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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
188 Comments
View All Comments
meloz - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - link
>It's really cheap, though.Until you include the price of a carrier plan? Or were you planning to use this smartphone without any phone capabilities? Apple iphone sells so well *inspite* of its premium price because most people who buy it buy with plans.
doobydoo - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
The iPhone 5 is $199 on contract, right?How much is the Nexus 4 on contract?
Guspaz - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Hard to do a direct comparison when you can't find the thing anywhere. None of the major Canadian carriers have the Nexus 4, but the LG Optimus G was $50 less than the iPhone 5. A list of what I saw:iPhone 5: $180
LG Optimus G: $130
Galaxy Nexus: $0
iPhone 4S: $0
Sabresiberian - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
This is the best thing Google does (make phones that can be used on any service provider), in my opinion. $300 (or $350) for a top-end phone you can use on any carrier? Almost makes my desire for a Nokia 920 Win 8 phone go away.Then, I think about Android compared to Win 8, and realize that will likely never happen.
;)
crankerchick - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Thanks for the thorough review. Too bad this phone will go largely unnoticed in the US amongst non-enthusiasts, and almost wholly ignored by any one on CDMA. Those of wanting LTE (who also acknowledge that a nexus on VZW is a hard feat to accomplish) are left wanting more, and *gasp* looking at the iPhone 5. I wanted this to be my next, but I'm not willing to switch to have it.I hope the folks around the world make this phone super-successful and can make this phone a game changer in the Android landscape (and here in the US where carriers rule and the customers drool). That's a lot to ask, but I'm still hopeful.
superjim - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
WTB Nexus 10 review. Sure there's plenty on the net but I specifically wait for the AT review.Pipperox - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
I do not understand how Google can sell a "flagship" phone which is unable to complete a 3D benchmark without thermal throttling.This is unacceptable, do they expect people who run intensive 3D apps such as games to take a liquid cooling kit with them?
Also unacceptable is the lack of browser optimizations for this SoC.
The Snapdragon S4 Pro is a BEAST, with 2x the theoretical CPU power than pretty much any other ARM SoC (with the exception of the Cortex A15 which is only for tablets now), and yet one sees lackluster performance in most browser related tests.
This is a diamond which hasn't been polished at all... the only thing going for it is the price.
JohnnyL53 - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - link
The throttling is not an issue if it doesn't result in any real world performance slowdown. Although the reviewer adds subjective comments to the battery life section, I would like to see some comments as to how benchmark performance actually relates to real world performance. What seems to be poor performance in a benchmark may not even be apparent when playing a 3D intensive game.meloz - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - link
>The throttling is not an issue if it doesn't result in any real world performance slowdown.Yes, because in real world everyone will use this device in temperature controlled room (mom's basement?). I mean, who goes out on a hot summer day?
doobydoo - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
The bottom line is that if you have to use a freezer to get results from a phone in the same situation where other phones don't have such a requirement, there are issues.The reality is that this phone probably gets too hot so the throttling was a necessity rather than a choice.