Samsung Galaxy Nexus
There are a lot of reasons to be interested in the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The biggest of these reasons is that it’s the first phone to be shipped with Android Ice Cream Sandwich, and Android users will notice a lot has changed.
First off, the phone itself. The Nexus can run off of Verizon’s 4G LTE network so speed wasn’t ever an issue with the phone. The phone feels very solid in your hand and has a textured back that makes holding it easier. Around the side, it has a volume rocker, lock/unlock button, charging port, and a headphone jack. The HD screen on the phone was crystal clear and vivid, even fine text came out sharp. I was a little disappointed with the camera however. I would’ve expected to see 8 MP on this phone but Samsung went with 5MP instead. Nevertheless, the camera still took good photos and the panoramic mode is always fun to play around with. Another surprising thing missing on the Nexus was a SD card slot. Samsung decided to forgo this feature, instead preferring to give the phone 32 GB built in memory. While this should be adequate to accommodate your apps and some music, users may miss the ability to take out an SD card and switch all your files to a new phone.
With Ice Cream Sandwich, the first look at the phone you can see a big difference. Instead of having a home, back, settings, and search button, the phone now only has 3 shortcut buttons. They are for home, back, and multitasking. Home and back work the same way, but multi-tasking shows recent apps and web pages in a several panes. One click on one of these will bring you to that app or a swipe will shut the app down or close the webpage. This took a while to get used to and I found myself having to search for settings in the beginning. Ice Cream Sandwich also has several other new features and design aspects compared to its old version, but the essence of the operating system remains and it is still easy as ever to customize and navigate. A few hours of playing around will give you a good representation.
Because there are no other phones operating on Android’s new operating system, the Nexus definitely has something that its competition lacks. However, once other smart phones come out that are designed for this, the Nexus may soon be one upped.