Samsung Galaxy Nexus review

What is it?
Google's new flagship handset, a 4.65-inch touchscreen device featuring the brand new Android 4.0 OS.

What's great
A superbly vivid and sharp screen; re-designed Android OS; great multi-media functionality and premium design.

What's not
The camera is a bit disappointing and speech recognition is poor.

The bottom line
While the Nexus is a little underwhelming in certain areas, the updated Android is a joy to use, offering tons of customisation options and a sleek, intuitive smartphone experience on a vast screen.

Review
According to the dictionary, a nexus is "a connection or link; the focus or nub of something". It's a fitting name for a phone that's been at the heart of speculation about Android 4.0, a device that forms a bridge between the current version of Google's smartphone OS and Ice Cream Sandwich (the code name for this update).

The case design is nice but rather vanilla. The Nexus' speaker is housed under a lip on the rear, beneath a textured silver back panel, making it a slightly bottom heavy phone. The front, meanwhile, is all big 4.65-inch show-off screen, a glass panel that extends right to the edges of the handset; unless you tilt the Nexus toward a light source it's hard to tell where the panel ends and the housing for the microphone and alert light begin. A simple volume rocker and power button sit on the curved left and right edges, with a 3.5mm headphone jack and micro USB on the bottom of the phone. In short, it's a solid, classy design that fits snugly in the hand; but it lacks the wow-factor of the iPhone 4S or Nokia Lumia 800.

The screen, however, will induce plenty of oohing and aahing. Colour reproduction, sharpness and clarity are all faultless, and it's perfect for showing off the new-look Android. Icons are much more detailed and really 'pop' on the Nexus; they even seem to float slightly above the new selection of Live Wallpapers. Open up one of the core apps such as Gmail or Calendar and you're introduced to the new vibe of Ice Cream Sandwich: cool, elegant minimalism. Thin sans-serif fonts and muted colour schemes dominate, with slivers of electric blue found on the small-keyed but accurate keyboard and redesigned dialer app. All very slick and stylish.

A neat sound effect accompanies the updated ring unlock system, although as you'd expect with Android, there's an option to change this to a number of other unlock methods, one of which is a new Face Unlock feature. Multitasking is also integral to the Nexus experience, with all your open apps accessible via a tap of the dedicated touch button at the bottom of the screen - up to five of your favourite apps can be placed in the dock too. However, the option to pinch to show all home screens at one glance has mysteriously disappeared - an omission we can't quite understand.

The bundled browser is super fast both on 3G and wi-fi, and website text is pin-sharp. Smooth pinch zooming, tabbed browsing and easy bookmarking also feature, though this being an Android phone there are plenty of alternative browsers available from the Android Market too. A word of warning: our test handset lacked Flash functionality, but we're 99.9 per cent certain it's in the pipeline.

We were pleased to see a straightforward data usage menu in the settings, which allows you to easily set a mobile data usage limit and monitor which apps are chewing up your megabytes (Google Maps - we're looking at you). Widgets are also easily resizable once you've placed them on one of the home screens (only five unfortunately - odd considering the Galaxy S2 has seven). Calls are crystal clear too.

However, there are some holes in the Nexus' package. For starters, social networking integration is poor. You can download dedicated apps for Twitter and Facebook from the Android Market of course, but there's no straightforward means of merging your status updates, tweets and IM conversations - something many similar-priced handsets offer out of the box. Wi-fi signal strength is rather hap-hazard too, and the speech recognition tool is virtually unusable; compared to Siri, its about as good as understanding voice commands as Del Boy is at understanding French.

Although megapixels aren't the be-all-and-end-all when it comes to digital photography, we expected the Nexus to be packing at least an eight, rather than five, megapixel lens. The camcorder is better, featuring full 1080p recording, and the Panoramic stitching tool works well for super wide-angle shots. But all-in-all the Nexus makes for a distinctly average camera phone at this price. Battery-wise it sits squarely in the middle of the pack. You'll easily get a full day out of it if you're only a light or medium user, but ramp up the brightness to max and kick back with a movie and you'll soon be seeing red.

Verdict
Overall the Samsung Google Nexus is a solid, sophisticated phone that's a pleasure to use and its flaws are more than made up for by the excellent operating system. But with Android 4.0 handsets from HTC, Sony and the Samsung Galaxy S landing next year, the Nexus won't have a monopoly on Ice Cream Sandwich for long.

Essential info
Camera: 5MP
Video: 1080p@30fps
Display: 4.65-inch, Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
Dimensions: 68x136x8.9 mm
Weight: 135g
Internal Memory: 16GB storage (32GB version coming soon)
Card Slot: N/A
Colour: Silver and black
Touchscreen: Yes
Audio Playback: 3.5mm earphone jack & speaker
Operating System: Android 4.0
Processor: Dual-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9
Battery Life: Up to 8 h 20 min talk time (3G)

What you said:
"The software is great, the hardware is dull" - RufusUK

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