The current Google flagship smartphone, the Galaxy Nexus by Samsung, is the first device to run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The super large, super high-resolution display on the Galaxy Nexus is a dream to look at, and the new Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system gives users something very new and interesting to work with. Here is the in-depth review of this super smartphone.

 

Hardware

The Nexus itself is fairly big. With dimensions of 135.5 x 67.9 x 8.9mm, it’s marginally bigger than Samsung’s other flagship handset, the Galaxy S2. It’s also a little bit heavier at 135g compared to the latter’s 116g. Not that it feels larger although you can tell you are not using an iPhone 4S. The rear takes its design cues from the S2 with a snap on cover that feels slightly coarse to give a good grip. It has both Google and Samsung branding on. Ridiculously, in this flagship Google handset which is so set up as a media device, has been crippled by having no expandable memory. Words fail us. And they may fail you when you realise that 16GB internal storage is your lot. It has a CPU of Dual-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9, PowerVR SGX540 GPU along with 1 GB of RAM. It’s available in Black colour only. It is available in 16 and 32GB of storage with no external micro SD option in it.

Display

 

 

The phone has a 4.65-inches with a resolution of 720 x 1280, giving a ppi of 316. It really is super sharp. We would have expected nothing less with Samsung’s mobile displays among the best out there but it’s cracking for internet and video. But it’s bright, it’s beautiful, the viewing angles are as close to 180 degrees as you can get. It’s simply a great display, and the delicate curve given to the glass adds an extra touch of class.

Software

The Samsung Galaxy Nexus is the world’s first phone to run Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and comes with full of top end tech, including a huge but still massively high resolution screen.  The Galaxy Nexus is like nothing you’ll have seen before from Android. It is a complete redesign and although some bits are the same as they were, on the whole, even long-term Android users like us had to spend a few moments figuring out where things now are. Three soft keys are now provided within the OS at the bottom of the screen: back, home and multitasking. The beauty here is that when they’re not needed, the OS disposes of them and gives you more screen space to enjoy your pleasures. Icons have been refreshed and look sharper and clearer too… overall, it’s a much more polished experience to take on the gloss of Windows Phone and iOS. Like the rest of the UI, Contacts has been rewritten and we are massive fans of the new look. The older one was looking really dated and the black colour scheme was hardly imaginative. The new People app is light (white and blue) and feels so much more elegant. Texting has been redesigned to fit in with the whole look of Ice Cream Sandwich. It’s fairly basic. White background, black headers, but it does the job well. It’s very much separate from the other messaging forms – there is no BlackBerry-style unified inbox here.

Camera And Multimedia

 

The only thing in Galaxy Nexus which is not up to the currently available standards, is it’s camera, which clocks in at 5MP. It’s not the most adventurous of phone camera specs considering the iPhone 4, which launched almost 18 months ago, came with that. Indeed, the Samsung Galaxy S2 has been out since early summer, and that rocks 8MP.

The good thing in that camera is that it takes photos unbelievably quickly. You tap the capture button on screen and before you can remove your finger, the photo is taken and saved. It really is that fast. There is also an inbuilt panoramic mode that you will really enjoy using but don’t do it in a hurry. Even when you’ve finished, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus has to stitch the photos together. And it will take almost 20 seconds to do this.

Video on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is captured in glorious 1080p Full HD and looks fantastic on that screen. It’s not amazing when transferred back to a computer, but it’s no so bad that you’ll want to throw the handset under a bus.

The size of the Galaxy Nexus, the quality of its screen and its weight make this an ideal PMP and you will really enjoy using it as such. It’s a real shame, however, that you are stuck with a finite amount of storage as it makes you really selective about what music and videos you load on in case you run out of space.

Watching movies is a more than pleasant affair on the Galaxy Nexus. It is a basic player in that when you start playing one of your flicks, there aren’t dozens of options that you can wade through, tweaking this and tweaking that.

Internet and Connectivity

The phone runs on the latest Google OS, and compared to the internet experiences of both Gingerbread and Honeycomb, we were expecting perfection. But there was one huge omission on our review handset. Flash. Yes, you read that correctly. Flash is NOT on there.

The browser is fantastic and aside from the (presumably temporary) lack of Flash, we had no complaints. However, we appreciate that Android’s browser is not necessarily to everybody’s taste and if this is the case, you can easily download a third party one from the Market.

For connections, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is pretty future-proof. Not only are the staples such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, HSPDA and GPS all built in, we also have the benefits of DLNA and NFC technology, which also incorporates Android Beam.

You can expect blazing fast speeds over Wi-Fi and HSDPA, so internet surfing really is a breeze. Ice Cream Sandwich also provides you with a new data monitor to track how much you get through, which is particularly handy on a data-hungry operating system like Android.

Wi-Fi is quick to set up, and Wi-Fi direct is also supported, so you can bypass the hotspot. We weren’t impressed with the wireless internet signal strength, though. Samsung really needs to sort out the components it uses, since we’ve noticed that on both the Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy S2, even when you’re practically sitting on the router, it’s still not 100%.

Detailed Specification

  • 2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
  • 3G Network HSDPA 850 / 900 / 1700 / 1900 / 2100
  • SIZE 135.5 x 67.9 x 8.9 mm
  • Weight 135 g
  • DISPLAY Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
  •                     720 x 1280 pixels, 4.65 inches (~316 ppi pixel density)
  • - Oleophobic coating
  • - Multi-touch input method
  • - Touch-sensitive controls
  • Internal  Memory 16/32GB storage, 1 GB RAM
  • Card slot No
  • GPRS Yes
  • EDGE Yes
  • 3G HSDPA, 21 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps; LTE
  • WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, dual-band, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot
  • Bluetooth Yes, v3.0 with A2DP
  • NFC Yes
  • USB Yes, v2.0 microUSB
  • CAMERA 5 MP, 2592×1936 pixels, autofocus, LED flash, Geo-tagging, touch-focus, face detection
  • Video 1080p@30fps
  • Secondary Yes, 1.3 MP
  • OS Android OS, v4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)
  • CPU 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, Cortex-A9
  • GPU PowerVR SGX540
  • Messaging SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Mail, IM, RSS
  • Browser HTML, Adobe Flash
  • Radio No
  • Colors Black
  • GPS Yes, with A-GPS support
  • Java Yes, via Java MIDP emulator
  • Other Features
  • - Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
    - MP4/H.264/H.263 player
    - MP3/WAV/eAAC+/AC3 player
    - Organizer
    - Image/video editor
    - Document viewer
    - Google Search, Maps, Gmail,
    YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk, Picasa integration
    - Voice memo/dial/commands
    - Predictive text input
  • BATTERY Standard battery, Li-Ion 1750 mAh
  • Stand-by Up to 290 h (2G) / Up to 270 h (3G)
  • Talk time Up to 17 h 40 min (2G) / Up to 8 h 20 min (3G)

 

By Roman Butt