You would be surprised how much difference .3 inch can make. The One X is a bit taller than the N4 because of the buttons. It's only a couple mm difference at the most, but it went from not fitting in half my jeans (One X) to comfortably fitting in all my jeans (N4).
Pretty much this. I've got the Epic 4G Touch GS2 with capacitive buttons in the screen glass. It's one big clean rectangle and looks classy as fuck. The GS3 and now GS4 physical home buttons totally turns me off from them, but I won't go the HTC route. FUCK HTC SENSE.
Look around on Anandtech. I think it was possible initially for us Canucks to get it working because it worked on the bands that our providers have 4G on, but not in the US. And with an Android update later on they disabled it entirely. Something like that. I just did a Speedtest on mine, and it got 14mbps down and 2.5mbps up. I can't really see the need for much more than that, although it would be nice I guess.
The 8 cores are for their big.LITTLE fix for the power issues of ARM's cortex A15 design. Basically 4 of the cores are built using ARM's A7? architecture which is less powerful but much more efficient. Those 4 cores would be in use the majority of the time when performing less intensive tasks. The other 4 cores are built on the cortex A15 architecture. They are much more beastly but power draining as well, so theoretically would only kick in when more intensive processing tasks require it. The problem with this "solution" to power efficiency is that it eats up more space on the board and costs more to manufacture. Not ideal at all.
