Introduction
Once again, it is the Nexus time of the year. This time, Google has left the Gingerbread cookies and, together with Samsung, has brought to us the Galaxy Nexus to deliver the Ice Cream Sandwich. And while a cold dessert is totally out of place this holiday season, the latest release of Android is more relevant than ever.
The Galaxy Nexus packs an impressive spec sheet, but it is (yet again) the OS which is the device’s main highlight. After all, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is widely expected to put an end to the fragmentation, which currently plagues Google’s mobile platform.
Unlike its Nexus S predecessor, which was essentially a rebranded Samsung Galaxy S, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is a completely different device from the current flagship of the company, the I9100 Galaxy S II. The latest Google phone sports a different GPU and chipset, which are, well, not as powerful as those found inside the Galaxy S II.
Here is a quick look at what the Samsung Galaxy Nexus has to offer, along with its main disadvantages.
Key features
- Quad-band GSM; penta-band 3G support
- HSDPA 21Mbps; HSUPA 5.76Mbps
- Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS with stock UI
- 4.65” Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with HD (720 x 1280 pixels) resolution; 16M colors; oleophobic surface
- Slim profile at 8.9mm
- Dual-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A9 CPU; PowerVR SGX540 GPU; TI OMAP 4460 chipset
- 16/32GB built-in storage; 1GB RAM
- 5 MP camera (2592x1936 pixels) with autofocus, LED flash; 1.3MP front-facing unit
- 1080p video recording @30fps; touch-to-zoom while recording
- Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n
- DLNA; Wi-Fi hotspot
- Bluetooth 3.0 with ADP
- Charging MHL microUSB port with TV-out (1080p) support
- GPS receiver with A-GPS support
- NFC connectivity
- Accelerometer, gyro and proximity sensors; compass; barometer
- Back cover made of Hyper Skin material for increased grip
- Excellent audio quality
Main disadvantages
- Camera resolution is not on par with the rest of the high-end dual-core competition
- Below average battery life
- Lacks a dedicated camera key
- No microSD card slot
- No mass-storage mode (some files don't show up in MTP mode)
- Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is yet to be fully compatible with all apps from the Android Market
- No FM radio
A quick look at the key features of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus will show you that the smartphone’s hottest hardware feature is its Super AMOLED screen with HD resolution – a first for a Samsung smartphone. The display combines amazing contrast ratio and superb viewing angles, with eye-popping size and resolution – a perfect match for the spanking new OS on board.
As far as the rest of the hardware is concerned, we heavily suspect that Samsung has intentionally omitted a couple of Galaxy S II features such as the microSD card slot and a superior 8MP camera unit. The superior screen of the Galaxy Nexus, while giving it a touch of exclusivity hardware-wise, will not be enough to cannibalize the strong sales, which the I9100 still enjoys.
The latest Google phone will be aimed at the Android purists – the crowd, which doesn’t like launchers or UI tweaks. And also the crowd that likes to get the latest OS updates from Google first. In this aspect, the smartphone is entirely in a league of its own.
So is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus a proper flagship for the company, or is it simply an Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich flag bearer for Google? This is what we’re trying to find out in this review.
Design and build quality
With the design of the Galaxy Nexus, Samsung have accomplished something, which was rather unthinkable until recently. The smartphone has merely two hardware buttons. Combined with its dark gray color scheme, the device is a celebration of understated design. The slightly curved screen, while paying homage to its predecessor, does not make the Galaxy Nexus look overly familiar – it is simply like nothing else on the market in terms of design.
The build quality of the Galaxy Nexus is superb. The back is made from grippy plastic (intriguingly called Hyper Skin), while the display has gotten the oleophobic treatment. Both features leave absolutely no room for fingerprints. While many might frown over the lack of any metal in the device’s construction, we do believe that the weight benefit from this step is well worth it.
The 4.65” Super AMOLED screen with HD resolution is nothing short than a thing of beauty. The bump in the number of pixels is a perfect complement to a display, which has been among the industry benchmarks for quite some time now. Its contrast ratio and viewing angles are still to be matched by its competition.
