As with the Nexus S, I noticed some color aberrations and odd striations which were visible when there was a large swath of solid, lighter colors visible a plain gray background, for instance. This problem seemed less obvious when the brightness was a bit higher, however.
Speaking of brightness, Ice Cream Sandwich seems to have an overly aggressive auto-brightness setting, and the screen was often too dark for my preference when I had the function turned on. This seems more like a software issue than anything else, but it also seems like an attempt to over-manage battery consumption.
Small issues with the display aside, the Galaxy Nexus is a fully equipped and capable modern smartphone. There's nothing here that really left me wanting — at least not to any great degree. From a pure spec perspective, the Nexus is not just rock solid, it's right up there with the best-in-breeds.
As I've had a very short testing period with the phone, I won't go into great detail on battery life just yet. I will say that I have concerns about the overall battery stamina given the time I've spent with the phone thus far. It might just be that I've been putting the handset through its paces, but I've noticed a faster dip in battery life than I would like to see.
Obviously I can't speak to the LTE version's battery capabilities, though I should have Verizon's iteration in hand soon, and will add my testing results to this review. On a typical day of heavy use phone calls, lots of email, Twitter, general productivity tasks I'm more than able to go through my entire workday.
Squeezing out 19 hours or more on a single charge is not uncommon. Some days, that number is shortened if I'm watching video, taking more calls than usual, or playing games, but it's no more dramatic a dip than you might see on any other smartphone. In using the device as my daily driver, I haven't found any major issues with battery life which would I would consider show-stopping. As far as phone performance is concerned, however, the Galaxy Nexus feels blazingly, stupidly fast to me.
Touch response is excellent on the phone — everything reacts quickly to your movements. Homescreen scrolling was snappy, moving into and out of apps was instantaneous, swiping through long lists was stutter free, and web browsing even on heavy pages like ours was super speedy. Game frame rates were smooth, photo viewing and editing was frictionless, and the phone handled heavy multitasking with aplomb.
It's obviously a combination of great hardware and great software, but the Nexus is probably the tightest feeling, snappiest Android phone I've ever used. It's awesome. While using the device, I had nearly no dropped or failed calls — even in locations like the first floor of my house, which is typically bad for phone calls.
Data rates were frankly off the charts for me in my testing. In a spot where I typically see 2. When I originally saw camera shots from the Galaxy Nexus during my interview with Matias Duarte at the Google campus , I was blown away by the quality of what I was shown.
The pictures were taken on a sunny day at the beach, and they looked incredible. I'd like to report that all photo results on the Nexus are as impressive as the ones I saw that day, but that's not exactly the case. The 5-megapixel shooter on the device is most definitely capable of taking great looking photos, and that's aided by a super-fast auto focus with tap-to-focus as well , consistent face detection, and a generally forgiving sensor.
The camera taking and photo editing software Google provides with Ice Cream Sandwich is truly outstanding. I was impressed by the panorama and time-lapse modes provided, and there are some relatively powerful tools for editing your pictures after you've done some snapping.
Google is even providing a set of filters not wildly dissimilar to some of what Instagram is doing, obviously gunning for the retro picture craze that's sweeping the globe. The filters are good — though not as good — as the Instagram offerings, and they'll go a long way to salving the wounds of Android users who are envious of their iPhone-owning brothers. But while the software is excellent, it can't make up for that so-so sensor.
Even though you can get great results with the camera, it's pretty easy to get bad results as well. Compared to something like the iPhone 4S camera, I found the Nexus' lens to be lacking. I had mixed results while shooting. While that zero shutter-lag feature is really great when trying to quickly capture moments, I feel like its speediness can sometimes contribute to slightly shakier looking photos.
It's almost too fast, if that's possible. Some of my photos and macro shots looked really gorgeous, but others were ever-so-slightly out of focus in a way that kind of drove me crazy. Obviously shooting in bright daylight is the optimum environment for the Galaxy Nexus, and my lower light results were not inspiring. I saw a lot of noise in darker scenes, and focusing was doubly difficult.
I also felt color reproduction wasn't as true as that of the iPhone 4S; images can look washed out in certain settings. There's no question that I was able to get good photos out of the phone, and I think overall the camera is very capable, but I don't think Samsung built a world-beater with the sensor used in the Galaxy Nexus.
As far as video is concerned, the Galaxy Nexus can capture great p and p recordings, though the quality suffers from the same issues as the still camera.
One thing that's kind of interesting is that Google has included a batch of realtime video effects which use face tracking to create some surprisingly cool modifications of your subjects.
