Google galaxy Nexus HSPA+ Review - Part 2

After messing with the Voice control and the "siri" like text searching system,   It's pretty much useless, just like siri on the iPhone.   Searching for "good places to eat"  turned up results from all across the country....  not much help.  and the Voice dialing is better, it at least will tell you what it is dialing with voice,  but it still does not let you choose if there are multiple matches.  saying "call dave" will call the first dave in your address book and the first number in his listing..   That's an epic fail.   And there is no music or device control.   saying "play beatles" results in a "I did not catch that" from the voice control system.   Apple is significantly better than Android on the voice control side.   And after playing with it most of the day,  all the "reviews" online are heavily scripted.   I cant get it to give me good information.  It assumes for you and returns that assumption without asking you for more input.   UPDATE:  IT seems that Android is only capable of voice control of dialing from a headset or Bluetooth device.  IF you look at the screen and launch the Google voice app from the screen then talk it will do everything else like play a song.   This is a horrible design.   All android phones are not a good choice for a motorcyclist wanting voice control of their phone for dialing and media playback.   This is sad as it is a deal breaker with many people, hopefully they fix this, but right now iPhone voice control is significantly superior in usability.

if you are highly specific it does return better information, but visually only.  this is a major epic fail on googles part.  I should be able to use this 100% with my eyes closed.   The first thing I tried was "post to facebook that I like the google nexus phone"   it cant do that,  "post to twitter that I love my nexus phone", it cant do that.

So once again all the fanboys out there were lying or are actively lying about how advanced the new vice control system in JellyBean is... It's better, but still not even close to as good as the apple iPhone.

Battery life is still looking to be short.   from 6:30am to 3:30pm 40% battery life remaining.   Last night I had to put it on the charger at 9:00pm with a low battery warning.  But I am playing with the phone a lot more because it is new.  today confirmed that battery life is not the best.   I charged the phone on my 30 minute commute and regained 10% of the battery (very slow charge from the car charger) but I was at 15% battery at 9:30pm with the phone asking for the charger and disabling the wifi and cellular modem.  This is a charge twice a day phone.

I really like the notification light on the face at the bottom,  cool that it's an RGB led that has a wide range of colors,  bad that I cant SET the color for what notification is what...  and also useless for me as I leave my phone face down.  if they had a translucent strip around the display and used 2 of them to illuminate the strip from the top and bottom,  that would be super cool looking and let you see the notification no matter if it is face up or face down.

IT seems to have a better receiver than other phones I have owned.  it is keeping a solid 2 bars of signal in the office here.  Most of the time I would have 1 bar or even a loss of signal.   My nokia phones would lose signal completely here.

From what I can tell phone calls use the least amount of power,  the screen sucks up most of the phones power use according to the built in power management.   I'm trying a lower brightness setting to see if it will give me better battery life.

I still love this phone,  It's one of the best I have owned.


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