The contrast, of course, being infinite. We measured the brightness levels of the screen and they turned out surprisingly low. Putting the Galaxy Nexus next to the Galaxy Note, it doesn't seem that much dimmer. The difference certainly isn't the 73% that the numbers suggest.
| Display test | 50% brightness | 100% brightness | ||||
| Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | |||
| Samsung Galaxy Nexus | 0 | 112 | ∞ | 0 | 247 | ∞ |
| HTC Rhyme | 0.43 | 265 | 609 | 0.58 | 402 | 694 |
| HTC Explorer | 0.26 | 201 | 763 | 0.47 | 358 | 755 |
| HTC Sensation | 0.21 | 173 | 809 | 0.61 | 438 | 720 |
| Samsung Omnia W | 0 | 118 | ∞ | 0 | 358 | ∞ |
| LG Optimus 2X | 0.23 | 228 | 982 | 0.35 | 347 | 1001 |
| Sony Ericsson XPERIA Arc | 0.03 | 34 | 1078 | 0.33 | 394 | 1207 |
| Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II | 0 | 231 | ∞ | 0 | 362 | ∞ |
| Samsung Galaxy Note | 0 | 287 | ∞ | 0 | 429 | ∞ |
| HTC Incredible S | 0.18 | 162 | 908 | 0.31 | 275 | 880 |
| Apple iPhone 4 | 0.14 | 189 | 1341 | 0.39 | 483 | 1242 |
Below the display of the Galaxy Nexus you will find… absolutely nothing. We surely hope that the lack of hardware buttons is what the future holds for Android smartphones. It looks quite neat on the Galaxy Nexus.
Things begin to look more familiar above the screen of the device. It is the home of the earpiece, ambient light and proximity sensors, as well as the front-facing camera unit.
The volume rocker is on the left side of the device. On the right side, you will find the power/lock key.
There is nothing happening on the top of the Galaxy Nexus. All you are going to see there is a tiny latch for removing the battery cover.
The bottom of the device is much busier. It houses the microUSB port, 3.5mm jack, and the earpiece – just like in the case of the Nexus S.
On the back of the Galaxy Nexus is where the 5MP camera with LED flash resides. It is kept company by the loudspeaker, which is located on the, typical for all upscale Samsung smartphones, chin at the bottom.
It is business as usual under the paper thin battery cover. All you are going to find there is the beefy 1750mAh battery and the SIM card slot.
In our battery test, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus performed rather poorly. It lasted only 31 hours of combined usage, which is one of the lowest times we've seen yet. It did okay as far as talk time goes - 8 hours and 23 minutes - and the video playback time was about average (6 hours and 2 minutes). Web browsing was abysmal however, lasting only a couple of minutes over 3 hours starting from a full charge.
We can’t find anything to frown about, regarding the design and build quality of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The smartphone is a massive improvement over its predecessor in terms of quality and feel – both now match its unique looks.
We are now going to take a journey into the depths of Google’s latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS. With premium hardware coming from just about every manufacturer these days, we believe that the software experience will drive the Galaxy Nexus sales.
USER INTERFACE
Let's start with the lockscreen. The unlock mechanism differs from both ICS and Gingerbread. There's a circle around a padlock icon at the bottom of the screen which can be dragged within the confines of a circle but only two positions actually unlock the phone - sliding to the right unlocks the phone, while sliding to the left unlocks it and starts the camera.
You don't have to be precise - just get the circle close enough to the unlocked padlock icon or the camera icon and it will snap to position.
This unlock isn't as flexible as some of the custom solutions we've seen - there are only two unlock actions that can't be customized and you can just tap anywhere and drag like you can on the Galaxy Note for instance.
Ice Cream Sandwich also brings the option to unlock the phone with your face - it's not the most secure way, but it's the fastest just point the camera at your face the phone will let you in.
Past the lockscreen is a very different homescreen. It brings major changes to how Android's UI on phones works; the biggest change being that the interface is completely free of hardware buttons.
A row at the bottom has been reserved for three on-screen buttons - Back, Home and the Recent apps. Occasionally, a Menu icon button appears to the right of the Recent apps button, but only for apps that need it. This one is rather cramped and uncomfortable (the other three keys don't reposition to make more room), so we hope apps get redesigned quickly to use the new interface.
That row is always visible - even on the lockscreen (the icons disappear, but the black bar where they live stays). The icons will rotate as needed to match the screen's orientation, which one advantage over their hardware counterparts, but some prefer hardware buttons.
