Saturday, February 23, 2013

96 Days, and Counting

Yep, 96 days since the Nexus 4 narcolepsy wifi bug was first reported here, and again later here.

However, after using up nearly a whole box of digital bandaids, like this one, which required rooting the phone, and this one, which was necessary to fully goad the still groggy N4 into reliably responding to push notifications when on wifi, well, the phone sort of works on wifi as you would have expected.

All this being necessary because Google just can't muster up the wherewithal to push out a fix for the buggy Qualcomm wifi driver.

However, if you dare to attempt to use wifi and bluetooth at the same time, say, to make a Skype call while using a bluetooth headset, boom: bluetooth kills the wifi radio.  Every time.  Usually locking up the phone in the process.

Other than that, the Nexus 4 is a great phone.  I guess.

--Doug

7 comments:

  1. Well, my trusty ole 3gs does all the above without any problems. Google is going to rue the day they did not get together with LG and put this fire out, once and for all. A "smartphone" that cannot use BT or wifi correctly, way ahead of the curve again, google.

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  2. i wish i had known your blog before i bought my nexus4 two weeks ago :)

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  3. I sympathize. I ended up rooting mine and installed this patch:

    http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2072930

    as a work-around to the wifi suspend problem, but bluetooth still won't work when wifi is on.

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  4. My bluetooth works flawlessly while connected to wifi. I regularly workout streaming music while listening with bluetooth headphones. I do still get the issue of greyed out wifi bars after about 15 minutes of deep sleep, but I do not get this when streaming music. I've had my nexus 4 about 15 days. However I'm not sure if I have ever left the screen off for 15 minutes or more while streaming music with bluetooth connected.

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  5. That's very interesting, 4:33. I've tried my Plantronics BT headset, and a BT keyboard, and they both kill wifi every time. You might want to take a look at this bug report, where a number of people have similar complaints:

    https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=41631

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  6. Checked out the bug report. Connected my Jaybird Freedoms to listen to music streamed from songza over wifi. No issue with the wifi. Opened up phone app while listening to music...dialed a number and immediately the wifi drops and bluetooth becomes choppy.

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  7. You might find this one interesting as well. The nature of the Qualcomm wifi driver bug is such that the Nexus 4 behaves differently with different routers:

    http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2072930

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