Galaxy Nexus 16GB Sim Free Smartphone

I received the Samsung Galaxy Nexus about an hour ago. These are my first impressions & I will add to the review as I become more accustomed to the phone.

SETUP
I've upgraded from another Android phone (the HTC/Google Nexus). All I needed to do was take the SIM out of the old phone, snap the back off the Galaxy Nexus, install the SIM and battery and refit the back cover (a little bit fiddly on first attempt).
Then I plugged it in using the supplied plug adaptor and micro-USB connector and powered it up. After entering wifi network details and the username and password for my Google Apps account, the phone was ready to use.
It immediately began installing the various apps that I had set to AutoUpdate on the old phone and, after a few minutes of that, it told me that there was a firmware update. This took about 3 mins to perform, including a reboot of the phone.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The screen is gorgeous - large, vibrant, and really easy to read. It's much larger than the Nexus One, but it's lighter too. The phone is much faster than my old Google Nexus - apps spring open, and flipping screens / navigating menus is near instantaneous.
One niggle is that the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android works differently to the previous versions. The app tray is swiped sideways rather than up/down - muscle memory/force of habit means that I've found myself performing the old gestures in this first hour or so. I guess that will fade pretty quickly.
I've taken some stills and video. Both are straightforward to perform, and the picture quality seems good (need to check it on a PC screen) but I seem to have put my finger over the microphone a few times while filming - need to work out the best way to hold it to avoid this in future. I have uploaded some photos to the product page. You can find them under the main product image.
The Gmail app is much nicer than on my old phone. Clearer, faster to use, and the menu options seem to be in a better place than the previous one. Calendar seems to have synched up correctly too, with multiple calendars from my Google apps account showing.

UPDATE: About 2 hours in
I tried out the Portable WiFi Hotspot. It works perfectly - managed to get my iPad 2 connected and accessing the outside world. Also, I've got an integrated Bluetooth hands free system in my car and the Nexus paired perfectly with it.

'Contacts' seems to have been replaced by a 'People' app that pulls together contact info from Gmail, Google+, Twitter & WhatsApp and attempts to consolidate each person's Connections under their contact info. It's possible to tweak this so that you don't end up with everyone you follow in Twitter clogging up your contacts. Noticeably, it doesn't offer to integrate information from your Facebook friends. I'm not sure how useful this is, or indeed if I am correctly understanding what info it is pulling together, but I can see a real danger of your genuine contacts being swamped by the profiles of online acquaintances. Consequently, I've chosen not to view any of my Twitter contacts in the People app.

The auto dimming screen brightness seems too low to me - I'll have to poke around to see if I can tweak it.

Call me a Siri Iriot, but I thought I'd try using the microphone icon to tell the phone to 'Call XXX YYY at home' and the speech recognition worked very quickly to find the correct contact details.

I made a call and the quality was perfect. No volume problems. If you have a picture associated with a contact then it takes up the whole screen background when you're talking. The in=call options (keypad, loudspeaker, hold..) appear at the foot of the screen.

UPDATE: 6 hours in.
I noticed that some of my photos and videos were crystal clear in the background, but not on the subject. The trick is to tap the screen over the item you want to be in focus. [Correction: tapping the screen focuses on a subject in camera mode. Doing the same in camcorder mode captures a still whilst the video is still being recorded. ]

Seek time for autofocus in low light is slow.

UPDATE: 3 days in.
I've got used to the different gestures in Android 4, which is great.
Tinkering around in the settings I found one that disconnects the WiFi connection when the phone is not being actively used - I've selected that as I think it might extend battery life.
Speaking of which, with normal use (more data access than calls for me) the phone has been running for 20h 14m since the last charge and is still showing 34% battery.

UPDATE: 5 days in
Generally I am delighted with the phone but there are some more niggles that are worth knowing about.
1. The phone has crashed twice and frozen once. The crashes were while opening a contact and while using the Facebook app. The freeze was when opening the app tray. I'm not so worried as I'm sure subsequent updates to the FB app and/or system updates will address such instability.
2. [This now fixed, as Flash for ICS is available from Android Market] There is no Flash support as Adobe has yet to compile a version for Android 4. This means that apps like BBC iPlayer, that depend on Flash, don't work. This is frustrating, but Adobe & Google recently announced that Flash and Adobe Air support will be rolled out soon.
3. Some apps are not yet Android 4 compatible. Again - this is something that should be addressed by publishers of popular apps.

UPDATE: 13 Jan 2012
There was an Over The Air update waiting to be installed this morning. It is a bug fix release of the phone operating system. Now running Android 4.0.2

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If you have any specific questions, add them as comments to this review and I'll see if I can answer them.