ICS can use hardware buttons too, if the device has them, but the Galaxy Nexus will probably be a trend-setter in the Android world, so hardware keys might become are rarity.
Anyway, above that row is a dock - called favorites tray - of four shortcuts with the app drawer shortcut sitting in the middle. The shortcuts are easily customizable (you can drag them like any other shortcut) and you can even dock folders here.
Another permanent fixture is the Google Search bar at the top of the screen. It stays in place as you scroll through the homescreens (so it's not just a widget).
The notification area is present also and it too has received a facelift - it shows you icons next to the notification, such as the picture of the person who called or messaged you. There's a Settings shortcut (similar to that in Honeycomb) to make up for the fact that you can't go Menu > Settings anymore (which was the quickest route to the full Settings menu).
Notifications can now be removed from the screen one at a time and all you have to do is swipe on them to remove them from the list.
There are five panes on the homescreen and you can neither add nor remove ones. They are populated with shortcuts, folders and widgets and the latter two have learned new tricks.
Widgets are resizable both vertically and horizontally (usually, some can be resized only in one direction). It's something we've seen in custom launchers before but is now part of the standard Android package.
To resize a widget, you tap and hold on it and then release it. Four handles will appear on its sides, allowing you to change the widget's size in the direction you want. Resizable widgets appear with a border around them in the app drawer (more on that later) to make them easier to spot.
Folders are different too - you create them by dropping a shortcut on top of another shortcut and you can name them by opening the folder and tapping the "Unnamed folder" label. Opening a folder expands it only as much as needed to fit the icons inside.
The folders themselves are circular with the shortcuts inside drawn as if they are in a line one behind the other and you're looking at them at an angle (complete with perspective). They are lined up in order, so the first shortcut in the folder will be the only one unobscured - the rest are harder to see, very hard to tell apart.
Live folders seem to be gone for good in this latest iteration of Android.
The app drawer is pretty much the same as it was in Honeycomb. It features two tabs - Apps and Widgets - that house side-scrollable pages. If you scroll past the available apps you move into the Widgets tab. There's also a Market shortcut next to the tabs, for quicker access to Android's app repository.
Apps and widgets are ordered alphabetically and there's no option to order them by something else or manually reorder them.
Putting a shortcut or widget works as you would expect - you press and hold to grab it and then position it somewhere on the homescreen. Two more options appear at the top of the screen while you're dragging - Uninstall (to quickly remove apps) and App info, which opens the application's entry from the Manage applications list. Drop the app or widget on either one to activate it.
Synthetic benchmarks
The Samsung Galaxy Nexus packs two Cortex-A9 cores running at 1.2GHz inside its TI OMAP 4460 chipset, so in terms of CPU performance we expect to see it somewhere around the Galaxy S II (which uses two Cortex-A9@1.2GHz cores too), save for any optimizations brought about by the new OS.
And the first benchmark, BenchmarkPi, shows a promising result - the Galaxy Nexus bested the Galaxy Note (1.4GHz). But then, in Linpack the Galaxy Nexus fell behind the S II. Overall, the Galaxy Nexus is a strong performer in CPU performance, among the best, though it doesn’t leave current dual-cores in the dust.
Camera
The Samsung Galaxy Nexus is equipped with a 5MP camera that snaps photos with a maximum resolution of 2592x1944 pixels. It's partnered with an LED flash.
The user interface has been reworked but we're still not big fans of it. It sure is functional and custom camera interfaces can learn a thing or two from the Galaxy Nexus' camera, but it could have been executed better.
The viewfinder takes up most of the screen, with a panel to the right of it for some of the controls - the gallery shortcut (which is a thumbnail of the last photo taken), the virtual shutter key and the camera mode switch.
The switch works like this - you tap it, it extends and presents you with three options (still camera, video camera and panorama).
The rest of the controls are overlaid on the right side of the viewfinder. They are the front/back camera toggle, a virtual zoom slider and the settings shortcut. The setting shortcut brings out options to control the flash, white balance and exposure compensation, scenes and finally, more settings (only geo-tagging and photo resolution options are available here).
Tap focus is also available if you want to get creative with your framing (i.e. the subject isn't in the center). Face detection is also available too.
