Came off a Samsung Charge which I got in the spring of 2011, The charge was my first smartphone...I held out with an old Nokia candybar phone for 6 years because of its far superior signal strength.
The Charge being my first smartphone, it has to be the baseline which I measure by. The charge had MAJOR issues with data connectivity...I had 3 of them, all of them bad....very slow browser, etc.
Just got the Nexus, as I have heard it is much better data connectivity, not as laggy, and generally wont freeze up like the charge did.....which has all been true so far....
But now for the bad........
Ok, you would think when you go from 2.3.6 to 4.1.1, things would get better, with more features, but I have found the opposite to be true....i keep finding things this phone cant do, or does so miserably that gingerbread CHARGE did just fine.
1)Stock email client much better on CHARGE, can see all three of my accounts on one screen with simple tabs at the top. Email widget actually shows how many new unread emails you have. Gingerbread email client is colored very nicely, white on black for unreads, and gray on gray for read emails...easy to scroll thru, and spot unreads.
The other HUGE problem with the email client (and K9 email for that matter) is that you can not SHRINK the email small enough to fit it on the screen! (I mean COME ON!) this is even worse if it is an HTML email.
2) 4.1.1 dialer inferior on GNexus (no T9, colors suck, no option to send text message to number, no link to contacts) also when you end a call, you dont have the option to immediately text that person (as in the person didnt answer, so I am going to text them)
3) 4.1.1 contacts or "people" list has similar issues, colors suck, harder to read, cant swipe a contact right or left to dial or text...when you open up a contact, the look is OK, (white on black) but it is harder to read, and just plain looks cheap, and is not as functional.
4) Text messaging....again, this app is poorly colored, harder to read, (white is NOT white on this phone) and no options to change the theme, colors, font size, color of incomings, backround colors etc.....when someone texts me a picture, I have to click on a "arrow" which brings me to another screen where the pic is displayed...in the CHARGE, the picture just shows up in the text body, and clicking on it will bring you to a seperate page with a bigger photo...
5) volume is kind of quite
luckily there are a few fixes, but they are not perfect...I have yet to find an email client that I like, and i have tried a ton of them...as for the dialer, and contacts list, exDialer by modoohut is absolutely fantastic, especially with the SGS2 theme....it adds almost all the features the stock dialer and contact list is missing, but unfortunately, this is not a full replacement for the system app...and when requesting contact info from other apps, it often goes to the STOCK contact manager, which is not cool. As for a Text messsanger, I have found that GO SMS PRO is much better...
If anyone has any solutions to these issues, I am all ears....because in reality, I lover the way the UI worked in Gingerbread, I just hated that the phone and OS (or combination of the two) was very laggy, and freeze prone, and wasnt good at multi-tasking.