Google Nexus 4 Review - Google's new Flagship
by Brian Klug on November 13, 2012 8:45 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- LG
- Android
- Mobile
- APQ8064
- Nexus 4
- Android 4.2
- MDM9215
Speakerphone and Audio
The Nexus 4 has a small vertical notch cut out of the back glass for its speakerphone port. The unfortunate part is that when the Nexus 4 is laid display-up like I always place phones for testing under our digital sound level datalogger, it is quite muted since there is no gap in the cavity for sound to escape through.
With the phone raised, however, the Nexus 4 turns out to be decently loud, which matches my subjective impressions using the device for Google Navigation over the past few days.
Noise Suppression
The Nexus 4 has a pair of microphones for noise suppression both when on calls, and also for the increasingly important task of reducing noise on ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) workloads like Google Now. I believe the Nexus 4 is using Qualcomm’s Fluence for this task, which is an adaptive beamformer system.
To test its efficacy, I turned to the industry standard babble track and ramped volume in front of a pair of speakers to 94 dBA (very loud) and then back down while recording the mobile-terminated end of the call on my PC. I should note that when I run these tests I always originate and terminate the call on the same mobile operator (in this case T-Mobile) if possible.
The Nexus 4 does a pretty decent job at canceling noise on my test call. The Galaxy Nexus noise rejection performance quite honestly never was that spectacular, and getting better noise filtering is going to be an increasingly important part of the speech recognition battle on these platforms.
Audio
Inside the Nexus 4 is a Qualcomm WCD9310 audio codec, which we’ve seen in other devices like the MSM8960-based Galaxy S 3s and a few other phones. Measuring sound quality is probably the number one requested addition to our reviews, and still is a rather nebulous thing to measure at times. For this I worked together with the ever-awesome François Simond (@supercurio) to measure sound quality on the Nexus 4 using RMAA on my desktop equipped with an ASUS Xonar Xense sound card.
Subjectively the Nexus 4 doesn't sound terrible to my ears on a pair of SE535s and listening to music at half volume or less. Objectively however the results are less than awesome thanks to a combination of things. First, audioflinger is set to 48 kHz which results in software resampling causing artifacts for 41.1 kHz source material. Second, there appears to be different modes that the Nexus 4 switches into depending on your volume level, and the frequency response plots show these different plots at the number of different volume levels we tested. We're going to update with some thoughts from Francois about the Nexus 4 soon, for now I think the Nexus 4 sounds ok at least when it comes to the most glaring of things — I couldn't detect any background hiss or whine as the SoC changes states, which is a huge percentage of what I normally wind up hearing on smartphones.
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hulabaloo - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
"We now have a form factor of device for every two inches of diagonal difference. "Should be three inches?
kyuu - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Thanks for the in-depth review, Mr. Klug. Greatly appreciated.Question: Is there a review for the Lumia 920 in the works? I'd really love to see a thorough review on it like this one from yourself or Anand.
aryonoco - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Thanks Brian, you've outdone yourself yet again. There is literally no reason to read any other Nexus 4 review.And also, a huge hats off to Anand for employing the very talented Brian and giving him a platform to show of his talents. You guys rock!
tuxRoller - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
I suppose the end result explains how thry achieved the price of $300.About the SoC, is there anyway AT could do a more detailed review of the s4 pro? Perhaps something like what you did for Swift?
There is something seriously wrong with the s4 pro. Singke threaded performance shouod be really similar to the s4 but it is always as good bit slower. The memory performance has likewise regressed.
Has there been actual architectural changes made that causes this or is it something software releated (perhaps core affinity is nonexistent causing processes to keep moving between cores thus harming single thread performance).
Slaps - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
""First, audioflinger is set to 48 kHz which results in software resampling causing artifacts for 41.1 kHz source material.""I think you mean 44.1 kHz not 41.1 kHz :)
Conficio - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Hi Brian,thanks for all the hard work that flowed into this review. Your drive to put out the best reviews is evident and you are succeeding when measured in the amount of data and information.
However, I'm considering this phone for my wife, and wanted to send it to her for a read. That is until I realized the enormous amount of comparisons to other phones, to other chips, etc. make it a really hard read. Somehow the text is a review and a history lesson mixed in one. I'd wished there would be a structure like the following:
* Introduction
* Form factor, feel, usability
* The phone's innards and benchmarks
* Comparison to phone X
* Comparison to phone Y
...
* The good, the bad, the ugly and conclusion
Funny that I'm as ambivalent about the phone. On the one side it looks great on price and basic features and independence of carriers and phone companies and their skin shenanigans (Why don't they compete on useful social or productivity software or at least make the skin removable). And I don't even need LTE, and can live w/o more memory. But then there is the thermal throttling going on and that just makes me uneasy. While it may not mean that much in today's real world applications, it is unnerving, that performance is something not reliable. It is there, but when you really use it it disappears. Reminds me of the unlimited ISP plans with speeds depending on your neighbor's usage and caps set so that they'll hurt in three years. I hope for really useful apps in three years to actually catch up to four cores.
What also bother's me is the camera. The low light performance is xoxo. But this horrible yellow tint is not something I'd appreciate. Can anybody recommend PC/ Mac OS X software to correct this? Can one set up something like a monitor calibration profile?
Conficio - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
For a few years now we had the death grip test in every phone test. Has this problem disappeared altogether? How do we know? Due to tests or any other characteristic?staticx57 - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Not a problem with the review itself, but chrome is so far behind on Android that it absolutely kills the experience. If you compare AOSP browser vs chrome, not only does the AOSP browser faster in feel but kills chrome in benchmarks. It is pathetic that the Nexus 4 with krait scores 1800 ms sunspider but the Gnex on AOSP scores much better says something about the software Google chose to ship with.Impulses - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Google really needs to address this... Whether they need to start optimizing for the most popular SoC or simply update faster, it should not be that hard for them to improve on it.thesavvymage - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - link
is there a way to just install the AOSP browser on the nexus? mine should be arriving friday if they ship on time and on my dad's gs3 i wasnt too impressed with chrome either