A few days ago, the nice postman brought this to our home

and the android experience hasn’t been the same since. I think the Samsung Galaxy Nexus has brilliant design, the curved look adds to this, and the little bumper at the bottom back does as well. Since as a Nexus device it doesn’t feature Touchwiz either, it also dropped the “cheap-iphone-ripoff” look that has always been a dealkiller for me with all the other Galaxy devices up to this point.
The real surprise though was Ice Cream Sandwich. It looks really good. It features the basic surfaces of the redesigned Play Store, I think you can tell that the designers work at a web company. It’s fast and it’s beautiful.
Having seen this review some time ago, I was worried about a few things. First off, dropping the search button seemed like a bad idea, as I use the physical button a lot. Along with the “back” and the “right mouse click” buttons, it is a big advantage about limited iOS. But it really works and I find the new setting really flowing. Especially the “recent apps” button is gorgeous. The second issue was the missing mSDHC, which was another of those android staples: Just plug your device into any USB port like your friend’s computer and copy your or his files around freely (when I tried that with my iPod many years ago, it just wiped everything clean. I hate iOS). With the Galaxy Nexus, it’s not that simple. It only has internal storage, no mSDHCs, so you can’t just switch out the storage (and I just bought a brand new 32GB mSDHC…) and when connecting to a computer what happens then depends: On a Win machine, you will nearly have the same experience, using the built in MTP in the Windows Explorer. On Mac OS, you’ll have to first install Google’s “Android File Transfer” from here, and you’ll get a wrap-around to browse some designated sectors of the internal storage. ubuntu users have to work the most and resort to a web search to find the most convenient method at the moment, just in order to get two Linux devices to work together. So, it’s not a dealbreaker like the iOS devices are for me, but a big step back. Google should have provided a good way to access the internal storage via Linux right at the launch. Lastly, the big bad screen has the most stunning black I have ever seen but the whites are more of a greyish blur.
After having been an HTC Sense user for a long time, I’m really happy to see a few gripes of the Sense launcher go away: The deep integration of facebook, which makes it impossible to use the “People” widget if you don’t have an account and let facebook take over your phone, the random resetting of all your sound settings, the device setting itself on “silent” without your input, the warm resets after using the browser or youtube, the device taking screenshots if you push the home button etc.
So, while there are of course constantly new upper echelon devices on the horizon and already available (hello quadruple HTC One X and hello Sony Xperia S), I think of the current Nexus as the goto android flagship device and will be unable to put it down for a long time. Until Alienware step forward with their iteration.

__
The shoulders of giants
Galaxy Nexus frame by nikosrs4 from the Nexus forums.
An in depth discussion of the behaviour of the new internal storage and the reasoning behind it here.
Full specs here.
Come on, let's do this together:
Like this:
Be the first to like this post.