Status of Nexus 4 issues?

[fuzzybabybunny]

I have a friend thinking about getting the Nexus 4 now that the price has dropped, but I faintly remember there being a lot of issues with it when it came out.

The only one I can remember is short battery life. Has that been resolved?

 

[Ravynmagi]

I've had my Nexus 4 from day one. I don't think I've ever had an issue with battery life. It's always been plentiful for my needs anyway.

Anandtech review from last year mentioned the phone throttles aggressively. Not sure if that was ever fixed, but it is something I've never noticed being an issue, it's always been a fast performing phone. I think it was mostly an issue when they were running consecutive benchmarks if memory serves correctly.

I can't really think of any software or hardware issues I've had with the phone, it's been pretty nice.

I only have two issues with it. Not a fan of the glass back, but the Ringke Slim case is pretty nice, so I'm okay with it. And I wish the external speaker was louder. Oh, and I really wish I had 32GB of storage.

 

[Bateluer]

Oh, and I really wish I had 32GB of storage.

Its biggest problems, the lack of storage and LTE, still exist.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Part of the battery life issues stems from the msm_hsic wakelock. According to research done by XDA, this is because the modem of the Nexus 4 is connected to the USB bus. As a result any data transmission triggers this wakelock. It seems that this wakelock gets held longer than data transmissions and is exacerbated when you move from point to point.

I've been looking into the deep sleep time of my phone, for example over an hour I'll have about 10% of wake time. DUring that 6 minutes, the partial wakelocks for Gmail and other apps might add up to 2 minutes tops. The rest of the awake time is held by the msm_hsic wakelock. If I drive during that hour, the wake time is closer to 25%. msm_hsic seems to do worse with tower handoffs.

This has been largely improved since 4.2, but it's not perfect. There's also several wakelocks that can screw this phone over like wireless charging as well as the nlpcollector wakelock.

In terms of battery, this phone probably wasn't as well optimized as a GS4 or a HTC One. You can see the endurance rating on GSM Arena (was it 36 hours?) to be worse than the Moto X, HTC One, GS4, GS3, and GS2.

The other issue is the Wifi notification delay bug which Google never fixed. I believe the drivers are updated in 4.3, but build.prop lacks the correct setting in JWR66Y. JSS15Q fixes this finally. 10 months later.

Its biggest problems, the lack of storage and LTE, still exist.

Before people jump in and say "I have LTE," let's remember this applies to T-Mobile and WIND only. There's only a handful of operators that use 1700 AWS for LTE.

 

[lopri]

My first N4 did not have a bad battery life per se but it acted erratically. For instance, it would occasionally die while idling and I would turn it back on to see this:

The replacement doesn't do this. It also fixed the hiss I used to hear when I play music through Bluetooth. It would occur whenever a singer's voice goes high-notes. That is no longer the case. I do not know whether this was fixed through 4.3 update or the replacement, for I did not think of it until I realized. It just doesn't happen as of now.

I also think subjectively the call quality of the N4 isn't as good as it is on iPhone 4S or Galaxy S4, I can live with it.

 

[lopri]

double post