingerbread phone. I’m curious how quickly, if ever, existing devices will get ICS.
That’s really the main reason I’m interested in the Prime, that it will come with ICS and be one of the first devices to get new updates. So I won’t have to wait 6 months or more for Samsung or HTC to put their crap on it, then for the carrier to put their own crap on it and approve it. And that’s just being optimistic too.
Aye. If I don’ get a Prime (and since I’m not buying for another 4 months or so, I probably won’t), I’ll only get something with a fully unlocked or hacked bootloader. If I can’t have kernel-modifying ROMs or Google directly supplying my updates, I’m going to be left behind.
