We’ve been eagerly anticipating the arrival of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus to our shores ever since it was announced late last year. After Smart announced that they’ll be the exclusive carrier for Google’s latest ICS laden smartphone, we knew it was only a matter of time before it landed in our office. Well, today is the day. Samsung Philippines have delivered the Galaxy Nexus to our office today, and we are impressed.
First off, let’s start with the basics. Measuring at 135.5 x 67.9 x 8.9mm, it’s considerably larger than most typical 4.3-inch smartphones currently out in the market. And while it’s overall size is a bit larger than the norm, it’ll still fit in the palm of most people’s hands, unlike the truly monstrous Galaxy Note.
It It uses a 4.65-inch Super AMOLED display that has a resolution of 1280 x 720. To be honest, we’re smitten with the display of the Galaxy Nexus, and it’s not hard to see why – colors really just pop at you, and blacks are just truly black, not light gray. Powering the whole thing is a dual-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9 processor, which is paired with about 1GB of RAM.
Of course the biggest star of the whole show is Android 4.0, better known as Ice Cream Sandwich. A lot has changed from the jump from 2.3 to 4.0, most notable of which is the disappearance of the four soft touch keys that are typically found at the bottom of Android devices. It’s been replaced by three keys (home, back, and running apps) that are built-in directly to the display. While this setup works well with the larger screened Galaxy Nexus, we’re not sure how this will work on devices with smaller screens once they’re upgraded to ICS.
Once you’re in the apps screen, swiping left will allow you to go through your app list until it runs out of apps to show, at which point it starts showing widgets you can embed into your home screen (complete with information on how much screen real-estate it’ll take up).
It sounds weird, but it works pretty well in practice.
Another nice feature we’re sure a lot of you will appreciate is the ability to monitor and cut-off data depending on the limits you’ve set – handy for preventing bill-shock.
That’s it for now. We’re sure we missed a lot of other features, but don’t worry, we’ll be doing a more in-depth review of the device once we get more time in. In the meantime, enjoy more photos of the Galaxy Nexus below along with comparison shots with the HTC Sensation XE and XL.
[album: https://gadgetsmagazine.com.ph/wp-content/plugins/dm-albums/dm-albums.php?currdir=/wp-content/uploads/dm-albums/[email protected]/Samsung Galaxy Nexus/]