When Google announced the Nexus 4 smartphone, it was easily one of the most powerful Android smartphones currently in the market. With the leading edge Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM, it was one of the few so-called “superphones” in the market. Add to that the guarantee of being the first to receive software updates and the vanilla Android experience – and the sensationally competitive price – makes the Nexus 4 a tough one to ignore.
However, many in the West are bemoaning the lack of LTE support in the Nexus 4, with some going as far as calling this omission akin to being sacrilegious and totally unacceptable for a 2012 flagship smartphone. Well, as it turns out, during the routine teardown by iFixit to determine its repairability, the Nexus 4 not only scored above average in terms of repairability (not that it matters that much to us), embedded in the Nexus 4’s motherboard is a seven-band LTE chip, just waiting to be activated. We’re not sure why this fact was not highlighted by Google when the criticisms were pouring in, but at least that’s one pleasant surprise to Nexus 4 owners.
Unfortunately, there is some bad news in store to go along with the good news. For starters, it appears that Android 4.2 Jelly Bean has a really weird bug on its People app, where users cannot input a contact’s birthday if they were born in December – because the option is missing. Even worse, this is not an issue with the Nexus 4, but all devices running on Android 4.2 – and we may not see a fix until the next software update.
In addition, the Nexus 4 also appears to suffer from lens flaring in its camera, which was made famous by Apple’s iPhone 5. As we mentioned back then, many photography experts are saying lens flaring – or purple haze – does happen even to high end cameras, although that doesn’t explain why some cameras exhibit the issue and some, like Nokia’s Lumia smartphones and even the 808 PureView, don’t. Either way, we will check it out as and when we get our hands on a review unit.
