Samsung Galaxy Nexus Review: This Is Android os
This gets said every month, but yes, the Galaxy Nexus is
the best Android phone on the market. This time it's by a long shot
Here's the thing about the Galaxy
Nexus: It is the best Android phone available now by such a huge margin that I
am prepared to say that shoppers should either buy it or steer clear of Android
entirely. And that has nothing to do with its hardware.
I am putting forth a call to arms: Let
us not care so much about hardware, Android friends. Let us not pay mind to
mobile processor clock speed, to millimeters of body thickness, to HDMI-out
ports and docking stations and removable batteries. The Galaxy Nexus is the
best Android phone because its software was designed for humans. More than any
other 'Droid previous, using the Galaxy Nexus just makes sense. And for that we
can thank its stock install of something called Ice Cream Sandwich.
WHAT'S NEW
The Nexus line is Google's
"reference line" of Android phones—each one (this is the third) is
the first phone to carry the new version of Android, completely unencumbered by
the custom interfaces tacked on by most other manufacturers. They're intended
to be the purest version of Android of their generation. The Galaxy Nexus is
the first with Android 4.0, called "Ice Cream Sandwich," or ICS
(Android code names use alphabetical dessert names—Cupcake, Donut, Eclair,
Froyo, etc). More phones with ICS will come, and soon—and they will have skins,
like HTC's Sense UI. But this is the phone Google wants us to think of when we
think of ICS.
Ice Cream Sandwich is easily the
biggest update to the smartphone version of Android since the original Droid's
Android 2.0. A lot has changed—too much to cover everything in detail. But
sticking to the highlights:
The look of Android is quite different
from before: it's now cool and blue, with spare lines and black backgrounds.
There's a new, custom-made font. There are friendly animations. The buttons are
completely different—instead of the traditional four Android buttons (Home,
Menu, Search, and Back), there are...well, technically, there are none. The
buttons have been moved to the screen itself, and shrunk to three: Home, Back,
and Recent Apps. The camera app has been overhauled. All of the first-party
apps, like Gmail and Maps, are new. Icons and folders are more
three-dimensional. The keyboard is new. Google Plus is heavily integrated. The
list could go on, but it won't, because it's long enough already.
WHAT'S GOOD
Just about everything listed in the
section above is a good change. But more importantly, Ice Cream Sandwich comes
very close, dangerously close, to the ethereal goal of "just
working." It is fast and responsive as all hell. That is impressive technologically,
but for humans, it's more important as an element of a phone that feels like
it's working with you, not against you. There's no lag: when you swipe, it
moves. This is not as easy as it sounds; I've always felt Android had a
distinct lag between your finger and what was happening on screen, and
throughout most of the Galaxy Nexus, that's now gone.
The new buttons are great; they save
space, but they're also very functional, rotating when you want to rotate the
screen, adding a menu button when you're using an app that needs one,
disappearing when you're playing a game or watching a video.
Apple stole Android's swipe-down
notifications shade in iOS5, and while Apple's is prettier, Ice Cream Sandwich
seems to say "oh yeah? Enjoy the first generation. Here's what we've done
with years of practice." There's an embedded settings button in the shade,
so you can jump in there and turn Wi-Fi or Bluetooth on and off, or change your
brightness, or whatever, in one tap. You can swipe notifications away one by
one—just tap and toss them off the phone.
This animation comes from Matias
Duarte, the user interface genius behind the beloved and now-extinct Palm Pre, who is now a design bigwig at Google. It
is the perfect way to deal with things you don't want: it's like grabbing an
unwanted piece of junk mail and pushing it off your desk. Now your desk is
clean! That same UI trick pops up in a few other places, and it never fails to
make your phone feel simultaneously intuitive and transparent, which is not an
easy trick.
Galaxy Nexus
Apps: On the left: the Recent Apps screen. You can swipe any of these apps
to close them, or tap to switch to them. On the right is the app drawer;
swiping horizontally browses through apps and widgets. Dan Nosowitz
All the new apps are great; Android's
biggest strength, I always thought, was its Google apps. Maps on Android is in
a different league than anywhere else, as is Gmail. The browser has been
redesigned, smartly. Tabs can be swiped-to-close, just like notifications or
open apps. Pages are rendered very nicely (though I found the
tap-to-zoom-in-on-text, as well as pinch-to-zoom, to be less reliable and
natural than on the iPhone 4S). There's a mode to request the desktop, rather
than mobile, version of a site—ideal for the sites that, frustratingly, don't
provide such links for you. There's a "save for offline reading" mode
so you can read longer stories later, even when you've got no wireless signal.
Mobile Flash, recently shuttered by Adobe, is not currently available on ICS—it
may come later, but I didn't miss it, even though it was occasionally nice to
have the option.
The keyboard is great. I've used
Android for a long time, with many different devices, and this is the first
time I did not immediately download a better keyboard app from the Market. It's
the right amount of sensitive, autocorrect is unobtrusive and helpful, and it
gets what you're trying to say. Job well done, Android keyboard developers.
There are lots of nice little features,
which you'll discover as you go, ranging from NFC to
a new unlock mode that recognizes your face to a new People app that collects
info from all your friends. There are tons of goodies in here which you'll
discover as you use it.
THE HARDWARE
Is mediocre. Please, guys, no more
cheap-feeling, lightweight plastic phones. The Galaxy Nexus is made by Samsung,
and feels like the Galaxy S, or the Focus, or any other modern Samsung phone.
It's wildly thin (maybe a hair thinner than the iPhone 4S at its thinnest
point), but it's still light and plastic-y. It is not impossible to make
great-looking and great-feeling phones that aren't the iPhone—just ask
Nokia—but the Galaxy Nexus is just, you know, fine. When I reviewed the Nokia Lumia 800, I kept trying to get
other people to hold it. "Feel how great it feels to feel!" I'd
sputter. No such illiterate enthusiasm here. It's not bad either, just nothing
special.
