So I've decided it's time I got a new phone and (hold onto your hats folks) I've decide the iPhone 5 just isn't for me. I tried one in an Apple shop last night and while it's perfectly serviceable iOS device, I just don't like the 'feel' of it as a phone. It's too vertically thin and very, very much too light and it feels.. hollow. It's like - you know some mobile phone shops have plastic replicas of phones rather than actual phones on their displays? The iPhone 5 feels like one of those plastic replicas. No iOS then. As I said elsewhere, the windows 8 phones are nice but the app store just isn't mature enough yet and I'm not sure it'll ever get enough market share to attract the developers to get there. So I'm left with Android. I have no problem with this tbh.

So, actual phones. I don't change my phone often, so I might as well go for state of the art (or as near to such things as exist in the Android world at any given time). My three choices basically come down to

Google Nexus 4
HTC One
Sony Xperia Z.

Anyone got any strong opinion regarding these three - to me they all have some plus and minus points but I'm kind of veering slightly towards the Sony (mainly because of it having an SD slot tbh).

Bloody hell.. Never thought I'd see you writing that. To be honest if I was you I'd go for the nexus 4. Mainly for the updates from Google. You don't have to worry about any update having to go through the manufacturer.
With my S3 I put in a SD card and have never used it. Then again I don't fill it up with music as I use to on my old iPhone.

Have you thought about the new Windows 8 phone?

See OP. I have a windows phone for work currently which as a phone I'm rather impressed with. However I did a list of the things I did with my phone or needed it to do and there were a couple of things that there just weren't windows phone 8 apps for yet, and a couple where the available apps looked quite poor. Not sure I could sign up for a phone hoping better apps showed up at some point and deal with the inconvenience in the meantime, especially given windows phone 8's market share doesn't really create a great incentive for app developers to jump onboard.

As to the Nexus 4, a work colleague has one and it's a nice phone indeed. And, as you say, the fact it will always be running the most up to date OS versions and it's got guaranteed updates are major points in it's favour. However I think 16GB of storage may not be enough (I'm currently using 22GB on my iPhone 4) so the lack of an SD card slot does bear against it, although I hear what you say. As does the fact it's not 4G. I know right now 4G is a joke but I tend to keep my phones for quite a while so I kind of have to think of future proofing a bit. The Nexus 4 isn't off the list at all, which is why I am canvassing opinion. The problem is the other two aren't actually in people's hands yet so while I have read a few reviews, there's not a lot of word of mouth, which doesn't help matters. Internally, they're pretty much of a muchness and they each have pluses and minutes of varying degrees - for example, the Nexus has contact charging which the others don't, but I do like having my phone in a dock at night and the dock with the Xperia is rather nice while Google don't seem to want to bring a dock for the Nexus 4 to the UK...

Sony phones are the one thing they've did right in recent years; from my own to ones I've tinkered with, 'everything just works'

AVOID HTC phones - we rolled around 45 of these out to our employees (HTC One V) last November and so far I've had 4 fail with exactly the same fault whereby they stop connecting to the mobile network and even a factory reset does not cure it so looks like the internal mobile bit has packed up I spoke to our usual UPS bloke when I sent them back to HTC to fix and he said he collects more HTC phones than any other which is not a good sign. So far 3 have come back from HTC supposedly repaired but 2 still won't work on the mobile network so f*****g useless.

Now Samsung phones on the other hand

Apparently they are more reliable than HTC but still have more than their fair share of faults.

Whenever I read/hear google nexus 7, it sounds like an instruction to me.

We say the same about iPhones. We've rolled out 6 and we've had 12 fail in 2 years...

Mostly with BlueTooth or Wi-Fi not working, although we've had 3 battery failures.

On the other hand, we have a lot of htcs privately owned and I don't know of anyone who has had problems.

The biggest problem with Apple is, you have to wait 2 weeks for them to repair / replace the phone, whereas htc (and Samsung) send out a replacement phone with the courier, to replace the broken one.

We've also got 3 Samsung Galaxy SIIIs and an SII, 3 of the 4 devices have been replaced, 2 with broken screens, because they were dropped and one with no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth (after being dropped from 2M onto marble, the screen remained intact, which saved us 90€ swap out fee, which you have to pay for water damage or broken displays).

Galaxy S4 could be out next month.

Other than that I've got no experience of Sony Android handsets, loved my last HTC in terms of build, look, feel and Sense but got far too many crashes for me to rush to get another and think the Nexus 4 is (particularly for the money) amazing. It's juts a shame about the glass back which will get scratched and possibly cracked.

Well, I think the Nexus may be off the list. I borrowed a Nexus 7 from work to have play with and it's got one enormous flaw - no mass storage mode via USB. Means I'd have to copy all my media and stuff onto it via wifi in some form, either using a file explorer and a network share or something like doubletwist. Feck that for a game of soldiers. Assuming the HTC, which also doesn't have a card slot, suffers from the same problem (it turns out Android 4 devices can't present their internal storage to USB properly) then it's the Sony or wait for the Galaxy 4, and I can't say like the style of Samsung phones all that much

I just plugged mine in and it was instantly recognised as a disk labelled "internal storage" on device "Nexus 7" with full read-write access. It's Android 4 point something; it updated the other day so I guess it's the latest release.

I think the one you borrowed was broken, or maybe the lead didn't connect properly? It's an odd fit because of the curved edge. Or maybe it's a security policy?

you just set the usb connection as media device and boom mass storage device ability is there or have it set as camera (PTP). So no flaw unless its the person who has it set that way

4.2.2 I think.
It's not just me that is seeing this problem. I connected it via USB and was only offered MTP (media) and PTP (camera) modes. If the cable was shot I wouldn't have been offered USB connectivity at all.


Possibly the security policy is the answer. The policy requires storage to be encrypted and although we don't block USB access, that could cause Mass Storage to be disallowed as that would allow data to be copied off the device. With every other policy restriction however the banned option (for example face recognition unlock) still appears, it's just greyed out. And that doesn't explain why other people are seeing the same issue. Is your Nexus 'vanilla' or have you rooted it?

Looking at it, I see what you mean about the curved back. I'm not using the cable that shipped with it, but if they've somehow buggered the USB port so you can only use their supplied cable that's no better recommendation. I think I'll try taking the 'enterprise' account off it (thus hopefully removing the security policy), we'll see if that makes any difference.

Edit : Can't do that apparently, as it was the 'owner' account, which you can't delete. Going to try a factory reset then install my personal account, to eliminate the security policy as possible cause.

Further Edit : Nope, still only getting PTP and MTP.

Before you do all that - I just had a quick look at one of your links, and it seems it's connected using MTP. It was transparent to me because I'm on Windows 7, and I'd never even heard of it!

Looking it device manager it appears under "Portable Devices" and there's no entry in disk management.

So yeah, no mass storage option. Not an issue for me, but I can see how it might be.

I'm using a generic cable. It works, but it doesn't feel entirely secure.

It's totally vanilla. Only had it a week and not found any problems that would call for rooting.