I'm surprised there isn't more negative backlash against the lack of a user-replaceable battery in the Nexus 4. I switched from an iPhone 4 to a Galaxy Nexus about a month before the Nexus 4 was released, and the ability to pull the battery for a quick reboot has been invaluable to me since I went kind of nuts with the rooting and playing with custom ROMs and kernels (being my first Android after living under Apple's iron fist for so long I just couldn't help myself--I've since calmed down a bit and am sticking with an unrooted stock ROM).
I would think that a replaceable battery also extends the life of the device in general for people who don't necessarily need the latest and greatest every year or two, since it's easy to just buy a new one and pop it in when the old one starts to lose its ability to hold a charge.
> I would think that a replaceable battery also extends the life of the device in general for people who don't necessarily need the latest and greatest every year or two, since it's easy to just buy a new one and pop it in when the old one starts to lose its ability to hold a charge.
This while logical turns out to not be true. Most (99.99%) people will never buy a new battery for a phone. Instead, they might sell the phone to a store which may refurbish it or give the phone to a friend or family member who dosen't need the latest phone. In the latter case the lack of battery life is typically irrelevant as the user is using the phone all the time anyways.
Yeah, this and the move towards MTP for storage (rather than an SD card) has turned me off the Nexus line. My biggest complaint about the Galaxy Nexus has been MTP - it only works half the time, requires the phone to be unlocked sometimes, can freeze up the file browser (happens in both Linux and Windows), isn't compatible with many other pieces of software (like if I want to FTP a file from a server, through my laptop, to my phone via USB using FileZilla), and transfers files extremely slowly.
Since I can't get a new phone on contract again (don't want to lose unlimited data on Verizon), I'll probably buy a used Galaxy S3 some time next summer - by then it'll hopefully be $100-200 for one that's in good shape. The Galaxy S3 has a strong modding community around it, so I can just install a stock Android ROM and things will be fine.
> I would think that a replaceable battery also extends the life of the device in general for people who don't necessarily need the latest and greatest every year or two, since it's easy to just buy a new one and pop it in when the old one starts to lose its ability to hold a charge.
Don't forget about the option of getting a bigger battery when it can be removed, for those who need their phone to last longer.
The move to MTP was because Android now uses a virtual file system that unifies the SD card and internal storage, making it unsafe to allow a foreign OS to munge the content of the filesystem at the block level.
No more USB mass storage? Darn, that was one of the main reasons I ordered a Nexus after trying another phone OS. Well, it's Linux so I suppose I can port Samba or NFS to it or something :-)
I actually looked into this once I found out the same about my Nexus 7. The workarounds all seem annoying at best. I just ended up installing a Windows 7 VM in order to make it less painful.
There is mtpfs, which mounts the storage over MTP using FUSE, but it's finicky. Since I have problems in Windows as well, I've been using FTP over Wi-Fi as much as possible, but it's quite slow compared to wired file transfer. So for large files, I'm still stuck hoping that it'll somehow work.
I use "Folder Sync". It runs on the phone, can be configured to start when on charger and on home wifi. will keep your phone synced with designated network shares.
That sounds like a good idea. The only issue would be that I'd have to get/set up Tasker/Locale with a wifi geofence, since I rarely bother connecting to my home wifi (instead of using 4G).
I would think that a replaceable battery also extends the life of the device in general for people who don't necessarily need the latest and greatest every year or two, since it's easy to just buy a new one and pop it in when the old one starts to lose its ability to hold a charge.