I've now owned this phone for around 2 weeks, and I am incredibly impressed with it. Here are my impressions of it:

Build
The build is surprisingly good, I was worried about the fact it's mostly plastic but I'm actually really grateful. It's much lighter than my old Desire Z (which doubled as a paperweight) and also incredibly thin. The curved screen is not very noticeable but just exudes awesomeness when you have it casually laying on a table. I really like that the front has very few features when the screen is off, and looks very understated. A lot of my friends have complemented me on it! My biggest issue with the phone is that the screen is huge and really difficult to operate one-handed unless you have big hands (I don't). There's a lot of hand-shuffling from the top to the bottom, or using two hands.

Screen
The screen is really nice. I have had no issues with the auto-dimming feature other people have found, it works great. The screen is pin-sharp and colours are simply excellent. My issue is that, despite lots of people saying you cannot notice the "Pentile" type display, you can. I've found it particularly noticeable on thin cyan lines (such as when typing a message in Messaging); it's not a big issue but is a bit of a shame because otherwise the screen is spectacular.

OS
ICS is really cool and a huge leap in terms of visuals for Android. I really, really like it and I also love having pure Android on it, which makes it easier for me as a developer too. The UI is understated and sleek, and much better than HTC Sense and TouchWiz, which are starting to look really stale. I like having the multi-tasking button there (although I'd love to be able to "pin" apps here), but I really would've liked a search button too. Google has once again really pulled it out of the bag with their apps, which are simply fantastic, although 3rd party apps are *still* lightyears behind (I'm looking at you, Facebook). Contact sync with Facebook is currently broken, which is annoying but not a huge issue.

Performance/Stability
I've had very few issues with performance. Occasionally, the launcher will trip up and lag a bit, but not very often. Saying that, using a live wallpaper tends to really kill the device and I wouldn't recommend one. I've had a couple of app freezes and total lockups, but nothing major and it's stability is a huge leap from Honeycomb. The browser in particular hasn't crashed once.

Overall, I think this phone is a great one to get if you're looking to get updates as soon as they come. I have a feeling that this phone will be very quickly overtaken spec-wise by HTC and even Samsung themselves, but for now, this is the best phone you can buy.

I recently found myself the owner of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Google's hero device for Ice Cream Sandwich (the latest iteration of Android). What you'll find in this review are comments both about the device itself and the software found upon it. But first, a quick recap. The Nexus One debuted in early 2010, the first of the Nexus line, and was designed to become a benchmark that all other Android phones are to live up to. Later that year, the Nexus S was released to champion Android 2.3 Gingerbread and also be the first of it's kind to support NFC. Now we see the third in the Nexus line, the Galaxy Nexus. Manufactured by Samsung (like the Nexus S), the Galaxy Nexus finds itself on par with current smartphone offerings, but sporting a couple of unique features including the OS.

Hardware:

The first thing you notice about the Galaxy Nexus is the size of it. I've been used to a 4.3' Desire HD for the past 12 months and thought that was giant, but this is on another level. The 4.65' screen makes it large indeed, not Galaxy Note large, and not even HTC Titan large, but definitely up there as one of the more monstrous handsets. To look at the shape of the Galaxy Nexus is to almost see the result of a Nexus S and a Galaxy SII having a child with a recessive gene coming out to make it larger than both. The Galaxy Nexus comes out at a smidgen under 9mm in thickness and 135g in weight. The thinness mitigates some of the lateral size to the phone and the weight means it doesn't drag down on your pockets much. The colour is a satiny grey that leans over towards a gun-metal hue. The removable back panel is the same shade with a diamond textured feel to add to the grip on the back.

The front sees complete coverage by an unknown type of reinforced glass (most top end handsets use Cornings ubiquitous Gorilla Glass). Samsung explained that Gorilla Glass was not used as GG could not achieve the very slight curvature the fascia has to it, creating a concave effect. There was much backlash at this revelation by the consumer technology community (especially among fans of the fruity cult who would see this as a huge threat); however a key scratch test proved that this unnamed glass was every bit as good as Cornings offering. Physical and capacitive buttons are conspicuously absent, see the software section of the review for further delineation. Just below the bottom of the screen is a notification light. The rear facing camera is a 5MP unit with an LED flash in the center-top portion of the rear of the device. The front facing shooter resides about a centimeter to the right of the earpiece at the top of the front fascia.

Connections are fairly par for the course. There is nothing on the top of the device, the right edge plays home to the power button and an unknown 3-pin connector, presumably for some sort of proprietary charging or car connection (Nexus One owners will be able to draw a parallel here). The bottom edge houses a 3.5mm audio jack on the right hand and a Micro-USB connection in the center. The left edge has the volume rocker on it, the top edge of which is roughly in line with the bottom edge of the power button on the opposite side. Removing the textured back panel reveals a 1750mAH battery that is also (and interestingly) NFC enabled. The standard size SIM card slot is located on the right side above the battery section.

