"The offline playback stuff continues to be pretty clunky to set up. If I know I am going on a road trip and will be driving out of range, actually adding that music to the device is a huge pain, and often the easiest way is just to leave the device playing music for days and let it build up a cache. Horrible."

It's not obvious but the way to do this is to "pin" (aka mark as keeping for offline) playlists on the device. Create a few travel playlists, pin them on the device, put the device on wifi or change the data settings in the app, go to the web client and mass drag and drop songs onto the travel playlists. I manage about 6 GB worth of offline music this way and it works decently. Once in a while you have to go into settings and tap "Refresh Music" to get it to recognize a new playlist but I maybe do that once a month.

This is my favorite feature of the service (Spotify has this, as well). The best part is you can pin a playlist and it auto-updates when you add songs. When I'm going out of the country I'll create a 'Trip to XX' playlist, pin it, and then over the days/weeks leading up to the trip add things to it. The app auto-downloads as you do so.

It also does it across devices! I have a crappy old smartphone w/o a sim card that I use for running, and have a running playlist pinned to it.

I can be listening at work, add a song to the playlist, and then back at home the device automatically downloads the new song over wifi for when I go running. (I'm sure spotify does this too)

I use the Kindle app for Android because that is where the indie authors seem to be. I use the app in spite of itself. The Kindle app on Android has over the past few years been such a buggy piece of shit that I curse it's very existence. It alone has demonstrated that Amazon can't competently develop mobile apps worth a damn and made me laugh when I heard Amazon was making a phone.

Once a month Amazon seems to make a release that outright breaks a critical flow in the app. For the past couple weeks I've had to use the website to skim through books because every time the app tries to open the store view for a book the app instead opens Chrome with "about:blank" as the URL. /facepalm

I'll ignore the fact the tablet version gets a proper store interface (when it's not completely broken) but the cellphone version gets a regurgitated ancient web view that was last updated a half decade ago.

I can only conclude that Kindle isn't profitable for Amazon at all and they throw appropriate talent at it... that is none at all.

Does Apple give a rip about iBooks? Google doesn't seem to give a crap about getting indies on Google Play.

I think you have the causality backwards. It's not that Google doesn't care about getting indies on Google Play (though, to be fair, not enough to deal with the havoc their automatic discounting creates for indies, last I heard), it's that indies often don't really care about being anywhere but Amazon (largest market, extra perks for titles that are exclusive, less to manage and so on). For obvious reasons, this may not be a great long-run choice for them, but it can be very attractive in the short-run.

> Once a month Amazon seems to make a release that outright breaks a critical flow in the app. For the past couple weeks I've had to use the website to skim through books because every time the app tries to open the store view for a book the app instead opens Chrome with "about:blank" as the URL. /facepalm

Had same issue, reported it, was told to uninstall and reinstall, no joy. Upgraded to Android 5.1 which included a new webview component update, issue fixed.

We live in a sea of available entertainment and sources of amusement. Why be so attached to one particular form of entertainment when the cartel that controls it doesn't make it easy or inexpensive to consume?

@touchmuchtodo, unfortunately you cannot stream digital antenna content to a Chromecast directly. I would assume it would need a digital signal converter, at the very least. I've been considering getting a TV tuner card for my desktop explicitly for streaming live games to my Chromecasts.

(I couldn't seem to reply to you directly for whatever reason)

Off topic: Can you stream over the air digital antenna content to a Chromecast directly?

7" screen was the perfect size for reading books and comics in my opinion. I'd preferred to have gotten a new 7" with smaller bezels. Might as well skip this Nexus generation.

As someone against having any form of debt other than a mortgage or useless obligation such as a cellular contract:

$649 is where I stop paying attention to the Nexus line.

The hours worked to afford the device and it's needed case and accessories make the 6" screen not worth it.

And trying to hide the cost behind a cellular contract brings that cost over a thousand dollars. Stupid.

That isn't a physical button, it's a speaker. Dual front facing speakers.

Rogue DHCP servers should not be a problem in any decently engineered enterprise or college campus network. Cisco switches have included DHCP snooping for years which when used only allows authorized switch ports to act as a DHCP server. Any decent enterprise wireless platform should either have transparent firewall functionality to block client DHCP responses or an equivalent to DHCP snooping.

