What is galaxy nexus

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. I happen to think the new typeface is a welcome, clean addition to Android, and a big improvement over the previous Droid Sans face.

Starting at the lock screen, things are really different. The standard unlock sequence is now a swipe of a lock icon left or right — the latter to get into the phone, and the former to jump right into the camera.

I love the convenience of this, but unfortunately you can't use the camera jump if you pin or password protect the device that goes for Face Unlock and pattern locks as well. Notifications have been cleaned up and tweaked too. Not only can you access your notifications from the lock screen provided you're not password protected , but you can individually swipe messages or alerts away. There's also a persistent quick jump to settings in the notification window which has been restyled and made subtly transparent.

When you hit the homescreen, you'll see a fairly familiar setup of five main screens, but with persistent navigation elements along the bottom. A row of the on-screen buttons, and then a customizable lineup of your favorite apps or folders, plus a center button which brings you to your app and widget drawer. Google search is now a persistent box at the top of all your homescreens it's very similar to webOS' "Just Type". You can now make folders of apps by simply dragging one icon onto another, and the folder will auto-arrange itself when you move the icons around.

It's very reminiscent of iOS. Opening the app drawer brings you a grid of your applications, and you can tab into your widget selections as well. There's also a persistent link to the Android Market in the corner. It's similar to the way Honeycomb handles these pages, but it all feels much more natural here. Menus and lists have been changed as well, and particularly in settings, it's easier to find the toggles you're looking for without hunting and pecking.

One big new feature that Google has added to the settings menu is the ability to set data warnings, hard limits, see application data activity, and limit background data on an app-by-app basis. That's a welcome relief for people looking to contain their bills, especially if you've got a hard stop on something expensive, like Verizon's LTE service.

The look and feel of these screens is refreshingly stark with just the right amount of futurism a theme here. I want to note that moving around all of these screens is buttery smooth.

There's no lag, no stutter. Animations are fluid, and everything feels cohesive and solid. It's like Ice Cream Sandwich is more "there" than previous versions of Android.

Additionally, there are repeated motifs that really work, such as the concept of swiping left of right through panels of an app to get at different pieces or layers of content. That's used throughout the OS now, and it makes a lot of sense. Another thing that's been done is that navigational items previously buried in menus have been pulled out and placed into touch-friendly, exposed rows.

There are still some options hidden in a small "overflow" tab a consistent triple-dotted nav item , but these are generally the less frequently visited areas of an app, such as settings. I find that the new system makes it even easier to get around in the OS, and compared to its nearest competition iOS , it is actually far simpler in some instances. Take, for example, clearing your cache in the browser. In iOS, you actually have to exit the app, open settings, find Safari settings, and then do your cache clearing.

In ICS you simply tap on the overflow box, click settings, and clear away — without ever leaving your app. It's a great blend of the desktop and mobile user interactions, and one of the things I liked best about what Google did with Honeycomb. One last big piece worth mentioning is the vast alteration to multitasking on the phone.

Previously, multitasking was done by holding down the home button and waiting for a pop-over of your last few apps to appear. The trigger to get into that screen was blind, and the apps your were heading towards were blind as well. Google has rectified that situation in ICS by providing a dedicated multitask button in your persistent virtual button list, and by not only showing what app you've been using, but a small snapshot of the last screen you were in.

You can also triage this list by swiping away the apps you're not using. It's kind of like webOS cards running vertically instead of horizontally — and it really, truly works well. It does take a moment to get used to, but after a few minutes with it, I was wondering how I'd been living with multitasking in Android and other platforms like iOS that was so clunky.

The core of the redesign here is about exposing options, reducing steps and confusion, and making Android generally more delightful to use. I would say Google has accomplished what it set out to do. That's not to say that there aren't still some imperfections here, but generally Ice Cream Sandwich feels like a modern — and most importantly, elegant — operating system that's been thoughtfully designed.

A lot of people yours truly included have long griped about the consistency and accuracy of the keyboard and text selection options in Android. Well I'm happy to report that Google has finally stepped up to the plate on the much-needed changes to both of these items.

For starters, the keyboard is now far more accurate than previous versions. I would put the text prediction and auto-correction on par with iOS at this point. My typing speed noticeably improved with ICS, and not only was it easier to bang out messages quickly, but moving back to correct mistakes or change words has been massively tweaked.

Android is tracking mistakes or perceived mistakes much more closely now and red-underlining anything that looks amiss — a simple tap on that word and you get a contextual dropdown of suggestions. Additionally, you need only double tap on a word and the cursor below it or long press on that word to get a context menu with choices to replace.

You can now easily long press on any text pretty much anywhere on the device and get options to copy, share, or find-in-page for that snippet. It works brilliantly, and the provided start and end cursors work just as you'd expect. It's stupid to have taken so long to do something so simple, but it's incredibly refreshing to not have to think about it anymore.