Galaxy Nexus
Back:
The screen warrants some talk. It's
sized at 4.65-inches, which is just insanity. 4.3 inches has become the
accepted size of a "big" phone, so I was positive a 4.65-incher would
be unusable, but in fact the Galaxy Nexus as a whole is just slightly larger
than a 4.3-inch phone like the Droid Bionic (pictured). Partly that's because a
portion of the screen is devoted to the new "buttons," and partly
it's because the phone has a pretty small bezel. It's still a little too big, I
think—I'd have preferred a Nexus with a 4.3-inch screen that physically is much
smaller—but aside from a couple stretches to tap something in the upper-left
corner of the screen, I can proclaim the Galaxy Nexus usable for people with
average-to-large hands. The extra space is nice for watching videos or reading
Kindle books (suddenly a pleasant experience on a phone), and the screen itself
is great: ICS mandates a true 720p resolution, and the Super AMOLED display is
very clear, with some of the deepest blacks I've seen.
The camera's speed is unparalleled—it's
very fast to shoot and then ready itself for the next shot, even faster than
the iPhone 4S. But the sensor in the Galaxy Nexus
itself is surprisingly bad. It's a 5MP shooter, and compared to photos from the
iPhone 4S or even other Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S II, I found
the Nexus's shots washed out, fuzzy, and without detail. That's a hardware
issue, I suppose. Bummer, though. Future Ice Cream Sandwich phones will
hopefully use better sensors.
The Galaxy Nexus will be released on
Verizon's network here in the States, and it'll boast 4G LTE, which is pretty killer. My review unit is
on T-Mobile's HSPA+ network, so I can't make any judgment about the Nexus's 4G
speeds or battery life (a constant concern with 4G phones). It won't have a
slot for expandable memory (most Android phones do) and rumors indicate
it'll probably have 32GB of internal storage on Verizon. Call quality on
today's phones usually has more to do with the network than the phone itself,
but the Galaxy Nexus I tested delivered stellar-sounding calls on T-Mobile.
WHAT'S BAD
Android is still not as streamlined as
iOS or Windows Phone. Perhaps Android phone fans don't want it to be. Ice Cream
Sandwich is a big step forward, but there are still elements that feel
redundant or messy. Having three ways to do something doesn't make it easier to
use; it makes it harder to learn the rules of the operating system, harder to
understand why certain things work certain ways and thus harder to perform new
actions for the first time, since you're not sure how it'll respond. Some apps
require a menu button, which will pop up next to the Recent Apps button at the
bottom right of the screen. Some don't need one. Some do, but you'll find it in
the upper right corner instead. Ugh.
Sometimes you scroll through things
vertically starting at the bottom (like in the Recent Apps list or browser
tabs). Sometimes you scroll through things vertically starting at the top (like
every other app ever, including contacts and music). But then the app drawer
scrolls horizontally. Every single time I opened the app drawer, I tried to
swipe it up, the way non-Samsung Android phones have always worked. Why,
Google? Why change that?
Galaxy Nexus and
Droid Bionic: On the left, the 4.3-inch-screened Motorola Droid Bionic. On the
right, the 4.65-inch-screened Galaxy Nexus. The Nexus is barely larger, and
actually thinner. Dan
Nosowitz
The home screen is my least favorite
part of the entire OS: it not only permits messiness, it encourages it. There
are still five home screens, and you can't change that number. I never saw the
need for more than one or two; the complete list of apps is one tap away, so
why do you need to litter five homescreens with widgets and multiple redundant
shortcuts?
Android is powerful and flexible, yes.
You can do all kinds of crazy things! But that's like saying a huge buffet is
always better than a carefully composed dish from a chef. I don't want to make
Android something it's not, and there are definitely times when it's thrilling
to be able to make my phone look just the way I want it to, but some
consistency and limits might help here.
And once you get away from the warm
blue glow of Google's first-party apps, performance takes a hit. Scrolling is
noticeably jerkier and less natural in non-Google apps. The app selection is
still not very cohesive; it sounds like an unfair claim, but the majority of
Android apps are not as pretty or as fun to use as those on Windows Phone or
iOS. Functional, sure, and there are an awful lot of apps in the Market. But
mostly they are not as good. (Examples: Rdio, Twitter, IMDb, Hulu Plus.) The
Music app is still disappointing; I'm not sure what the problem is there, but
Android's default music player has always been curiously ugly and un-fun to use
to me. There are lots of replacements in the Market, luckily (I recommend Winamp, although the official Music app is the only
one that integrates with Google Music's cloud-streaming storage feature).
THE PRICE
None of the principal folks involved
with the Galaxy Nexus (that'd be Google, Samsung, and Verizon) have announced
price or availability in the States. Good bet would be soon, though.
THE VERDICT
The Galaxy Nexus is the best Android
phone I've ever used, heads and tails above anything else on the market. The
speed, the new sleek blue-and-grayscale look, the new Google apps, the new and
easier ways to manage what's happening on your phone—there's no contest. With
Verizon's 4G, presuming the 4G doesn't reduce the Nexus's battery life to zero
in a few hours, it'll be a damn fine phone, and not just for dedicated
Androiders.
I love the direction Ice Cream Sandwich
is going: toward a more consistent, simpler, more fun experience, while
retaining that tinkerer's ability to do anything. Finding that balance is as
hard as balancing an egg on its end; it may turn out to be impossible to please
everyone. But I have no hesitation in recommending the Nexus if you're leaning
toward or curious about Android. It makes other Android phones feel much older
than their age, and I mean that in the best way.