The GN can be described in a few words. Understated, demure, modest (save for the size, perhaps). The whole aura about the GN is one of sleek sophistication that ultimately says it all because it's design doesn't really say anything at all (yes, I am aware of the very loose Ronan Keating reference there). This, however, is while the screen isn't on. You see, the GN with the screen off is like a beautiful tulip on the cusp of flowering. And when the screen turns on, that little tulip flowers like an utter boss. Sporting a 1280 x 720 resolution Super AMOLED display, this screen is undoubtedly the best screen on a phone to date. Colours are vibrant, fonts crisp, blacks deep, viewing angles wide and aliasing is all but gone. There is only one display that may currently match this one in beauty and that is the one found on the 4.3' HTC Rezound sporting a 720p TFT display, but Super AMOLED just snatches the biscuit in vibrancy.

As far as internals go, we've got a strange one here. Being a Samsung creation, you'd expect there to be an Exynos SoC in there like that of the Galaxy SII. Instead we find a Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 dual core processor clocked at 1.2GHz (downclocked from 1.5GHz). On the graphics side, we have an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX540 GPU. Both of these are paired to 1GB of RAM and are supported by 16GB of in-built storage. Unfortunately for any of those used to removable storage in the form of Micro SD, there is no slot for it here, you've got what you've got here. As a side note, and in a rather weird twist of irony, ICS only supports USB Mass-Storage transfer protocol for Micro SD cards. This means that the in-built storage on the GN can only be transferred to and from using MTP (media transfer protocol); so when you plug your GN into your PC, it will register as a media device, not a USB mass storage device. You've got the usual gamut of radios in the GN, a penta-band HSDPA radio handling 3G connections, quad-band EDGE radio for 2G connections, Wifi B, G, A & N, Bluetooth 3.0, A-GPS and NFC. Like the radios, sensors are par for the course with an accelerometer, magnetometer (compass), gyroscope, photometer, proximity and barometer (air pressure).

The battery life is incredibly good. This is both due in part to the optimsations made in ICS and in the larger-than-usual battery included. Referencing Engadget's standard battery run-down and normal usage tests, the GN will last you 5 hours 15 minutes on a torture test and 28 hours "normal" usage. Their conclusion was that "it's unlikely most people will have to worry about running out of juice with the Galaxy Nexus."

The performance is stellar, once again due in part to the hardware and the software in combination. The 1.2GHz dual core processor is the diametric opposite of "slouch", scoring nicely on the gamut of benchmarks available. Engadget particularly noted the SunSpider 9.1 score (a benchmarking test used to denote internet browsing speed) where it scored significantly better than their other devices on test (Galaxy Note, DROID Razr, Rezound). While benchmarks have a tendency to be slightly detached from real world performance, the SunSpider score does not betray such a quality. The browsing on the GN is the fastest you'll have ever seen on an Android device, no doubt made possible by the optimisations to the Javascript rendering engine inside ICS. Calls are loud and clear with no notable loss of quality, the antennae array inside the GN keeps a consistently high signal level so long as you're not literally in Middle Earth. There was originally problems with erratic volume levels when users were connected to 2G networks on the 900MHz frequency band, however the 4.0.1 patch available worldwide has rectified this.

The camera is rather par for the course, which ultimately is disappointing. The GN is the hero phone that ultimately goes up against the iPhone 4S which has been widely praised for its near professional quality camera sensor. In this arena, the GN sorely loses however. The 5MP unit is somewhat bolstered by a better-than-usual sensor, however pictures taken are mediocre. Why on earth Google didn't get Samsung to put their awesome 8MP module found in the Galaxy SII inside the GN is beyond me, but unfortunately it wasn't so. The overall experience finds its saving grace in the vastly improved Camera app that includes a number of cool features including zero shutter lag, that is also seen on the iPhone 4S. Video recording is in 1080p on the rear shooter and 720p on the front facing one. The last cool feature is the panorama shot mode that appears to record like a video and waits for you to pan round before saving the completed product as an image file. Overall, the camera experience is okay, but at the level it's competing at, this mild praise ultimately damns it.

Software:

Ice Cream Sandwich is probably the most major and important update to Android that's ever existed. It is the amalgamation of 2.3 Gingerbread and 3.0 Honeycomb (the tablet centric OS debuted earlier this year). This unified code base means you will be seeing ICS on both phones and tablets without requirement for seperate operating systems. This will come as a boon to developers who will only need to code for one API level in the Android IDE and only need to worry about XML layout differences among the different screen sizes. Running alongside the unified code base is OS level GPU acceleration of the UI with a revamped API for app developers tapping into the GPU acceleration. GPU acceleration is something that has been sorely absent from stock Android for a long time now and was one of the biggest detractors for potential users in the face of the very smooth Windows Phone 7 and iOS. But even with 1280 x 720 pixels to process, 2D rendering is as smooth as Androids two biggest competitors. Like iOS and Windows Phone 7, ICS makes Android addictive to use. I find myself going into my phone to just have a swoop around the UI it's that lovely. The new API allows developers to tap into this baked in acceleration by inserting just two lines of code into their app. 3D applications like high end games will still require manual tapping into of the Open GL 2.0 API's available in Android. But for the majority of app developers who primarily work in 2D rendering, this is an excellent addition.

ICS' main changes and refinements come in the UI. Read more ›