One other item worth noting — Google's voice-to-text feature now processes your input nearly in realtime, meaning you can get your dictated messages into the phone much faster.

In testing, the service was generally accurate, though we still have a long way to go before it can steer clear of all of the natural pitfalls of this sort of human to machine translation. While most applications are not affected, I have seen some significant issues with a handful of apps I use.

For instance, Andchat, an IRC client I've used on every Android I've owned seems to display incorrectly for a few moments, and then crash completely. TweetDeck, my Twitter client of choice, works well save for a menu which is missing when composing a tweet in portrait view.

There are other small issues I've noticed in a handful of apps, such as menus not appearing and formatting seeming off, but the majority of the problems strike me as screen size related, not fundamental issues with the platform.

It's not just new hardware and whole new look and feel. Google's overhauled the core apps as well. Gmail has been redesigned from the ground up, utilizing most of the changes made in Honeycomb. Weirdly, however, these changes make a lot more sense when your fingers aren't darting from one corner of the screen to the other.

Instead of the awkward, unresponsive controls of the older Gmail app, the icons and navigation in Ice Cream Sandwich's Gmail are superb. I never had any missed touches a common issue in Gingerbread and earlier iterations , and I found I was able to manage and read my email much more quickly.

Google is utilizing that swiping motif here to great effect, allowing you to simply page through your emails and conversations. Additionally, you can now search your mail offline at least 30 days back , meaning my train rides are going to be about a million times more productive. More than anything though, just as in the rest of the OS, Gmail is just a lot less ugly and clunky than it used to be.

It feels fast and modern, and frankly might be better than Gmail in the browser in some ways. Just like Gmail, the calendar app has been prettied up and made more functional, but the biggest alteration comes in the form of a new gesture here: pinch-to-zoom. If you've got a massively packed schedule I do, you just don't see it in the video below , this is a life saver. The basic concept is that you can zoom in or out on your more cluttered days, and get increasingly granular information on the events you have upcoming.

In use, I thought the feature was terrific. All too often, designers add this kind of window dressing to an app for the visual flair without taking into account any kind of actual utility. That's not the case here. The gesture is beautiful and functional. You know if you can excite people about your calendar app, you're doing something right.

I found it pretty reliable and helpful during busy hours, and Google has thoughtfully added little breadcrumbs suggesting which conversation is to the right or left of the one that you're currently in. If you're jumping between conversations a lot and I am , this is pretty radical feature in the world of mobile IM applications. I felt more able to triage and respond to incoming messages in the new Talk than I have on any other smartphone messaging client.

Another nice thing about Talk is that it integrates with the People app which is basically your new address book , meaning that you can see statuses from multiple areas on the phone.

Let me just say this — the browser in Ice Cream Sandwich does some serious ass-kicking. I don't often use profanity in my gadget reviews, but I felt it was worth emphasizing just how much better the browser on the Galaxy Nexus is compared with much of its competition. Not only has the look and feel of the app been cleaned up along with the rest of the OS, but its speed is rather impressive. Testing with SunSpider, I scored a staggeringly low number of Comparatively, the iPhone 4S scored There are some minor issues with the browser — like the fact that it doesn't seem to be rendering certain elements such as TypeKit correctly, and some of its JavaScript performance seems laggy in comparison to Mobile Safari.

Still, it's one of the best mobile browsing experiences I've ever had. I used to dread having to use the browser on the Nexus S. This is the polar opposite. The People app is a new — and welcome — addition to Android. The company says its offering a social API for the app that developers can plug into, and I have to imagine that a lot of third-parties will be taking advantage of it.

Google may have just taken a page out of the Windows Phone playbook with this one, but it works in a really organic way across the device, and I found myself really liking it. The Galaxy Nexus is the best Android phone ever made. It's one of the best smartphones ever made, and with a couple of minor tweaks particularly to the camera , it could be the best smartphone ever produced.

Still, there's really not much to knock here. The hardware is elegant and smartly designed. The smaller the number is, the bigger this opening is, allowing for more light to pass. Location - This field shows the positioning systems supported by the device.

Every wireless phone device that is sold in the U. Date approved - Shows the date when the particular phone is approved by the Federal Communications Commission. These limits are given in terms of a unit referred to as the Specific Absorption Rate SAR , which is a measure of the amount of radio frequency energy absorbed by the body when using a mobile phone.

PhoneArena Score Review. User Score User reviews. Released Nov 17, Display 4. Camera 5 MP Single camera 1. Storage 32GB,. Battery mAh. OS Android 4. Cons 32GB basic storage not expandable. Hardware Benchmarks. Design Size comparison. If you are interested in using our specs commercially, check out our Phone specs database licensing page. Differences from the main variant: Internal storage: 16GB.