Android for all and the new Nexus 5

I'm sad that the Galaxy Nexus isn't supported. My phone has increasingly been running out of RAM lately for reasons I don't understand - hearing Google boast about how KitKat has been optimized for memory had me hoping that it would support more than just the latest-greatest.

Here&#x27;s the Android release notes:<p><a href="http://developer.android.com/about/versions/kitkat.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;versions&#x2F;kitkat.html</a><p>Highlights:<p>* WebView is now based on Chromium * KSM and zRAM integrated into stock kernel * Public SMS framework * Printing framework * Storage access framework

<i>Behind the polish on the screen is the power under the hood. Take the Phone app, which for most people hasn’t really changed since the days of flip phones. Now, we’re making calling easier than ever, by helping you search across your contacts, nearby places, or even Google Apps accounts (like your company’s directory), directly from within the app.</i><p>Is that marketing speak for, &quot;We&#x27;re moving the Phone app into Google Play Services&quot;?

The story behind the scene to my eyes is Google removing out of the box apps from Android to leave it PLAY dependent 100% if possible %200. This means that no other store like Amazon will be able to create a second store based on Android with a fresh environment out of the box. Google says is due to modularity I say due to market strategy. As a clear example (apart from the clear explanation of the article, great article BTW) a feature released today on KiKat 4.4 is that WebView is based on Chromium, this means the sole purpose of only Google using WebView. If I where Amazon I would be reconsidering having to develop all again for future releases or today make a fair deal with Google.<p>However this is not bad news at all for startups like myself because of two things.<p>1) Google will spend about a year or two on refactoring Android to fully cope with PLAY dependence allowing some spare &quot;time&quot; for third party ideas on features that can advance outside Google internal teams.<p>2) Third party developer a are now in equal position to compete with Google applications to win terrain into Android future tiny out of the box. Basically on future ex-activated apps like mail for example.

I had a terrible experience with the Nexus S. I bought it a couple years ago (which seems to be a vety long time in Google terms) and right now it&#x27;s totally unusable. It&#x27;s very slow, the battery is sucked up in less than an hour when on wifi, some apps can&#x27;t work, the play store is a mess and I can go on and on.<p>I experienced the nexus 4 a little bit and though it&#x27;s a great phone I&#x27;m afraid the next OS updates are going to ruin it just like it happened to the poor Nexus S.<p>My next phone is going to be an iPhone as I had a rather pleasant experience on the iPad.

Well.. that was probably the most impulsive buy I&#x27;ve made in a long time... Shame on Google Play for not crashing this time around!

Okay I thought the camera on my Nexus 4 would kick ass but it sucks compared to an iPhone. The only way I&#x27;m going to purchase this 5 is if it has iPhone-esque camera quality.

In a moment of madness I managed to easily buy a Nexus 5 on the UK Play store. Last year it was months after N4 release until I was able to grab one. I don&#x27;t normally splurge on consumer goods but in this case, the camera looks like a step up, and more battery life can&#x27;t be bad.<p>I thought &quot;ach why not&quot;, but bought it at least partly out of surprise that the online store was working :)

First major smartphone which included India as one of the first few countries to be released. Nexus 5 will have a huge impact on high end market in budget conscious indians.<p>Selling at 28k where HTC one, note3 and Lumia 1025 are being sold at around 50k!. If distribution channel is properly organized it will just blow away the likes of samsung,nokia and HTC

Already bought the Nexus 5. My GNex is really showing it&#x27;s age, and it&#x27;ll be nice to have a device with the new OS to develop and debug apps with.

Engadget says no Verizon support. Is this true? I thought they had Verizon&#x27;s LTE bands listed but I&#x27;m not very familiar with all this stuff.

...anyone else seeing &#x27;out of stock&#x27; for all configurations and models?<p>Yep, definitely another high-grade Google Play user experience....

I&#x27;m disappointed with the current lack of details around this. For example, it&#x27;s unclear if the rumoured Dalvik improvements made it in. The omission of GN support is slightly galling too, although with the variants of that in the wild it may be too complicated to deploy.<p>That said, a couple of things in the API, especially the storage framework, could be really good. That may provide a way forward to get apps working with the cloud or self hosted servers with a common API, which would be a great development.<p>Cyanogenmod usage may get a big spike when they get on to Kitkat, and that might be just what the Android ecosystem needs.

I almost choked when I was watching the video and I thought I saw Stallman on second 11:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ0XTJqFLIE#t=11" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hQ0XTJqFLIE#t=11</a>

Google keeps rolling more and more up under them. I can understand the &quot;good&quot; argument...it rids the platform of fragmentation.<p>...but Android is slowly becoming less open. Scares me a little. Why shouldn&#x27;t it?

