Ubuntucat

I just got my third Android phone. You can read about my previous experiences: T-Mobile MyTouch 3G First Impressions, Why people get Nexus phones: I rooted my MyTouch 4G after less than one day

This time, I got a Nexus phone—the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. I’m just going to list the positives and negatives. These are positives and negatives for me. There may be things you care about that I don’t and things I care about that you don’t. Either way, you may find these lists useful in some way.

Positives

• Swipe-away notifications.
• Swipe-away recent apps list.
• Software buttons.
• Beautiful screen.
• Built-in screenshot ability without root (volume down button and power button together).
• Verizon LTE network.
• I have a Tasker profile that’s a tweaked version of what Juice Defender does. It’s either near-instant or only one second to reconnect when the screen turns back on.
• No shutter lag on camera.
• Camera photo quality better than most reviews would have you believe.
• Speaker is audible, despite what negative reviews say.
• No need to root to get vanilla Android.
• Will get updates to new version of Android before other phone models.
• Not much bloatware on here, but Verizon managed to squeeze a couple of useless apps on. With Ice Cream Sandwich, you can disable these apps even if you can’t uninstall them.

Negatives

• Headphones are noise-reducing ones, which are really uncomfortable for me. I know others prefer these. And I found an extra set of old headphones I can use instead.
• Autorotate is slow.
• The Android File Transfer app for Mac OS X needs the phone to be unlocked (makes sense, but confusing before you know it), and can transfer only one folder at a time from Finder.
• Even though speakers are audible, they are not loud, so you will have to crank them up to the max volume to get decent sound.
• Facial recognition to unlock takes too long. It has to load in a second or two before it even tries to recognize your face.
• Battery life is not good. The screen is huge, and in the battery stats it easily takes up more than 50% of the battery use. Fortunately I can make it through the whole day using my pseudo–Juice Defender profile in Tasker. I also bought an extra battery from Verizon for $20.
• The menu soft key (which is now three dots) is sometimes at the top of the screen and sometimes at the bottom of the screen.
• Keyboard autosuggestions is worse than the Gingerbread keyboard, which was awesome. I used to get four or five autosuggestions. Now I get only three and have to long-press on one to get more.
• Now that file transfer is MTP, I can’t use DoubleTwist as I normally would. Luckily, I could copy a ton of music and then use the AirSync plugin to finish the rest of the sync wirelessly. I understand why Google moved from MSC to MTP, but it’s also screwed things up a bit.
• The screen is large, which is beautiful, but it also means I can’t do one-handed WordFeud/Words with Friends while on the bus.
• If you use the slide-to-unlock unlock method, there’s no way to disable the haptic feedback on it.

Overall, despite all the cons, I love this phone. Ice Cream Sandwich has a beautiful UI, which is a joy to use. The phone is fast. And Verizon’s LTE is wonderful.

TouchNooter
The Nook Simple Touch is an excellent e-reader, and I like that Barnes and Noble keeps it that way. The e-ink screen and simple form factor make it perfect for reading books. That said, just for curiosity’s sake, I dove in and rooted the thing.

TouchNooter is an amazing script that automates the rooting process.

Getting it to work
Unfortunately, I had trouble reading directions, so it took me a long time to root. I kept dding the .zip file instead of unzipping it first and then dding the resulting unzipped .img file instead.

After I did that, I also realized that the wireless was off on my Nook, which meant I couldn’t follow the directions and sign in right away, which meant there was some weird bug with signing into the Android Market (I kept getting an error message about the network connection, even after I turned on wireless). I did quite a bit of Google searching. Some people recommended pushing a new Vending.apk file to the Nook via adb, but I couldn’t get adb to recognize the device, even after enabling USB debugging. Turned out the solution I stumbled upon that worked was just adding a second Google account to Gmail. Once I did that, I could magically sign into the Market app with my regular Google account.

e-ink-friendly Apps
There were some apps that quite obviously couldn’t run well on an e-ink screen with a slow processor and little RAM. Others surprised me. I had Google Translate, Flixster Movies, Google Books (once I tried to actually read a book), and Facebook crash or hang on me. Others that I thought would be problematic ended up being fine (Facebook can’t load, but Twitter and Google Plus work all right).

Apps that are definitely great for a rooted Nook are ES File Explorer, Gmail, Opera Mobile, Terminal Emulator, WordFeud, and Words with Friends. The latter two are especially good, since the Nook offers a bigger screen than most phones, and it also doesn’t go to screensaver for five minutes (by default), so you have plenty of time to consider your moves before playing them.

Other tweaks
Swiping left to right isn’t terrible smooth on an e-ink display, so I removed all but one screens on my ADW Launcher. I plopped a power widget on the home screen to toggle wireless on and off easily.

I also set hardware buttons (the top-left for the Back button, the top-right for the Menu button, the Nook key for regular ADW home instead of the Barnes and Noble home—otherwise you get stuck in the Barnes and Noble interface and can’t get back to ADW without rebooting).

Gallery wouldn’t recognize photos off my MicroSD card, so I used ES File Explorer to find my screensaver photo (of my cat) and then used the ES File Explorer image viewer to set that photo as my wallpaper in ADW.

Belated Caveat
If you’ve never rooted an Android device before, most of what I’ve just said will just sound like gobbledygook, but I wish someone else had written all that. Would have saved me a lot of trouble.