It’s been about 2 months since I replaced my slightly aged HTC Desire Z with the Galaxy Nexus, and in this time, I’ve formulated what I believe to be a fair assessment of the device.
Background
With my HTC Desire Z starting to fall behind a bit in terms of speed and features, I decided to look into replacements. For a month a analyzed what was available on the market, narrowing it down to two phones. Those two phones being the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and the Samsung Galaxy S II. The big things going for the Galaxy S II were the better camera, and the slightly better processor/GPU configuration. The Nexus ultimately won it over for me though, as there are some things that peeved me about the S II.
- Still stuck with Gingerbread at the time. I was definitely anticipating Ice Cream Sandwich.
- Even when upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich, the interface would remain largely the same due to the evil known as Touchwiz.
- The screen was a lower resolution in comparison to the Nexus.
So, I purchased the Nexus. And I’m happy.
The Hardware: Overview And Opinions
The Nexus is a beautiful phone. Construction is mostly of plastic, but I definitely find it to be of high quality. Adorning almost the entire front of the phone is the gorgeous 4.65” 1280x720 Super AMOLED display, along with a 1.3MP shooter for video calling and quick pictures. Since Ice Cream Sandwich was designed with on screen buttons in mind, there are no capacitive buttons on the front. When the screen is off, the phone basically looks like a glossy black, slightly curved glass slate. Below the display is a multi color notification LED that is only visible when active. On the bottom of the phone is the microUSB port, a microphone, and the 3.5mm headphone/mic combo jack. The right side of the phone houses the 3 gold connectors for pogo docks, and the power button. Along the left side of the phone you’ll find the volume rocker, and there is nothing on the top of the device. The back of the phone is home to the extremely fast 5MP shooter with LED flash, and on the slight bump near the bottom there is a second mic for noise cancelling. The back plastic cover is textured to provide a decent grip even in a sweaty palm, which I find holds true.
Inside the phone you’ll find a TI OMAP 4460 chipset with a 1.2GHz Cortex A9 dual core processor and a PowerVR SGX540 GPU clocked at 308MHz. The phone also runs on 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal memory. There is no SD card slot expansion. Connectivity includes a pentaband radio, Bluetooth 3.0, Wifi 802.11 A/B/G/N, NFC, and GPS. Powering the device is a 1750Mah Lithium battery.
Build quality seems really good, even though it is constructed mainly of plastic. It’s a lot thinner than my HTC Desire Z, which actually makes it feel smaller in my pocket even though it’s a much larger phone. It didn’t take me too long to get used to the size, and as it stands right now, the 4.65” display is just perfect for my hand. The slim build and slight curve helps it too, as if it was any thicker, it might be considered a bit unwieldy.
The screen is gorgeous, as stated above. Colors are nice, blacks are really deep, and response time seems great. It’s also very viewable in sunlight. This is all a big thanks to the Super AMOLED technology in the display. The display isn’t true RGB, as it runs off a pentile matrix, however, at the extreme screen resolution of the Nexus, image quality and sharpness don’t seem to suffer like in most lower resolution pentile displays. Having no capacitive buttons on the front is really nice as well, as I found with my Desire Z, the buttons could be a bit fiddly at times. The multicolor notification LED is a great feature, as I can set color based on the application, allowing me to know what kind of message I received before even activating the screen.
Headphone jack and power button placement were a bit weird at first, but I quickly got used to them, and they’re more ideal. Having the headphone jack at the bottom is logical, as that’s how I pull my phone out of my pocket, bottom first. The power button on the side makes for easy access too, as it’s pretty much where my index finger would lay when using the device.
Both cameras seem to function well. The 5MP shooter on the back is really fast, and the flash seems to work alright. In practice, the camera will take photos as fast as you can press the shutter. I believe this is more to do with Ice Cream Sandwich than the camera sensor though. The low light performance isn’t great, however, understandable for a phone. Well lit pictures are absolutely beautiful. Very good color, nice sharpness.
The processor and GPU in the phone seem to be a good fit. Although I do find the phone can get a bit warm with prolonged usage. Everything I need to do is done quickly, with almost no slowdowns. The 1GB of RAM is plenty enough for any multitasking that needs to be done, and again, even when doing multiple things on the phone, I notice no real slowdown. The 16GB of internal storage space was almost a dealbreaker for me, however, after owning the phone, I found I could whittle down my music collection to my most listened to songs, re encode them, and change it up every now and then if things started getting old. Worst case scenario, I have access to everything available on my Subsonic server anyway.
