Ok, seems there is more to Google Play edition than meets the eye. Thank you both for the information.
Well, bring on the Nexus 5 I guess.
What you get is a lean, extremely useable version of Android (the most recent one at that) on some of the best hardware available, but at a premium price. If cost is a concern, we'd opt for the cheapest means available — begged, borrowed or stolen subsidized — and then hack it on there via unofficial means, or otherwise.
-Phil via Android Central
To better understand what Google is doing, let’s put this into perspective.
Let’s take a Shelby Mustang Cobra and take away all the various tweaks and customizations in it that make the high-performance parts so efficient. You’ll still have top-tier parts in the car but not necessarily the soul of the car. You’ll have a Samsung Galaxy S4, but minus TouchWiz and the various camera optimizations that the tuned Android build included.
It can be said that AOSP applied to just about any phone will make it run faster. Earlier models this was more pronounced, especially those built by HTC. I remember getting noticable speed gains rooting my Droid Eris and Droid Incredible. Heck, let’s look at the Nexus S – BuglessBeast made that device fly.
But that has as much to do with the software running the device as the hardware pushing it.
The Nexus S in its own right was a fabulous phone. Gingerbread was great on that phone, ICS not so much. Jellybean can run on the phone but I’ve seen more slowdown with it than I care to acknowledge. I’m kind of partial to the Nexus S 4G, as I was on Sprint at the tail end of this phone’s life cycle and couldn’t resist “pure Google”. I’ve tried multiple phones and multiple operating systems. One of the easiest ways to get the fine-tuned performance out of a device you need is to run a customized build. Every Android device I owned was rooted at some point and ran a customized version of the OS.
This is why Windows Phone can be successful – if Microsoft became the only handset producer for the OS and developed hardware (through Nokia) and fine-tuned software to take advantage of superior components the sky is the limit. Android tries, albiet with moderate success, to be all things to all people. Unfortunately you can’t escape fragmentation within the ecosystem, and that is because everyone is allowed to add aftermarket performance parts and accessories. Some devices end up being Shelby Cobras, others end up being Honda Civics with excessively loud mufflers and neon lights underneath the car.
Has HTC made some great Windows Phone devices? Yes. Samsung? But most of the marketshare has been captured by Nokia who went all in with their manufacturing strategy, although an Android-based device was tested as a “Plan B”. Because the focus was on Windows Phone, the devices themselves were simply better. If Samsung put as much effort in a…Galaxy W… device, would we really see Nokia bought out by Microsoft? I’d venture to say Nokia would be a player in both Windows Phone and Android.
I therefore cannot compare an “experience” phone to the real thing. The GPE device doesn’t bring anything worthwhile to the table. It is a specialized build that comes with high-performance parts at the expense of the software that was tuned to run it from the start. A Nexus device is designed with hardware and software working in concert; not necessarily optimized for each other but as an example of what is possible when similar hardware/software is paired together. And with a price difference of several hundred dollars, no carrier subsidies and limited availablity (networks, regions) it is a me, too device.
Get a cheaper Android and root it. Install Cyanogenmod and get the benefits of plain Android for ? the price.
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