The Galaxy S2 is certainly one of the best phones out there – but as it goes in the world of Android, another month, another king of the Android devices gets launched.
Google has until now periodically released their “Nexus” branded phone who they develop with Android handset manufacturers. The latest Samsung Galaxy Nexus is the third Google Reference phone, and as before, it ships with the next major Android release.
This time round it is Ice Cream Sandwich, Google’s big effort to try and combine the phone and tablet operating systems. The final non-blurry videos show a very polished interface with a variety of new features.
In terms of the hardware the Galaxy Nexus will share the same type of contoured display that was found on the Nexus S, only this time it is increased to a gigantic 4.65 inches Super AMOLED display with 720p HD resolution (1280 x 720). Inside there is a dual core 1.2 GHz and 1GB of RAM, and also 16 or 32GB of storage. For certain markets a slightly thicker model with LTE will be released, whereas the rest of us will get HSPA+. The camera is upgraded to record 1080p video and has big improvements in low light.
But as is always the case with Nexus devices, the focus is on the new software for which the device was designed for. The new OS’s focus on tablets and phones means that Google has now decided to opt for the removal of hardware buttons just like on tablets, so the new Galaxy Nexus removes the traditional home and back buttons, shifting them to the screen instead.
Ice Cream Sandwich also now sports resizable widgets and a much better keyboard experience. There is also significant improvements on the browser, especially on properly developed websites like Gmail and Google Calendar.
In perhaps a similar fashion to Windows Phone 7, Android 4.0 will now have a People App, which combines your favorite people into a single app which connects a number of social networks.
On a more technical viewpoint Ice Cream Sandwich is built from the ground up for NFC (Near Field Communication), and also uses it content sharing (called Android Beam) – for example users can share apps, maps, directions, webpages etc, just by tapping two phones together.
