Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus is hands down the best Android phone we’ve used, though only some of that comes down to the phone itself. In what’s shaping up to be a yearly refresh for Google, this third Nexus-branded handset packs the new Android 4.0 operating system (aka Ice Cream Sandwich) in its untouched form; as before, this is semi-officially Google’s flagship phone, so it should be the first to get any future Android OS updates.
The one main caveat to the Galaxy Nexus is that it probably isn’t for everyone — it’s undeniably a rather big phone. But while its 4.65in screen size may sound intimidating on paper, in the hand it’s very similar to Samsung’s own 4.3in Galaxy S II. The Nexus is only fractionally wider (2mm) and a little thicker than the latter, and is still comparatively light at just 135g. Most of the Nexus’s extra screen size actually adds height rather than width and most of that height is taken up by the new navigation bar, which trims down and replaces Android’s traditional physical buttons (Back, Home, Menu and so on) with onscreen versions.
The 1,280 x 720-pixel AMOLED display does make things sharper — it greatly improves character definition and readability with smaller text. However, we found screen uniformity wasn’t great, with mild pinkish tinges on both sides of our test unit’s screen, and it’s not the cleanest display, with a slightly grainy look overall. These are minor problems, but they’re worth being aware of.
On the plus side, the lack of Gorilla Glass is a non-issue; we weren’t able to mark the screen at all, despite some quite forceful key scratch tests. Battery drain isn’t too severe either — we regularly cruised through a full 24 hours (with around three to four hours of screen time) on a single charge. From a hardware perspective, overall things are pretty good then.
What really makes the Galaxy Nexus great, however, is the software. With Android 4.0, Google has seriously cleaned up and unified the design of both the OS and most of the core apps, a little change that adds a lot to overall usability. Small touches and additions — like making swiping left and right a central control theme (allowing you to flick between emails in the Gmail app or categories in the Market), a redesigned Settings app that makes finding things much easier, tap to focus in the camera, and ‘Request desktop site’ and ‘Save for offline reading’ buttons in the browser — are all well thought-out and genuinely useful.
The new OS is also consistently fast and smooth on the 1.2GHz dual-core CPU, even with 70-odd apps installed. There are some minor problems and areas that still need a bit of work — the Menu button has a bad habit of jumping around the screen depending on the app and a handful of the apps we used during testing didn’t display properly or outright wouldn’t run on Android 4.0, for example. The lack of a microSD card slot, meaning you’re limited to the included 16GB of storage, may also be a bugbear.
Overall, though, this is the most polished and usable Android phone we’ve tested, and once you’ve used it, it’s genuinely hard to go back to any of its predecessors.
The other good news is the Galaxy Nexus is available on contract from all major mobile networks, or outright from online retailers such as MobiCity (which loaned us the unit for this review.)
