As the US gets the Galaxy Nexus today, and as I have had mine for three weeks or so now, here are some more considered thoughts after my initial 24-hour review. It’s only with continuous use that you discover issues with devices: and this, for me, is why reviews are normally fairly useless, since they rarely use a device for longer than a day or two; so I hope you find this useful.

On the mobile network 3, I didn’t suffer the volume bug which plagued other users (though when using my O2 SIM in the phone I certainly did). This is the only apparent bug that has been reported in the press. But there are more: and this post is mostly about them.

Bug: Calendar synch is dodgy
After 24 hours of having the phone, all my calendar information from my main calendar simply disappeared. Accessing via the mobile interface also appeared to show a completely empty calendar. To say I was concerned would be an under statement. Thankfully, something odd was happening with the calendar on the phone; I fixed it, and thought nothing more of it.
Recently, the calendar stopped synching certain events: so if I added an event on the web, it didn’t synch onto the phone. After missing two appointments (grr), I’ve worked out how to fix that, too: but doubtless it’ll happen again.
If you need to fix the Galaxy Nexus calendar, I’ve added a fix to the Google calendar help forums.

Bug: The screen sometimes becomes completely unresponsive
The physical buttons on the phone still work, but the screen stops reacting to any button press. Since there appears to be no way of forcing the phone to switch off (holding down the power button appears to do nothing), the only way to escape out of this is to yank the battery out – or, oddly, wait for some time after which the bug fixes itself.

Bug: Android is upgrading
On boot, it always claims that Android is upgrading. It’s not, of course, and I suspect it really means it’s running some system checks of some kind. I personally think this is a bug. The rest of the web appears undecided: perhaps it’s just poor wording (and ought to read “Android is starting”).

Bug: Sometimes it breaks my Mac
I charge it occasionally through the USB port on my MacBook Air – which has the Android Filesystem software on it. Sometimes it stops the cursor working, which is a frustration: and the only way out of that is a hard reboot.

Feature! It works perfectly with Bluetooth keyboards
After fifteen minutes fiddling in a Washington DC-based BestBuy, I discovered that the Galaxy Nexus (and, one would suspect, any ICS system) pairs quite happily with a Bluetooth keyboard, like the Apple one. While ostensibly a touch interface, you get quite used to the keyboard, and it’s a godsend for sending long emails and other things.

Boo – no Flash support… yet
There’s no Flash support for the Galaxy Nexus yet: which means no BBC iPlayer and no BBC News app either. Apparently it’s coming: and that might be one of the reasons why it’s taken some time to see it in the US.

Boo – support is flaky for games
I’ve been taking advantage of the 10p offer on the Android Market a lot, and I’ve spotted quite a few games that simply haven’t worked at all, or those that do are calibrated wrongly (a quite good racing game is impossible to play since the accellerometer is the wrong way round). As we see more ICS devices, I suspect we’ll see better support.

The battery
Battery life is about as good as any other Android phone: which is to say, not brilliant. What people forget about Android applications is that they all can steal processor power and communicate back to base; and that all takes battery power; and it’s doubtless an errant app. I’ll see if I can work out what’s going on.

But that’s about it: no other issues. Interestingly, I find my Sony Tablet S now feels “old-fashioned” when using it, and I’m very much looking forward to it getting an ICS upgrade (apparently in Feb or March next year).

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