&quot;the book you&#x27;re reading, the game you&#x27;re playing, or the movie you&#x27;re watching&quot;<p>I&#x27;m confused, PDFs, games and movies already are full screen on previous android versions.

For all, unless you are on Verizon.

Nexus 5 site: <a href="https://www.google.com/nexus/5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;nexus&#x2F;5</a><p>Already appears to be down.

Its too bad the focus isn&#x27;t on battery life. &quot;7 hours&quot; internet time on wifi, when you&#x27;re on airplane mode. And they refresh the same page every 40 seconds.<p>How about a real battery test, where you simulate someone reading HN or reddit, opening gifs, images, web pages with crappy flash video. I&#x27;m tired of the same 3 hours of useful battery life I&#x27;ve had since the HTC evo. Maybe I&#x27;m just bitter because my galaxy nexus has around 8 hours of idle time if I have 4G on (this after doing a clean wipe not 1 month ago).

Finally, true full screen support! That was my main gripe with Android VS iOS. Personally I find the navigation bar very hindering in games, where I have to be careful not to touch it (not to mention the wasted screen space). My young kids keep touching the navigation buttons by mistake, making using drawing&#x2F;music apps a very frustrating experience for them. I hope that various app developers will catch up quickly with this feature.

Holy crap, scrypt is now in android as a default method of key stretching for whole disk encryption! That makes it way of a legitimate option and I&#x27;m really happy to see a memory hard algorithm being adopted in such a large area!<p><a href="https://developer.android.com/about/versions/kitkat.html#44-crytpo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;versions&#x2F;kitkat.html#44-...</a>

This: &quot; In addition, the new Chromium WebView supports remote debugging using Chrome DevTools. For example, you can use Chrome DevTools on your development machine to inspect, debug, and analyze your WebView content live on a mobile device.&quot;<p>This is a huge step forward for the development of HTML5 hybrid apps if it allows us to debug our app&#x27;s embedded webviw. Good riddance console.log(*) debugging.

I love this as a stark juxtaposition to the Apple &quot;Hold a grand event to announce new OS and phone dates&quot;

Just a tip: Make sure you are logged into your Google account. Until I logged in it was showing as &quot;Out of Stock&quot;.<p>32gb black was available when only the 16gb white was available previously.<p>Also note that mine is a Google Play Dev Account, which may or not affect availability.

Wait, wait, does that mean that I can expect some version (possibly not entirely official) of Android 4.4 to run on my old HTC Desire Z? A snappier Android on a device with a keyboard would be great.<p>Or is it for the billion people who buy a phone from now on?

Android for all, except me:<p>&gt; Sorry! Devices on Google Play is not available in your country yet.<p>Oh, wait, their &quot;all&quot; means &quot;U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan and Korea&quot;, ie 10 out of 200ish countries in the world.

I really hope the new version of Android fixes the bug in their Wifi-enabled location service in version 4.3, as it&#x27;s been draining the battery on my Nexus 4, with the only fix available being to disable it.

5&quot; screen is too big for me. Will probably stick with N4 for a while yet.

Just purchased one thanks. It says dispatch 8th Nov. In uk. Moved from sg3

The thing that concerns me the most is their deep linking from Google search directly into native Android apps. The last thing the web needs is even more of being silo&#x27;d off into closed apps.

So it is now official that Nexus devices get 18 months of software support and then it&#x27;s game over? That&#x27;s quite disappointing, even Samsung supports the Galaxy SX line longer.

I will be sticking with my Nexus 4. I do not utilize the camera too much. KitKat will come to the Nexus 4 in time. The price is the really questionable point.

Hit refresh. I saw it sold out, then when I reloaded there was one in stock. Also be sure to check the 16&#x2F;32 &amp; white&#x2F;black permutations.

I just bought one. I currently have a GS4, used to have a Nexus 4. Every day I wish I had kept my Nexus 4. Now I can fix my mistake!

Google partnered with LG to develop Nexus 5... So remind me again why did Google bought Motorola for? ಠ_ಠ

Still no qwerty slider. No thanks.<p>If I wanted to waste half my screen on a keyboard I&#x27;d buy an iPhone.

I thought it was &quot;Key Lime Pie&quot;? Did Android get a corporate sponsor?

Has been less than a year since the 4. What is the major difference from the 4?

Well.. that was probably the most impulsive buy I&#x27;ve made in a long time... Shame on Google Play for not crashing this time around!

I was hoping for waterproofed...