The Display is
absolutely amazing! It's crisp, and the color saturation is incredibly. I've
never seen a display quite like it. It is on par with the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S
and the HTC Rezound. While the Rezound technically has the highest ppi, the
315ppi on the Nexus is amazing. You can adjust the brightness to save some
battery life, and even on low the picture looks as good as is to be expected,
but I've chosen to leave it on full brightness because the screen is just that
pretty. At time I find myself switching to the auto-brightness setting which I
find is very helpful. Since I have always used my cells phones as my alarm
clock, the auto-brightness makes it easy to actually look at the phone when the
room is dark after I've just woken up. Because the screen is amazing I am
willing to leave it on full-brightness most of the time, except when I go to
sleep becasue I don't like being blinded when I have to either snooze or
dismiss my alarm.
Camera:
I know I've
already mentioned the camera a little bit, but since most reviews line item
this separately, I will do the same. Yes it's only 5MP, but MP aren't
everything. As I've mentioned, the light sensors are more important. It is a
little disappointing to see that Samsung didn't inclue the 8MP shooter they use
on their Galaxy SII brand becasue that phone takes some pretty good photos as
well. After spending a decent amount of time playing with the camera, I find
that in perfect lighting, this thing takes great pictures, but other than that,
it struggles to take a high quality picture. This still doesn't change the fact
that it can take very good pictures, but it's just not what you would have
expected in a flagship phone, especially since pictures from the Galaxy SII
takes better pictures. Kind of a bummer. However, you can play with the
settings as needed to get what I think can still be a very good picture, but
not great.
This thing can
also shoot in 1080. Now if you wondering how it can do that with only 5MP, you
have to understand what resolution 5MP can produce. A 5MP shooter can produce
photos and videos with a resolution of 2984 x 1680. For those of you that don't
fully understand the resolutnion of 1080p video, the resolution is actually
1920 x 1080. Now that you can see this, it is clearly understandable why and
how the 5MP shooter with a great sensor shoots in 1080.
Software:
I came from a
Blackberry, but I have had some experience with iPhones and various Android
phones and the custom skins different OEMs use. I can say that the lack of OEM
customization and the pure Android experience is by far the best. I like it
better than the iPhone OS too. While some people won't like seeing the Google
Search Bar widget built in to all the home screens, I kind of like it. The
swipe down notification tray is great (something I didn't have with my BB), and
you can access it even while the screen is locked, but if you have security set
up you will need to unlock before accessing notification tray.
The speech to
text feature baked into the whole OS is very good. However, you need to speak
very deliberately, and very clearly. If you do, it's about 95% accurate. the
other 5% actually has some other options to select from that it thinks you
said. While I have not demoed Siri on the iPhone 4S, i do know that you need to
speak very clearly too for that, but it might be more accurate. I can't say for
sure though. And while the speech to text in ICS is not a personal assistant, I
do not need to talk to my phone like I am on the Star Trek Enterprise. Also
many owners of the iPhone 4S don't even use Siri after the first couple of
weeks. After months of having this phone, I use the speech to text all the time
because it's very easy to access and dictate messages when my hands aren't free
to type or if my eye should be elsewhere.
The resizable
widgets is great. The other thing I like is the ability to create folders on
your home screens, but this is something that iOS has had for a while now.
However, where this trumps iOS is if you create speed dials. In iOS you can't
easily create speed dials, but Android has always been good at this, and with
the ability to create folders on your home screen, this becomes incredibly
useful because you are not cluttering your screen with all your speed dials.
ICS also has a
task manager is that very easy to access as it's built-in as one of the
software buttons (remember there are no physical buttons aside from the volume
rocker and the power button). You can switch between apps that you have open
with a quick press. You can also use this to close any apps that you aren't
using anymore. Speaking of Apps, because this is a Nexus device, you won't find
any of the bloatware apps that Verizon loves include on its phones. Well,
actually you will find 2 apps, My Verizon Mobile and VZ Backup Assistant. I
tend to find Backup Assistant to be useless since all my contacts are synced
with my gmail, but the My Verizon Mobile i think is semi-useful. Although I
have a grandfathered data plan, I can easily launch this app up and check my
minutes. If you really don't want these two apps though, in ICS you can disable
the apps and they disappear for your app tray.
If you are
buying this and don't have a grandfathered data plan you will most defintely
want to take advantage of a brand new feature in ICS. You can limit how much
data your phone uses each month on the mobile network. This is really important
because you don't want to use your phone all month and then get hit with a huge
overage charge on data. You can tweak the settings too to limit background data
used by running apps also. This is a great add to ICS!
 |
| Samsung Galaxy Nexus 4G Android Phone |
Battery Life:
We've all heard
this time and time again, but battery life on 4G phones is not great. So this
phone comes with a slightly larger battery than the GSM version. That being
said, this was needed for the 4G LTE antenna. You may want to disable 4G if you
don't live in an area that has 4G or if you want to conserve battery life.
Because I'm not always in 4G coverage, I've turned off the 4G. Since then, my
battery life has been great! Most of your battery life is going to get drained
by your display, but this is true for all smartphones though. I love how
crystal clear the screen is on full brightness so I can deal with the the
slightly shorter battery life I will have.