The radios on the phone seem to be good. Reception is never an issue. The phone being pentaband also means I can take it to almost any carrier in the world, as long as they use SIM cards. It’s truly a world phone. Wifi is strong on both the 5GHz and 2.4GHz N bands of my WNDR3700N, providing excellent download and upload speeds. GPS seems good from what I’ve used it for, locking on quickly, and maintaining an accurate location. NFC will be absolutely awesome once Google Wallet legitimately comes to Canada. I cannot wait to use my phone instead of my credit card.
Battery life is purely dependant on software running the phone, so I’ll touch on that once I finish my opinions on the software side of things.
Software: Overview and Opinions
The operating system running this phone is what was the much anticipated Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. Ice Cream Sandwich is essentially a merging of 2.3 Gingerbread and 3.0 Honeycomb, to create one unified OS for both tablets and phones. Design elements are really refined from previous versions. The Holo theme is absolutely gorgeous. It uses very simplistic design elements, with a lot of symbols and clean lines. The Google applications and widgets follow this theme really well, making the entire phone interface look spectacular.
4.0 brings GPU acceleration to the table. With Gingerbread, all rendering was done by the processor, which could make for some less than appealing stuttering and lag when navigating the phone and various applications. With Ice Cream Sandwich, the entire UI is rendered using the GPU, making for an extremely smooth experience. Although Google allows applications to be GPU accelerated as well, some are not. This can be remedied using the developer options that force GPU rendering on all applications.
More nice features added with Ice Cream Sandwich are improved multitasking with a new task switcher/manager, Android Beam, which allows you to send links to another ICS phone with NFC, responding to calls with text messages, and built in photo editing.
I won’t go into detail on any of the applications, as by now, many other reviews have covered the changes in many of the apps, but suffice it to say, everything is a lot shinier and more usable than what it was in Gingerbread. All of the base Google applications are overhauled to be more user friendly, and take advantage of the new, slick holo theme. It just makes everything easier to use and navigate.
Of course, this being a “developer phone”, it’s extremely easy to unlock and modify. For this reason, I’m not running the stock ROM or kernel. My ROM of choice at time of writing is AOKP Milestone 4, coupled with my kernel of choice, GladOS by Ezekeel from Rootzwiki. I find these two modifications add just the little bit of extra control I like to have in my phone (Mainly notification bar toggles and some visual changes from AOKP, and the better battery life, audio/screen mods, and charge limiting from GladOS). So, I suppose this is more from my experience with this software installed on the phone.
The software is great. Coming from CyanogenMod 7.1 on my Desire Z, it just feels a lot faster. Moving between applications is much quicker, opening the camera app is faster, music doesn’t lag like it occasionally did on the Desire Z. Although I am a big fan of Swype, they’ve done awesome things with the new ICS keyboard. I’ve been running that for the past week or so and I’ve really enjoyed it. I don’t feel annoyed by the persistent Google search bar on the home screen. In fact, I find it fairly useful.
Soft keys are awesome. I really didn’t like the capacitive buttons on my Desire Z. I don’t mind losing a bit of screen space just to have those nice, modular, persistent buttons on screen. Dropping from the 4 in Gingerbread down to the 3 in ICS simplifies things too. I don’t miss the search button, or the menu button. I like having the task list button available. It makes switching between apps just one step quicker.
Touching on battery life quickly too, I can pretty easily get through a day of average use with the stock 1750mah battery. I rarely use wifi anymore, however, when I did, the best I managed for screen on time was approximately 3 hours with 5% remaining. Depending on what I’m doing, on 4G HSDPA+, I can usually see about 1.5-2 hours of screen on time, with the inclusion of music listening. Very impressed with the battery in the phone. It performs considerably better than that of my Desire Z with similar tasks. I can only assume that it’ll be even better when my extended battery arrives.
Conclusion
The easiest way to describe a Nexus phone is that it’s not really supposed to be an uber powerful awesome flagship device. The phone is put out to launch a new version of Android, and to really give manufacturers a baseline as to what an ideal phone is for the OS. It’s a device designed to spark development. Most importantly though, it’s a piece of hardware designed to just get out of the way and showcase what’s really important, Android itself. Does the phone do this well? Yes. It does this extremely well. I will be the first to admit the phone isn't the greatest thing on the market. There are a number of better Android devices on the market with better specifications. This phone however, offers something that many manufacturers don't; a pure Google experience, which is exactly what I want when buying a phone. I believe this will be a phone that I will remember for years to come.
