Samsung Galaxy Nexus

I finally got myself a smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus! I spend some time in the video above talking about the merits of the phone. A full review after the break.



Prelude

This is my first smartphone. I began looking at what phone to get sometime over the summer. At the time, Verizon's Droid Bionic was the glimmer in everyone's eye, and as my contract wasn't up yet, I decided I would get that phone.

As luck would have it, it was available on the very day my contract expired. I went into the Verizon store and it was... Uninspiring. It had the same tired Motorola style they had started with the Droid 2,(The OG Droid styling was cool, Motorola. Why'd you change it for the worse with the Droid 2?) and it felt chubby. By then, the rumors of the "Nexus Prime" were out, and the iPhone 5 announcement was expected soon. I figured I may as well wait a little longer to see what would come out for the iPhone 5.

The iPhone 4S came and went, and eventually the Galaxy Nexus was announced. Only to never be given a release date. I decided it was the phone to get, and I set out to purchase it. Of course this was in October and little did I know that it would take two months for it to come out stateside.

Google, Samsung, and Verizon: Take a page from Apple's book. Announce the product once you're nearly ready to release it. The day of the announcement should include the release date. This gets people even more excited, and doesn't make them go crazy. Verizon, I mostly blame you for this. This is the same game you played with the Droid Bionic, and it doesn't work for anyone. It doesn't give time for PR to hype up the new phone, and it doesn't really let people know when it will be available.

Eventually, in December, it came out, so it was a Christmas list kind of item, and it was gifted to me. And with that began the review process.

The First Impressions

The box: This is classy presentation. It's simple and elegant. Pretty much a rehash of what Apple does with their boxes, but hey, they're really good at simplistic, classy, desirable products. Taking a page out of their book isn't always bad.

First impression out of the box: Where's the battery? I took the whole box apart looking before I realized the battery was already inside, and the phone was actually that light. Weird.

First startup: When I started it up, my entire family went "woah!" at the boot animation's eye-popping colors. Good work, Google/Samsung. It's a cool bootup animation that really shows the capabilities of the screen.

The Phone

It's definitely a Samsung. It's light and plasticky, and it loses some points for that, but it feels oddly solid. Add that to the fact that it's about the same weight as the iPhone (more or less, depending on if you're in the US or in Europe), and I can easily accept its plasticky shell. I pretty quickly decided on buying a case to make sure I kept it safe. (My track record with phones is a story that ends in many tragedies.)

The screen is definitely this phone's most striking feature. With a diagonal size of 4.65" and a resolution more like that of a laptop than of a phone, this is a very nice looking screen. Yeah, it's a Pentile matrix so technically it's only 2/3 the pixels of a proper RGB color layout, but it doesn't even matter. It's got enough pixels on a bright enough and saturated enough screen that you don't notice it. Technically, it's a lower PPI screen than an iPhone 4, but you'd be hard pressed to care. Users of other Android phones often say "I wish my screen could fit that much stuff and look that nice!" Using other people's Android phones is an exciting experience of giant text-Way bigger than I need to read easily. (Bad eyesight? No worries. There's a font size option in the settings.)

The 4.65" screen does take a bit of a toll for the phone in the size department. It's bigger than most other phones I've seen. It's dangerously close to "small tablet" territory. The shift to the 16:9 helps with the size problem, however, and the phone is only marginally bigger than last generation's 4.3" screen phones, since the navigation buttons are now "soft." I do wish they had found a way to shrink the top and bottom "non-screen" sections a little more, though. Oh well. Nitpicking.

The screen is curved, but only slightly. It seems nice, but it's really, really hard to tell if it would actually make a difference if it wasn't curved. Your results may vary.

The LTE version of the phone is a bit thicker than the European variant, but nonetheless, this is a nice and thin phone. It makes it feel smaller in my pocket than my previous, thicker phone, even though it is an inch longer and half an inch wider. Being basically half the thickness does make a big difference.

Button positioning is very natural and I struggle to use other phones now because I look for the power button to be on the right hand side. The power button positioning means that it's right there whenever you grab the phone, and the volume button position is a nice position as well. I wish both of them were a little stiffer to press, though. I also think that with the zero lag shutter camera, a dedicated camera button should have been included.

Speaking of the camera, sorry. It's not great. I would have loved for it to be as good as the iPhone 4S camera, but it really, really isn't. I've included an example shot of some Yakisoba. The while balance is off, it's not particularly sharp, the dynamic range is pretty bad, and it just doesn't look very nice. Now, maybe these weren't ideal circumstances for photography, but it's not unreasonable to expect a decent photograph. I'd expect this from a last-generation phone, not the flagship Nexus phone.

The front camera is comparatively fine. No, it's also not very good, but it's pretty much exclusively used for video chat, where it doesn't need to be super crisp and clear. Here's me, writing this post. Hi world.



Response to Other Galaxy Nexus Reviews

 iPhone forever! Haters gonna hate. iPhone users still prefer iPhones, generally. I would probably suggest an iPhone for my own grandmother over the Galaxy Nexus. iOS is simpler, but way less flexible.

 It's too big! People with small hands might dislike that they have to two-hand the phone unlike the iPhone. I can comfortably one-hand the phone.

What was that?! Apparently the speaker for the speakerphone is super quiet. I guess I didn't notice because it's louder than the speakers I use for my computer. Your mileage may vary. I have no problem with the volume levels.

Not a World Phone! Samsung didn't put the GSM radio in the LTE version of the phone, so people travelling outside North America will have to find another phone. The iPhone has the ability to do CDMA or GSM, making it more versatile.

The iPhone has Siri! Okay this isn't really a good problem. Android comes with Voice Actions, which isn't nearly as good as Siri, but replicates a good portion of its functionality, and has been around for years. Expect an update to make it more Siri-like as soon as Google figures out how to sidestep Apple's patents.

The App Store has more apps! Well... Okay. But the Android Market is growing faster. Since Android overtook iOS as the most popular smartphone OS, I would expect more developers to focus their attention on Android, and we'll see the Android Market overtake the App Store soon enough.

The Elephant in the Room

I seem to have neglected Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich. This is on purpose. Many reviews of the Galaxy Nexus also reviewed ICS, and failed to separate the two. ICS will feature on a huge range of devices in the very near future, and it doesn't belong in just a Galaxy Nexus review. I'll talk about
ICS more in a later post.

Until then, thanks for reading!