There's no practical use for the software at this point , but it's a great example of just what the Nexus is capable of. As I said before — and as should be abundantly clear — this isn't just a hardware story. With the introduction of Ice Cream Sandwich, Google is making a big, important step forward in the evolution of Android. The new OS is a huge leap in functionality as well as fit and finish, and it's nothing like any Android you know.
While Gingerbread attempted a stark, neon green on black, striving-for-futurism dance with lots of mixed messages on styling and tone , ICS is much more unified. The general motif of the user interface centers on use and reuse of blue and gray dotted with bursts of color, mixed in with flattened navigation, and multi-leveled, multidimensional panels and icons. Dimensionality seems to be a theme in ICS, and you can see it even in the redesigned applications icons, which now seem to suggest physical depth as well as multiple strata of use.
There is some of the "Tron" feel from Honeycomb here, but it's been scaled back and humanized in a way that makes the OS feel a lot more approachable. Nearly every piece of the operating system, from the homescreen to the core apps, menus, widgets, and even pop-ups has been redesigned. That goes for the font in the OS, which is a custom, in-house typeset called Roboto — a subject of some controversy.
Still have it as a backup as I have a work phone now iphone 6 which is average. It's battery started to die in I bought a replacement Samsung battery however phone would still not hold charge. So I went to shop for another backup phone - the Nokia 5 this week. I factory reset the phone and no joke, the battery use is now like new! Crazy little phone detected that I was about to chuck it and it is alive again.
I am keeping the apps to a minimum and leaving the storage as free as possible. I like the removeable battery as it means I keep my spare as backup when travelling. The new phones now simply don't have that except for very few.. I am still using this phone and it is still perfect!
Now, back to the hardware. One of the biggest selling points of the Galaxy Nexus was its screen. Like all of Samsung's screens, the one on the Galaxy Nexus' screen is bright and clear. Even better, it one-ups the iPhone with its ability to play p HD video. It's kind of a pain to get your own videos onto the Galaxy Nexus more on that later , so I mostly tested HD video playback on streaming sites. It looks damn good. But the HD playback is the screen's only redeeming quality.
When placed side by side with the iPhone's Retina Display, the Galaxy Nexus' screen looks downright grainy in comparison. I'm not sure if this is a design aesthetic with Ice Cream Sandwich, but everything on the Galaxy Nexus has this weird textured look to it, almost as if each screen was printed out on a piece of paper. I suspect this is a feature of the hardware, as the screen captures I took using the phone didn't have that grainy look to it.
Don't get me wrong, the screen isn't awful. The graininess I mentioned is hardly a dealbreaker. Most of you probably won't even notice. Plus watching videos on such a large screen is a delight. I wish Samsung would've offered a 16 GB model at a cheaper price, but I guess it's tough to complain about a ton of storage and an incredible 4G network. That's more than enough power to get you by for gaming, video, browsing, you name it. I had no problem when it came to speed performance in these areas, so go wild.
The GSM model of the Galaxy Nexus has decent battery life; I was able to get through most days of normal use on one charge. However, Verizon's LTE model is a whole other story. The battery drains so fast, you'll find yourself reaching for the charger or a spare battery at least once per day. I was traveling this week and spent four hours on an airplane with my Galaxy Nexus completely off.
I still had to recharge about two hours after I landed. You're going to be completely up a creek if you don't buy an extra battery for your Galaxy Nexus or keep a charger in your desk at work. Speeds tend to hover around 10 Mbps for downloads and 1. That's pretty damn good, even by cable modem standards. Naturally, speeds will vary depending on location and how crowded the network is, but you won't be disappointed overall. Another drawback is the extremely low sound from the Galaxy Nexus' speaker.
Even at maximum volume, it's barely audible. It doesn't help that the speaker is located on the back, so it gets even more muffled when the phone is lying flat on a table. I've already missed several phone calls and even an alarm because I couldn't hear the phone.
Not good. One of my favorite additions to the hardware is the indicator light located at the very bottom of the phone. It doesn't feel enormous, really it's at the upper end of what we'd consider to be an ideal size for most users, but you can tell you are not using an iPhone 4S.
The front is probably as minimalist as you can get. It's all black and being built from the ground up as an Android 4. In fact, all you have on the front is the screen, front facing camera and the brightness sensor, plus a cheeky little light beneath the screen that you don't even know exists until you get an email and it begins to pulsate.
The whole handset has a curved shape much like that on the Samsung Galaxy S3 but it's not too severe. The rear takes its design cues from the Samsung Galaxy S2 with a snap on cover that feels slightly coarse to give a good grip. It has both Google and Samsung branding on it. You won't find an SD slot on the outside, or indeed, the inside. Ridiculously, this — the flagship Google handset which is so set up as a media device — has been crippled by having NO expandable memory.
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