[Nexus 4 General] pelesl:
I just got the Nexus 4. Needless to say, it arrived the day the S4 was announced, but whatever. It's cheap, relative to what I paid for the S2 I had from T-mobile.

I bought it to get away from bloatware. After updating my S2 to ICS I could type faster than the characters showed up on the screen. Reminded me of my days pushing the limits of a 386.

I've had the Nexus 4 for exactly one day. Immediately I notice some nice things:

1. Definitely feel snappier. This is a big plus.

2. The auto-correct is less intrusive. If I hit backspace after auto-correct does something, it will revert the entire correction. That is nice; in the S2 I had to turn it off because it was driving me nuts (texting in different languages; not to mention it insisted on capitalizing Work but not wednesday).

And then the bad:

1. Can't bcc myself on every email. How lame. No, I don't use gmail and I don't want you. And I am used to doing things this way and don't want to change my email handling on umpteen computers to deal with sent folders. So I had to download K9, and the fact that you have to go into a menu to find the compose function is just plain stupid.

2. Wow, I miss the dialer on the S2. I would just start typing in digits. It would search my contacts by digits *or* by the equivalent letters. Just beginning to type someone's name and I could find them. Now I have to hit the magnifying glass and type in the name to find someone.

3. I also miss the toggles on the slider (whatever you call that thing you pull down from the top of the screen). Takes several clicks to turn Bluetooth on and off now.

These things may not seem like a big deal, but for those of us who don't want to spend our days watching laughing pandas, the little things in software can make or break the experience. That is how Apple got ahead (and still is, in many cases).

Generally I think Google (and possibly all smartphones) missed a few things. Or else I'm old and stubborn. One of them is the utter lack of control over what's going on. Not being able to "quit" an app is annoying. And then you get an app to kill apps---but someone works around that. Happened with AirDroid. Had to uninstall it! Couldn't kill it, and couldn't figure out how to not keep this connection "open" all the time. So I feel like I can't use it.

And my biggest pet peeve is keyboard layout. If you know the history, you know where QUERTY came from. Then came Dvorak, which took off only with a handful of nerds, but is a smart concept. Now we take something that looks nothing like a typewriter and shove QUERTY into it. Look, I understand the need to keep things familiar, but from what I understand, it's extremely difficult to customize the keyboard layout. I hope someone can point me to an app that allows me to do that, but I haven't found one. The world's idea of "customizable keyboard" is to have a Japanese schoolgirl dancing behind semi-transparent keys. Sorry, but no. In the English language you should have the apostrophe on the main keyboard and for most languages the comma should be there, too. I don't use the "speak" key or the smiley face one. Hell, take the space bar, which is 5 keys wide and make it 2.

The keyboard layout without punctuation is a big problem. Already kids can't spell worth a damn. Now I find myself not using commas in emails, etc. either. It's really disturbing.

There's no angry old man post icon?

***EDIT***

Opera just downloaded 1600 messages by POP. Now, because of something K9 or the Nexus email client did, Opera lost track of which emails were new and I got 1600 duplicates. Am I doing things that wrong or does it just not work?