Nexus 4 review

Elsewhere small, thoughtful touches abound. Triple-tapping activates a screen zoom feature. Homescreen icons move to make room for new items as you drag them into place. Instagram-style filters can be applied to pictures, with a finger-drag generating a quick before-and-after, split-field view. The Daydream screensaver cycles through your photos or the latest stories from Google Currents.

The camera app has been redesigned, with the settings listed in a circular menu, and the addition of Photo Sphere – a fun, panorama-style mode that takes 360-degree pictures.

The hardware

It’s the best version of Android so far, and better still it’s running on some very attractive hardware. Built by LG, the Nexus 4 is smart and understated, with a glass rear that shimmers and glitters beautifully in the right light, and a clean, classy Gorilla Glass front panel.

It’s well built, comfortable to hold, and at 9.1mm only marginally thicker than the 8.6mm Galaxy S III. A handful of things put it at a disadvantage to its main rival, though: the battery can’t be replaced, and there’s no microSD slot for adding extra storage. There’s also no 4G version yet.

The Nexus 4 marks the first time we’ve seen the Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU in any smartphone or tablet and here this 1.5GHz, quad-core chip is partnered with an Adreno 320 graphics core and 2GB of RAM.

That’s a killer line-up, and in benchmarks it was around the same speed as the Galaxy S III – faster in some tests and slower in others. It scored 2,082 to the Samsung’s 1,782 in Geekbench, in Quadrant the Nexus scored 4,993 to the Samsung’s 5,371, and the Google handset took 1,902ms to finish the SunSpider benchmark, where the Galaxy S III beat it on 1,344ms. Both phones finished our 24-hour battery test with 60% remaining on the gauge.