If you've properly deployed these tools you've greatly limit the potential impact of a DHCP based worm.

Home router? Anyone test this against Linksys junk yet?

Twilio's test MMS (or any Twilio SMS) messages have never worked for me on the AT&T and Tmobile MVNO Straight Talk which uses Tracfone's MMS servers. I'd be curious what other MVNOs lurking about in the US are not handled by this. Does Cricket work?

Would love to learn more about why these messages are failing for you. Reckon you could shoot us some of the failed SmsSids to help@twilio.com? I'd be much obliged.

I'm not using the API only the "see for yourself" link on the MMS page at https://www.twilio.com/mms.

Webpage says it's sent but nothing ever arrives to the phone. I'll send an email to help@twilio.com with my phone number if someone over there wants to try a few test sends for debug info.

As a side note I just tested using the SMS page and it seems to work now. When I last tried it a couple months ago when swapping SIMs and trying to test SMS it silently failed with both sets of phone numbers and SIM Cards while every other SMS source I could try worked fine. That appears to not be an issue anymore so it's just MMS.

MMS to and from the phone works fine with Verizon and AT&T cellphones so I'd imagine there is some plumbing somewhere going wrong in my case.

Thanks.

I just tried this as well using my AT&T Straight Talk phone number, and the result was the same (message reports being sent, but never shows up on my end).

I'll also fire off an email so that you can have at least two numbers to test with.

Thank you!

That demo is still using our short code - we need to update that demo to use our new long code product. Thanks for the bug find!

Thanks for that - will definitely check it out.

People need to stop buying terrible phones. Consumers keep rewarding companies who don't keep up with their promises and thus no one ends up giving a crap.

In my opinion if you're not going to buy a Nexus device or a Moto E/G/X then you might as well buy Apple. The Android One program will hopefully add more to that.

You can only know if it is a "terrible" phone until long after you have bought it.

Most people don't have the ability to make an informed decision about a phones purchase (or they want to buy an iPhone or Nexus but they simply can't afford it).

I bought a Google Nexus at USD650 retail - a perfect counterexample to your advice.

I recommend iPhones to those who can afford it (purchase price, insurance, screen replacements etc.).

I recommend Huawei Y310/320/330 for those who don't have much.

In between there are too many other factors to make a straight recommendation (e.g. buy second hand iPhone versus a Moto G).

My one year old Nexus 4 is on KitKat. I guess you're talking about the Galaxy Nexus. While I agree with you that they dropped the support a way too soon, being the reference phone you'll have no problems in updating it with CyanogenMod, which is a really good distribution btw.

But as a slight counterpoint, given the fast release cycle, you can't expect them to support a phone forever. You mentioned iPhones. Well I have an iPhone 3GS. It's a perfectly capable phone that still works and that was still sold as the low-price alternative after iPhone 4 happened, yet Apple stopped supporting it as well. But I can understand that, because these OSes get more bloated with stuff and it leads to a shitty experience. I was able to upgrade an older Galaxy S (first generation, shipped originally with 2.1) to 4.3 by means of CyanogenMod and it was unusable due to the less than capable hardware.

Google did drop the support too early for the Galaxy Nexus, but try out CyanogenMod. I'm even thinking of installing it on my Nexus 4 because the Android on this device is bloated with Google-stuff that I cannot uninstall and it pisses me off. It's also enlightening to install CyanogenMod without Google Play, for an all open-source experience ;-)

Ouch. The issue seems to be with "the OMAP processor from Texas Instruments" that makes support difficult. Haven't seen that coming.

But the Nexus devices are just as bad as the others. If you had bought the latest model last year you'd be screwed on updates by now.

I'd love to buy an iPhone but I want to run Android software so Android it is.

There's test builds of Android L for the Nexus 4 available, so it looks like it will also officially get that release. It's still got 2GB of RAM and a quad-core 32-bit ARM, so it's not too different from the Nexus 5 in that sense. It is really a question of how long Qualcomm will support the S4 Pro board support package. If we've all moved to 64-bit ARM cores, then that'll be a bigger problem for these older 32-bit phones.