Ever since Android 4.0 (dubbed "Ice Cream Sandwich," but I'm going to call it by its version number) was demoed back in October, I was intrigued. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus is the flagship device running the brand new service and I've been able to run it through its paces over the last two days.
I've come away with an overwhelmingly positive feelings about the Galaxy Nexus. Read on for my initial impressions of the device. I'll have the phone for the next few weeks, so stay tuned for later posts for a more in depth or final takeaway of my experience.
Packaging and installation
It's a good thing that the most disappointing part of my impressions is getting the phone up and running. The box containing the Galaxy Nexus is a beautiful, understated white box, with red on the inside. It's a bit downhill from there: each component–headset, charger, USB cable, the battery–is enclosed in a tiny plastic bag. The LTE SIM card was in a little business card-looking case. There's also way too much documentation included in the box. It's just needless waste.
I also didn't enjoy the process of installing the SIM card and the battery, but there tangible benefits of having a replaceable battery (but more on that later), so it's worth the pain, in some respects.
Look and feel
The build quality on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is very good. It can't compete with my day-to-day phone, the iPhone 4S, in terms of industrial design. However, I feel the phone is easy to grip and has an pleasant textured plastic backing.
Who wants a giant, 4.65-inch touch screen on their phone? After all, a 3.5-inch phone is the sweet spot, right? False. Perhaps my hands are big (ladies...), but I've had no real issue with one-handed operation of the phone. Perhaps the one time I have to adjust the phone is to reach the compose tweet button in the top right corner of the Twitter for Android when I'm holding the phone in my left hand. It's a good thing Twitter for Android isn't my main app on the phone (more on that later).
There are three physical buttons on the phone: a volume rocker on the left and a power button on the right. Considering the size of the phone, the button placement is perfect. Each button feels good and the device is responsive to presses. For comparison's sake the iPhone has four buttons and a silent switch. In place of physical buttons for home and back commands, Android 4.0 renders buttons on the display.
Display
The Galaxy Nexus display, a 4.65-inch 1280-by-720-pixel resolution AMOLED display is very, very good. Colors are vibrant–sometimes too vibrant–and text renders nicely. I do still prefer the iPhone's retina display in terms of quality; I can still see the pixels when, say, looking at a zoomed-out version of the New York Times home page. For video viewing, however, I'd take the larger, higher resolution display of the Nexus any day.
There's a nice LED indicator below the displays that flashes whenever there is a pending notification.
Software
My previous experiences with Android involved skins: the HTC EVO 4G ran that company's Sense skin and Samsung's Fascinate ran TouchWiz. In comparing those UIs with Android 4.0's stock skin, I find there's no real competition. And it's not surprising, the mission for Android 4.0 was to create a beautiful design. That mission has paid off very well.
Most of the interface accents are a pretty sky blue contrasted on a black or gray background. It's very nice. Pair that with the new system font, Roboto. I find the font not to be a ripoff of Helvetica, as some have posited, but its own unique sans serif entity. It's a great font. I wish it was available in the Kindle app available on the Android Market, but it is available in the Google Books app.
In terms of responsiveness, Android 4.0 on the Galaxy Nexus hardware, is just as responsive as iOS 5. Scrolling is smooth, swiping gestures are pulled off perfectly. The only time I had an issue with scrolling was in the Twitter for Android application, which is just poorly developed it seems. The app stutters at just about every turn.
Navigation on the phone is very well done with three on-screen buttons that persist at the bottom. There's back, which takes you back one level of a menu tree or back a website, based on the app you are using. There's home, which takes you to the home screen, naturally. Finally, there's the app switcher, which finds an at-a-glance look at the apps that are running. It's just fun, and is reminiscent of the "card" interface, as each running app can be swiped away if it is not needed.
The Browser app included in Android 4.0 is extremely snappy. I tried loading the graphics-intensive full version of The Verge on both my iPhone 4S and the Galaxy Nexus at the same time (after clearing each phone's cache) and found they loaded at identical speeds on Wi-Fi. My one gripe with Android's Browser has to be the lack of website fonts. The Verge's gorgeous fonts were replaced with Roboto, which in some cases made text appear out of place or misaligned. See the "new articles" link below:
That's the one thing I want to see fixed with the browser. Otherwise, websites display flawlessly; scrolling and zooming results in no hitches.
Ultimately, I find the fit and finish of Android 4.0 to be up to par and in some cases better than iOS. There's just one thing holding it back: developer support for apps. There are some flagship iOS apps that aren't available on Android. Instagram, which has pledged that it would develop an app, is a notable holdout. Still though, the Android Market ecosystem is definitely gaining steam, so there's a ton of potential there. As I spend more time with apps, I'll post about the ones I find interesting.
LTE
The Galaxy Nexus on Verizon features an LTE radio. In my testing, it's extremely fast, but is a drain on the battery life of the device. Unfortunately, although Verizon tells me that I'm in a 4G coverage area, the Galaxy Nexus will default to the slower CDMA network. If I go a mile down the road, I get full bars on 4G and an extremely fast, broadband-like connection. It's mindblowing.
This comes at a cost; and it's not just the battery life. The data plan on the phone is typically 2 GB for $30 a month. Thanks to a holiday promotion, it's 4 GB at the same price. On the LTE network you could stream three HD movies and almost eat up all of that data plan. There's almost a panic that sets in each time the phone is used on the network. Fortunately, Android 4.0 has a nifty data-usage monitoring and warning system.
I think the data caps, with more and more ubiquitous 4G speeds, are stupid. Athough it has broadband-like speeds, at least broadband services cap data usage at around 250 GB per month.
Final thoughts
I think I get a bad rap for being a devoted iPhone user. For one, I've tried other Android phones running Android 2.2 or earlier and found them less than adequate. After using Android 4.0 for a day, I've come to a conclusion: I believe in Android. I think it's one of the best mobile operating systems out there and the Galaxy Nexus is one of the best phones ever made. It's that good.