When you tap the Gallery shortcut it opens a preview of the last photo taken with a list of all ways to share it and another shortcut to get into the regular gallery mode.
Panoramas are easy to shoot - you just hit the shutter key and start panning left or right, the phone will take care of the rest. It will warn you if you're going too fast, but has no problems if you keep it in place for a while (unlike, say, Sony Ericsson's solution, which fails if you move too slowly).
Video camera
Despite being saddled with a 5MP shooter, the Galaxy Nexus still manages to do 1080p video. The front camera shoots 720p videos.
The interface is practically identical to the still camera interface, but there are some really cool features available.
The first is the option to take full resolution photos while recording video - you just tap on the screen. This way you get the best of both worlds - the whole event captured on video and the extra resolution you get from the 5MP photo.
You can use the digital zoom while recording video too. Other options include real-time effects that modify a person's face for comedic effect and there's a time-lapse video option too (with shots taken every 1 to 10 seconds).
A curios effect that doesn’t work very well is the Background feature. You set up the phone on a tripod (or something else, as long as it's perfectly steady) and when the phone is ready you get into the frame.
The software will do its best to cut you out of the background and put you on one of three predefined backgrounds or on a video of your choosing. Unfortunately, it's very sensible to changes in the picture - even if you cast a very subtle shadow on the wall behind you, the effect isn't accurate at all. And the background has to be perfectly static or it will peek through, so it’s no Hollywood-rate green screen effects but good for a quick laugh.
Note that resolution for such videos drops to D1 (720x480) and the framerate hovers around 16fps.
On a different note, the FullHD videos captured by the Galaxy Nexus are shot in MP4 files with a fairly low bitrate of just under 10Mbps. The framerate is 24fps, which is lower than most of the competition, but looks good enough.
Even with less than the ideal framerate, the 1080p videos produced by the Galaxy Nexus are top-notch with correct exposure, good colors, and excellent resolved detail.
720p videos are shot at a slightly lower bitrate - 8Mbps - but the framerate goes up to 30fps so they are smoother. What's more, the camera field of view is wider in 720p mode. Quality is again pretty good.
Android Market is unchanged
The Android Market has several scrollable tabs - categories, featured, top paid, top free, top grossing, top new paid, top new free and trending. Actually, this is where the tabbed-UI trend in Android started.
Other than that, the Market is almost exactly the same as it is on Gingerbread (the only difference is that there's an on-screen Menu key at the top right corner). We weren’t big fans of the interface change, but it finally feels at home with Ice Cream Sandwich.
When downloading an application useful info on the app, like rating and comments along with the info, screenshots and demo videos by the developers. Before confirming the download, the Market will show you a screen of permissions required by the application.
There are all kinds of apps in the Android market and the most important ones are covered (file managers, navigation apps, document readers etc.).
You should have access to all of them - the ones not updated for ICS will run with that tiny Menu key cramped in the bottom right, but that's not a deal-breaker.
Conclusion
Google didn’t disappoint with the execution of Android Ice Cream Sandwich and Samsung did an excellent job with the hardware of the Galaxy Nexus.
It's probably only the second Nexus phone (after the Nexus One) that is really attractive to customers at large, rather than mostly to developers.
A new major version of Android is not the only first to its name, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is also the first globally available droid phone with a 720p screen. And what a screen it is - the 316ppi pixel density makes for an amazing image sharpness and completely hides the PenTile nature of the matrix.
Top-notch connectivity is also a big plus and the browser is hands down the most capable mobile browser currently available.
The camera resolution is the one department where the Galaxy Nexus falls short of the competition, potentially being a potential deal-breaker but we can assure you the Galaxy Nexus produces some excellent quality photos and videos.
You can always go for a Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II for a better camera and but at the cost of screen size and resolution. Some variations of the S II like the Skyrocket i727 for AT&T or S II for T-Mobile have bigger screens (though not higher resolution). The Skyrocket has LTE too. The Samsung Galaxy S II HD LTE has the same screen as the Galaxy Nexus and LTE, but it's a hard model to come by.
Also See :
LG Spectrum
LG Spectrum vs Galaxy Nexus
Also See :
LG Spectrum
LG Spectrum vs Galaxy Nexus
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