[Nexus 5 General] sparhawk6:
I just submitted my pre-order for a Note 4. I loved the Note 2 (I love the size), but I really wanted a Sprint tri-band phone about a year ago, so I sold my Note 2 online and got the Nexus 5. Here is my post mortem after about a year of owning the Nexus 5.

What I really like about the Nexus 5:

•	The phone is really zippy. With some of my other phones, I felt like after about 8 months the phone would start to get really laggy. Not the Nexus 5. To this day, it is really fast. Very smooth.

•	I of course love the fast Android OS updates.

•	I still think the phone has a great physical design. I love the very small bezels on the side of the screen.

•	I love the multi-colored LED, when used with Light Flow. I haven’t read anything about the Note 4’s LEDs. I hope it has one. If it doesn't, that might be a dealbreaker. I use those LEDs to help me keep track at a glance of SMSs, work emails, home emails, calendar reminders, and missed phone calls.

•	I love the HDR camera. I got some great shots, and got many compliments. I love that the HDR is subtle – the pictures do not look fake.

•	I love that it is easy to root. I am never concerned about a locked bootloader or anything like that.

•	I like the fast boot up time.

•	I love the “OK Google” voice hotword on any screen. I use autovoice and have several custom commands. Can other phones do that? I hope so.

•	The screen is awesome. I love the accurate colors. I’m not a fan of the saturated colors on the Samsung. The Note 4 seems to look better than prior Samsung OLED screens.

What I do not like about the Nexus 5:

•	I can’t stand that the volume settings are buried in the settings menu. When I want to turn down the media volume BEFORE playing the media, I have to go into the deep volume settings to get to it. I like Samsung’s solution. When I use the volume rocker, I can press the settings button to the side of the volume meter and individually adjust the various volume settings, without having to dive deep into menus. There might be an app that fixes this. I didn't look very hard.

•	I hate not having a physical home button. There have been many times when a full-screen app freezes, and I can’t access the home button for 10 seconds or so. Very annoying.

•	The GPS is laggy. Sometimes when I launch Waze, it takes like 3 minutes to get a GPS lock. That seems to have gotten better after a recent update. However, I still have problems in Runkeeper. It sometimes takes about a minute to get a lock.

•	The low light video recorder autofocus is terrible. This might be the most annoying problem. Most of my recordings are of my kids at home, indoors. The Nexus 5 video recorder autofocus cannot keep up. It got better after an update a few months ago, especially because now I can focus on the subject by tapping the screen before I hit record, but it is still bad. I have so many blurry recordings. I’m really hoping the Note 4 is better. I didn’t seem to notice this problem on my Note 2.

•	I am not impressed with battery life. When I am not at my desk at work, and I’m at home or out, my phone goes to about 20% after only 5 or 6 hours of medium to heavy use. I bought an external battery charger and I carry that around in my laptop bag now. Obviously, my Note 4 will be much better with the much bigger battery.

•	I hate not having an SD card. I record a lot of video, and like to load a lot of music on my phone. I have to be careful about what I load, and I have to regularly offload my videos to free up space. I don’t understand why Google does not want us to have an SD card.

•	I miss a removable battery. With the Note 2, I had one battery always charged at home, and another always charged at the office.

•	The HDR photos look great, but require the subject to be still, because it takes so long to get a shot.

•	I wish the headphone volume was a little louder. When I am listening while mowing the lawn, I often cannot hear my audio books and podcasts.