Tuesday, April 9, 2013

The Fine Art of Corporate Fibbing

Word has it that the good folks at Google's Device Support hotline (1-855-836-3987) are still telling people who call in to complain about the wifi and bluetooth issues with their Nexus 4 phones one of two little white whoppers:

  • (Imagine a voice on the telephone expressing the deepest of surprise) "Really? There are no reports of any wifi problems like that for the Nexus 4. Would you like to exchange your phone for a new one?" Or,
  • (Imagine a voice on the telephone expressing the deepest of regret) "Oh, we are so sorry.  If that happened to me I'd be very concerned too! But tragically, that was intended functionality of the phone. We designed it so that you could not use wifi and bluetooth at the same time.
In the mean time, a developer over at XDA has provided a kernel that includes a new beta release of the Nexus 4 Qualcomm Prima wifi driver code that completely fixes the first bug, above, that Google has never heard of. I'm running the latest nightly CyanogenMod 10.1 release with this kernel, and it completely fixes this problem (that Google has never heard about).

Also, as I write this the CyanogenMod developers are integrating the new Qualcomm Prima driver code into their nightly builds, so that this bug (which Google has never heard about) will soon be fixed there as well.

Regarding the intended functionality bug that prevents the N4 from being able to run wifi and bluetooth at the same time [note that this only happens when you are connected to a wifi access point running at 2.4 GHz; if your wifi access is running at 5 GHz you do not experience this bug] there has not been even a whisper that anyone is looking at this.

What I find amazing is that Google has been given a free pass on these little corporate fibs. Nobody has called them on it.  I guess I'm still naive after all these years; I confess to have been completely fooled, snookered, suckered, taken in hook, line, and sinker regarding Google's corporate motto. 

“War is peace. 
Freedom is slavery. 
Ignorance is strength.” 
― George Orwell, 1984

"Lying is not Evil."
― Google, 2013

--Doug

12 comments:

  1. A little new to this kernel thing. I just got my N4, updated to 4.2.2 and rooted/installed a custom recovery. Can I just flash the "motley_anykernel_422_nexus_4_build_49_new_prima_update_2.zip"
    after flashing a rom? Your help is much appreciated

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  2. Hi Anonymous. You should be able to flash that kernel over your stock 4.2.2 image without installing a custom ROM, if you wanted to give that a try. Or, you could install a custom ROM, like CynaogenMod and then flash the kernel. I strongly recommend that you first boot into recovery and make a backup, just in case something gets hosed.

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  3. Interesting. I'll give that a try. Reading the OP's instructions, I thought I'd have to flash the B37 kernel first followed by that kernel. Hopefully Google issues a fix soon. Cheers

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  4. I don't think you will need to do that, it should work to just flash it over the stock kernel. But, be sure to make a backup first. Backups are your friend.

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  5. Let us know how it goes, Anonymous, we'd love to hear back on your experiences.

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  6. Very odd actually. I just came back from Turkey to another Nexus 4, brand new and purchased in February. It's still running on 4.2.0 and I have not encountered any wifi issues whatsoever. In fact the device is running so well that I don't want to update it....weird because my other nexus4 that I purchased in December had all sorts of issues.

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    Replies
    1. Have you tried connecting a bluetooth keyboard and mouse while you're connected to a 2.4GHz Wifi access point?

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    2. hmm...haven't tried this and truthfully, I'm not going to touch the bluetooth while on wifi just in case it triggers something to go wrong.

      Yesterday I factory reset, wiped all cache and flashed the AOKP JB-MR1 straight to my rooted stock 4.2.0. The issue I have with stock rom is that the battery drains too fast. It's been running fine so far and wifi still seems to work flawlessly. I'll keep you guys posted in case anything goes wrong but maybe give AOKP a try...

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  7. Looks like Google has finally realized their incompetence in making phones.
    They're apparently hitch hiking on Samsung's Galaxy S4 and branding it as their next Nexus. Pathetic really, most probably trying to absolve all responsibility on the phone and pinning everything onto Samsung.

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  8. I'm old enough to know better, but I was still surprised by the open dishonesty of Google's Play Support operation regarding the Nexus 4 bugs.

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  9. Well, current Android support is nothing but a wall for people to cry.

    Google does not have the capacity, or the will to provide capacity for support teams / engineering, and will never have.

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  10. Google is big and inefficient. What happened to Microsoft, and what is happening to Apple will happen to Google. And then some other corporate entity will arise to replace them, too.

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