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As a fellow Nexus user, I've owned the Nexus One, 5, and currently use a 6P, how much of this is due to the OS versus hardware? Will Google ever be able to achi

by Inconel 10y ago

As a fellow Nexus user, I've owned the Nexus One, 5, and currently use a 6P, how much of this is due to the OS versus hardware? Will Google ever be able to achieve Apple level battery life or overall UI smoothness, not to mention update support, without having their own custom SoC? I was very happy with the 5, even with the intermittent lags, especially considering it's price at release. I suppose I'm not a very heavy phone user, and I never play mobile games, but I've been very happy with the 6P on Android 6.0-7.1. Battery life could definitely be better, and it does get fairly warm at times, but overall it's been a very good experience for me considering the Snapdragon 810 it's using is generally poorly regarded.

pcnix 10y ago
Google has been hinting at their own soc for the third gen Pixel devices though, so that is something to look forward to.
scott_karana 10y ago
Apple has had fluid UIs since the start, despite off-the-shelf, low resource Samsung SoCs. They only started making custom ones after with the 4S, as I recall.
- glasz 10y ago
  exactly. it's not (only) a hardware issue.
- Inconel 10y ago
  Good point, Apple's A series SoCs are so well regarded I sometimes forget they've only been around for half of the iPhone's existence.
- fixermark 10y ago
  Yep. Out of the starting gate, Apple forced tight constraints on background and multi-threaded processing---so tight that the first versions of the iPhone OS couldn't support some types of application that the Android OSs could unless Apple wrote the program and could take advantage of the private APIs in the OS. But the advantage to that B&D approach was responsiveness and battery life, relative to an Android OS where any developer could write an app that would spawn an ill-behaved background thread and suck your battery.
deleted 10y ago
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disiplus 10y ago
i have a nexus 6 and its ruining android 7. its better then samsung devices, but it has its own problems. i run the screen at min brightness because thats the only way i can get reasonable battery life. my car is parked -2 so i lose signal every time i have to go there. and sometimes i have to restart the device to get the signal back ( no tricks like airlaine mode work) the ui sometimes gets so slow i dont know why.

by Inconel 10y ago

pcnix 10y ago

Google has been hinting at their own soc for the third gen Pixel devices though, so that is something to look forward to.

scott_karana 10y ago

Apple has had fluid UIs since the start, despite off-the-shelf, low resource Samsung SoCs. They only started making custom ones after with the 4S, as I recall.

glasz 10y ago
exactly. it's not (only) a hardware issue.
Inconel 10y ago
Good point, Apple's A series SoCs are so well regarded I sometimes forget they've only been around for half of the iPhone's existence.
fixermark 10y ago
Yep. Out of the starting gate, Apple forced tight constraints on background and multi-threaded processing---so tight that the first versions of the iPhone OS couldn't support some types of application that the Android OSs could unless Apple wrote the program and could take advantage of the private APIs in the OS. But the advantage to that B&D approach was responsiveness and battery life, relative to an Android OS where any developer could write an app that would spawn an ill-behaved background thread and suck your battery.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

disiplus 10y ago

i have a nexus 6 and its ruining android 7. its better then samsung devices, but it has its own problems. i run the screen at min brightness because thats the only way i can get reasonable battery life. my car is parked -2 so i lose signal every time i have to go there. and sometimes i have to restart the device to get the signal back ( no tricks like airlaine mode work) the ui sometimes gets so slow i dont know why.