Galaxy Nexus first look video and impressions
The Galaxy Nexus smartphone I ordered on Sunday from the U.K. flew through customs and arrived on Thursday afternoon. I haven’t spent too much time with it, but the little time I’ve had with the first Android 4.0 smartphone has been most impressive. The best way to put the experience? Android has finally grown up.
In this brief video, you’ll see a quick unboxing and overview of the hardware. Short of the 5-megapixel camera sensor — which isn’t all that bad so far — and the lack of memory expansion, Samsung has a hot handset on hand. The dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM keep things moving, and the 4.65-inch 1280×720 display is excellent. You can see for yourself as I demo an HD video trailer and some of the many Android 4.0 features and functions.
Since I bought the unlocked GSM version, my Galaxy Nexus works on both AT&T and T-Mobile’s networks. If only more phones did. I tested T-Mobile’s service already and saw a 9.4 Mbps download, 1.7 Mbps up and network latency of 89 milliseconds. LTE it’s not, but I’m happy with these speeds. I’ll throw an AT&T SIM in over the weekend and share the results in my full review.
I neglected to show the Galaxy Nexus size as it compares to the iPhone 4S and original Nexus One, so here’s a still image of all three.
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Wow!!! I can’t wait! I’m definatelly going to purchase this smartphone. So long apple…
Great video Kevin… very informative. I’m sold ..now I just have to be patient!
Great review…. note: everybody knows your wife’s email address now! Haha.
Great review! :-)
Enjoy it Kevin! We basically remained kids, but the toys matured.
It is a nice device.
A a side note…Microscoft bought Samsung. The Samsung Nexus is the “purely Google device”.
How can a purely Google device be their arch nemesis?
Microsoft hasn’t bought Samsung. Are you thinking about Google buying Motorola, perhaps?
That’s a killer phone and a good review. Thanks!
Kevin what kind of iMac do you have in background? Is that a 27 incher? I7 or i5? How do you lIke it. Can you recommend a Pc equivalent?
you do realize that you can pinch to zoom on web sites then double tap the screen and it does the text reflow…
Yup, I’ve been using Android for 2 years non-stop. ;) But the issue isn’t what I’m doing. Full web pages aren’t rendering the text across whole columns. Matt Miller verified on today’s MoTR podcast that his Nexus is doing the same.
It’s as if the full screen browser is showing already zoomed text and leaving white space. But it only does this on portrait mode: switch to landscape and the text takes up a full column like it’s supposed to.
I noticed that the Galaxy Nexus doesn’t seem to do text reflow like my Nexus One, or the other Android phones I tried in the shop (Galaxy S2, a few HTC phones). This might be deal breaker- it was for the iPhone 4S I bought and returned last week! I hope they fix it!
Agreed, Aaron. I haven’t yet got the text reflow to work properly; the device shows full view pages with the text already “re-flowed” which it shouldn’t. There’s a setting that fixes this issue, but causes another one with zooming. Not sure why this hasn’t been fixed in Android yet; hoping to see it corrected in Android 4.0.3.
Great review Kevin, though I’d like to know how it performs as a phone too ;-)
Great Review Kevin….
I also would like to know about the performance of the device as a phone (Call quality, Speaker Phone, Any dropped calls etc) also do you think if the Nexus becomes bit slow after opening many applications? I did test a Verizon unit and it felt slow. I am going to get this device tomorrow as It can be used on both TMob and ATT HSPA+ .
Santhosh, the speakerphone isn’t nearly loud enough IMO. Hopefully, it’s a software issue that can be addressed in an update. Otherwise, call quality is quite good; I use the phone for SIP / VoIP calling over WiFi or 3G as I don’t have a data plan for it. So I can’t speak to the “dropped calls” question as I’m not using a traditional voice network for it.
Although the phone has a dual core CPU, it’s not what I’d call lightning fast at times. It can be slow to auto-rotate, for example. Task switching could be quicker as well, but again, perhaps this can be improved with software.