A couple of months back my HTC Wildfire S started complaining about there not being enough memory to download and install Android and other bloatware updates. It was getting to the point where the thing wouldn’t start up properly or wouldn’t close down without me manually clearing out all of the borked updates. I’d uninstalled all the apps from it, moved as many of them as I could to the SD Card but the phone has pretty much obsoleted itself. I started looking around at new phones without much enthusiasm and had pretty quickly settled on an iPhone 4 or a Samsung Galaxy S2. These met my two main criteria, firstly, enough memory to stop the sort of crap the HTC phone had afflicted me with, and secondly not too expensive. I just couldn’t see any earthly reason why I’d spend $500+ on a phone. I mean, come on, it’s just a freaking phone!

I drifted along aimlessly for weeks with my HTC keeping it going because I really didn’t want a new phone. The Samsung and the iPhone didn’t excite me and it’s completely usual for me to procrastinate endlessly over purchases that don’t excite me. Unless a gadget is terminally ill or the replacement is alluring in some way then I’ll just stick with the status quo. Then I read a review of the Google Nexus 4, the phone made by LG for Google to run their Android 4.2 operating system. An OS that wasn’t burdened down by crappy OEM apps that you couldn’t install, wouldn’t ever use, and that just got bigger and bigger over time as they endlessly updated themselves. Bliss! Android as Google intended it. I had to have this Google Nexus 4, surely all my phone woes would be solved by this one, single phone, one phone to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them. Errr *cough*, sorry Lord of the Rings flashbacks there.

So I ordered one through the Google Play store. Total cost was AU$419 delivered for the 16GB Nexus 4. It arrived about 3 weeks later and it’s been a very happy relationship so far. So much so that I really have nothing bad to say about the phone. The screen is a nice size but not so huge that I feel like I’ve got a book in my pocket when I’m carrying it around. The camera is nice and takes goodish pictures that work well on social media sites. The performance is snappy, with no noticeable lag or delays running games or apps. For the first time I find myself just playing with a phone rather than using it as, well, a phone. The Nexus is a fun device to fiddle with, download apps to, and customise to suit your whim of the moment. My only warning is that the phone doesn’t contain an external mini SD slot so if you’re someone who must have thousands of songs to listen to then you might be out of luck. I don’t really listen to music so it’s no biggie to me.

Highly recommended.