PCMag.Com - This is a huge deal. Ice Cream Sandwich is the biggest upgrade to Google’s Android OS since Android 2.2 hit in May 2010, and possibly the most important update ever. From what I’ve seen so far in a day with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone, Android users should be demanding their share of Ice Cream—and it should absolutely make a difference in your phone purchases.
Google lent me an international developer unit of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first ICS phone. This isn’t the LTE device that Verizon Wireless will be selling in the U.S., but it’s roughly the same size and shape with very similar capabilities, so it’s a good way to judge what ICS will be like when it hits the USA.
The Samsung Galaxy Nexus
The latest Google phone undoes the mistake of the lackluster Samsung Nexus S and brings the Nexus line back to where it should be: on the cutting edge. The Galaxy Nexus raises the bar for smartphones in one very critical way, with its 1280-by-720 Super AMOLED Plus screen. Like the screen on the HTC Rezound, this is finally denser than the iPhone’s Retina Display, and the results are vivid. You really see the difference in the browser and in apps like DC Comics: text may become too physically small to read, but it’s never too fuzzy.
Otherwise, the phone looks and feels a lot like the Samsung Galaxy S II for T-Mobile: classy, though plastic, and definitely big. My HTC Sensation is a big phone: the Galaxy Nexus is noticeably longer and wider, and I have trouble fitting it easily in my mid-sized hand. (I can only reach my thumb across the screen with difficulty.) The 720p screen is awesome, but I’d prefer it in the HTC Rezound’s 4.3-inch size than in this tendon-stretching 4.65-inches.
There’s NFC in here, but no Google Wallet, because this phone isn’t on Sprint. (Welcome to the perpetually tragic story of NFC, which always almost has an ecosystem.) The 5-megapixel camera has very good low-light performance, getting noisy in extreme conditions rather than blurring out. (Anything is preferable to blurriness.) Everything is fast, in large part because of Ice Cream Sandwich, which takes much better advantage of dual-core processors than Android 2.3 did.
All the same, I can’t yet recommend that people buy the Galaxy Nexus, because it is not on sale. Hopefully Verizon will soon explain when people will be able to get this thing.
Ice Cream Sandwich
Google has finally grown up. Ice Cream Sandwich is an elegant, futuristic-looking OS that borrows visual elements from both Gingerbread and Honeycomb. This is still Android: it’s still tweakable, there are still a lot of buttons, and it’s still for people who like to arrange the furniture in their house just so.
But oh wow, there are a lot of changes. Let’s start with speed: the browser is now dual-core aware (as the Honeycomb browser has been), effectively doubling browser benchmark scores on fast phones over 2.3. That alone is worth the price of entry. More
