Samsung 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'Contacts' seems to have been replaced by a 'People' app that pulls together contact info from Gmail, Google+, Twitter & WhatsApp and attempts to consolidate each person's Connections under their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.

Having owned a Nexus One for two years I was ready for a phone upgrade, so when I saw the Galaxy Nexus in the flesh at a Google developer event I was immediately smitten. Leading edge hardware combined with Google's latest version of Android was always going to be hard to turn down.

Starting with the hardware, Samsung have put together a stylish and distinctive device. The front consists of a Super AMOLED display, an earpiece and a front-facing camera (1.3 Megapixels). The front of the phone, and the display itself, is slightly concave (although this may just be the outer surface rather than the functional component) and at 4.65" it is a nice big size. The technology used gives fantastic colour and this phone can play 720P HD video natively (1080 will also play but is downscaled to fit).

Around the back is another camera (5 Megapixels) and a flash together with the speaker and microphone; the left side features the volume control, the right holds the on/off button and the bottom edge the MicroUSB socket, another microphone and headphone socket. This phone is slim and lightweight and fits comfortably in the hand.

Moving on to the software and here for me is the first big plus of this phone. The newest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, is installed in its original form. There is no Samsung Touchwiz, there are no Samsung applications preloaded, and all the software updates (as is the case with all Nexus branded and unlocked phones) come straight from Google themselves. My old Nexus One is bang up-to-date with Android 2.3.6 and I know that the Galaxy Nexus will also receive software updates promptly with no interference from my mobile network. Mine already has the phone call volume bug fix, for example.

All the usual Google applications are pre-loaded - this now includes Google+ - and some of the core applications (most notably the contacts application) have been updated to feature better social integration. I'm not going to spend time reviewing these here, lets just say that Ice Cream Sandwich is a well-executed refresh and update to Google's mobile operating system. The Galaxy Nexus feels sprightly and the attention to detail on the visual effects is excellent.

Having used it for a few days now (and being a long-standing Android user) I feel comfortable highlighting some strengths and weaknesses of this new device, before highlighting reasons that may make this a "must buy" or a '"can't buy" phone.

The primary strength is simply that the hardware is well-executed and good looking with an excellent display. Battery life is better than I saw on my Nexus One although I couldn't at this stage give you hard numbers. The screen is bigger, but so is the battery. People who've seen it like what they see without exception.

Bluetooth I have found to be miles better than older phones - I had to be picky where I carried my phone when using bluetooth headphones, but not with this device. WiFi equally has improved - I get better signal strength throughout my house.

The software is of course right up-to-date and very impressive. Signing on to my existing Google account I had all my gmail data on the phone within a couple of minutes - email, address book and calendar - while in the background the majority of the applications I had installed on my old phone were automatically downloaded and installed. Fantastic. Even my WiFi settings came over so I didn't need to re-join my home or work WiFi networks.

More importantly, if you purchase a SIM-free and unlocked device, your software updates will come direct from Google over the air and won't be blocked by your mobile network.

The weaknesses are, I will admit, subjective.

First I've been used to a phone that has a MicroSD card slot with 32Gb of memory in it, 75% of which is usually in use. No MicroSD card slot is present on this device, and it appears (for now) that Samsung are only manufacturing the European model with 16Gb of memory (the LTE version in the USA has 32Gb but won't work in Europe). However... only 13.3Gb is actually available for use when you first turn the phone on. I've had to slim down the amount of music I hold on it as a result to still make room for the other things I store on it. This is a mistake by Samsung in my opinion - I think there is enough room in the market for both 16Gb and 32Gb models.

The second weakness is related to this but has nothing to do with Samsung - you can't plug the phone into a USB port and use it like a memory stick. Google have instead implemented a media transfer protocol called "MTP", so there is also a good chance you'll need to install some software from Samsung or Google to transfer stuff over USB at all. I understand some of the technical reasons behind this but it isn't something I'm terribly happy about. I use a lot of computers in my job and have got used to treating my phone as my memory stick too. Large files take a long time to transfer over WiFi by comparison.

So why would you buy the Galaxy Nexus? If you want a stylish phone, bang up-to-date hardware and software with software updates not blocked by your carrier - and you can deal with the storage limitations - then this phone should be on your list. If however you need more storage, or USB file transfer without going through third-party software (MTP also restricts the types of file you can transfer), you may need to reluctantly cross this one off your list.