A Quick Look at the White Nexus 4
by Brian Klug on May 29, 2013 12:10 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- LG
- Mobile
- Nexus 4
We got a special care package from LG earlier today containing the elusive but recently-announced White Nexus 4. This is the same hardware we saw at Google I/O just a short week ago which I mentioned at the end of the Nexus Experience SGS4 article.
The White Nexus 4 is identical internally to the black Nexus 4 which we reviewed a while back. It's still the same 1.5 GHz APQ8064 inside with 2 GB of LPDDR2 and beautiful 4.7-inch 1280x768 display. The White Nexus 4 we got ahold of came with 16 GB of NAND onboard as well, though there's nothing preventing an 8 GB variant from appearing. All that's different is that now it's a beautiful stark white on the backside with chrome trim everywhere there was black. The front side of the white Nexus 4 remains black, this new model includes white trim around the edge and again white on the back while still including the reflective and faceted structured pattern. It's a purely aesthetic change which – to me at least – looks amazing in person. It's another option which doesn't do anything to sway potential phone shoppers to the Nexus 4 but does refresh the product with a somewhat new look. LG recently made a May 29th date public for the white Nexus 4's availability, there's no official word from Google about when we can expect it to hit the Play Store but release seems imminent. I would expect pricing to be the same for the white version as the black version.
Included with the white Nexus 4 is a white bumper as well, which looks great contrasting with the black Nexus 4 or on the natively white Nexus.
Also our white Nexus 4 came running Android 4.2.2, there's no secret 4.3 or other release running on the hardware we were sampled.
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Brian Klug - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
No, the Nexus 4 camera does indeed suck, Vivek is correct. Sugar coat it all you want, no Nexus has to date shipped with anything close to a decent camera.-Brian
vision33r - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
It doesn't suck that bad but it isn't better than iPhone 4 camera and the default Android camera app blows.Not blaming Google at all when there are tons of other options in the Play store.
Affectionate-Bed-980 - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
are you kidding me? I carry an iPhone 5 for work and a Nexus 4 for personal reasons. I have about 16 photos on my Nexus 4 and 300+ on my iPhone 5. Hmmm. I created an iPhone 5 versus Nexus 4 photo album for people to pick the better photo and out of all 10 photos I posted where I took photos using both phones of the same subject, everyone picked the iPhone 5 camera.With that said I'm not trying to pimp the iPhone. The Nexus 4 just flat out sucks. I'll take my Galaxy S2 camera over the Nexus 4 as well.
fenil - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
The camera is not bad at all. I have Samsung Galaxy S2 and this camera is far better than that even though the mega pixels are same.A5 - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
Like Vivek said, the N4 is almost two years newer than the S2. It would have to try pretty hard to not be better.tipoo - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
I want the Nexus 4 soon, but I'm curious if any manufacturing tweak has fixed the thermal throttling issue yet. People have been fixing it with 0.5mm copper shims from ebay for a few cents, plus some thermal paste. It would be trivially easy in mass production. And I think the Optimus G already uses a similar method to pass the heat into the metal inner frame of the phone, like those modders were doing, so it seems like a safe method. Seems like nothing but cheapness and laziness preventing it.http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2...
A5 - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
It's not something I've run into, but there has been some help from 3rd party kernels. I wouldn't mind a teardown of the white N4 to see if there's a difference, though.tipoo - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
Ditto. Anandtech, there's your queue :)tipoo - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
Those kernels by the way just increase the heat threshold by the way, they don't safely dissipate more heat or intelligently manage cores or anything. They just let the battery and SoC heat past where they shouldjaysns - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
They also lower voltages pretty dramatically in some cases. My Nexus 4 doesn't get nearly as hot as it did when stock.