Samsung, Google whip out Android 4.0 Nexus Here's the Samsung Galaxy Nexus - aka the Galaxy Prime - launched by the South Korean Apple biter and Google in Hong Kong this morning. As expected, it runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on a 1.2GHz dual-core processor and a 4.7in, 1280 x 720 OLED display. There's a gigabyte of Ram on board, and a choice of 16GB or 32Gb of …
Mobile phone CPUs contain the CPU, GPU, cache, ram and hardware accelerated bits & bobs for video, audio and so on. It's entirely possible that a device may appear on paper to be slower but in practice is faster or feels faster because graphics performance is better or memory access is faster, or the pipeline is kept filled, or the cache is larger or any other reason. I have no idea if that is the case with this new phone, just saying.
It's not as old as you make out, perhaps announced in 2007, but the SGX540 GPU was the GPU of the year in last years smartphones - it wiped the floor with the Adreno 205.
The chip in the OMAP 4 is overclocked for greater performance and still holds it's own against Tegra2 and alike helped by dual channel memory as opposed to the Tegra single channel.
If anything I'd say the tech specs are broadly similar to the Galaxy S II and performance-wise there won't be alot between the two.
Last year's phones weren't driving a 1280x720 screen were they. The Galaxy S was 800×480.
GFX performance should really have doubled just for that alone, putting in last year's popular chip to drive this resolution is plain stupid.
Tegra may be single channel, but the Galaxy S 2 uses Exynos which is dual channel.
What they put in this one is a lot of old rubbish.
Funny how 8mp for the iPhone 4S is adequate and just "souped up", yet on an Android phone a 5mp camera is seen as okay.
Also. 4.7 inch screen? is this seen as some sort of "upgrade" in specification? it's amazing how phones have shrunk for years and that a smaller phone was more advanced. Now a bigger slab of a phone is some how better?
If a phone sticks out of a shirt pocket then that's a fail (Cue Moss from the IT Crowd phone in toilet joke). If you can't easily put it in your pocket then that's also a fail. Or is there some sort of fashion for wearing a bumbag to put your big slabphone in these days? How much video do you really need to watch on a phone?
You've obviously not seen the side by side photos with the iPhone 4S and Nexus One then. Neither it seems, have you paid attention to the fact the screen is a lot more edge to edge with any extra buttons put onto the main screen area.
It's really not that much bigger:
http://www.wired.co.uk/reviews/mobile-phones/2011-10/samsung-galaxy-nexus-mobile-phone-review/viewgallery#!image-number=10
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Totally agree with comments about the size of smartphones these days. When I recently renewed my contract I went for a Desire S 'cos I wanted something I could actually fit comfortably in my trouser pocket. The flagship models may be bleeding edge tech (not this one admittedly) but they're simply too big to be practical.
Where digital cameras are concerned, the number of mega pixels isn't as important as you might think. A 10mp camera might sound fantastic, but depending on the optical chip used, the image quality could be worse than a 5mp camera. The ability to deal with low light levels is very important; I had a Nokia 5800 with a dual LED flash that resulted in grainier, lower quality images than my current Samsung Galaxy S without a flash.
I recall reading in the tech press and various reviews that the iPhone cameras have never been regarded as having a particularly high quality image output, so 8mp versus another manufacturer's 5mp offering might not be indicative of anything other than a perceived improvement.
As for video, watching Venture Brothers whilst on the train has been a welcome diversion! If only battery technology could keep up the pace :o(
Paris - because style matters, dangit!!
Exactly. The only difference between 5MP and the 8-12MP cameras in these things is the file space required to store the extra noise captured in each photograph. A decent 3MP DSLR will likely still take better photos.
It's not as if people taking photos with their phone are expecting to print them out A4 sized or larger.
Not anywhere near me old boy. Until your post and the ones before it I had no idea 'Froyo' was something you ate. I just assumed it was something to do with Lord of the Rings or some such. Maybe the Android folks need to be reminded that there is a world outside the USA and quite a lot of it is using Android devices these days.
Hmm I was actually excited in the build up to this launch but the end result is not as impressive as I'd hoped.
Facelock - unless it's really fast will be disabled by most.
I'm not that bothered about the camera but with 8mp being fairly standard now I'm surprised they settled for 5mp.
The CPUs while a lot faster than the iPhone (1.2 v 0.8) are not the 1.5s rumoured and "Texas Instruments" brings with it negative connotations for me.
Early reviews are saying that the battery is drained relatively fast by that amazing, huge screen.
Worst of all some early reviews are saying it handles Android with less aplomb than existing phones.
Good points: Siri-like voice, proper navigation, wonderful screen.
Declaration: I STILL don't have any kind of SmartPhone or any devices of any kind running Android or iOS.
Does it really still need saying that CPU megahertz isn't a good measure of system speed? Modern computing systems, including mobile phones, distribute a lot of work to the GPU (another component with a megahertz number attached, although no more relevantly) and are heavily dependent on RAM and secondary storage bandwidth, including network bandwidth for most user experience purposes. You should benchmark this phone against other Androids and, if you care, the iPhone before making a judgment.
Similarly, 5mp often looks better than 8mp since the real determiner once pixels are small enough is the optics system and, all other things being equal, cramming an 8mp sensor into the same physical space as a 5mp sensor just makes it proportionally harder to expose each pixel to enough light. You usually end up with exactly the same sharpness when you zoom in but each little soft portion of image has e.g. 64 pixels in it instead of 25.
No review or article I've seen suggests anything Siri-like is included. Siri is an artificial intelligence project that happens to have a voice interface. Both Android (first of the two by a considerable margin, I think) and iOS have had basic command-based voice recognition for a long time.
My feeling is that the screen on this one is just plain too large. The 4" on the Nexus S is a lot more sensible.
The GPU and CPU's in this are dated, and won't be enough to power that screen properly. Not that there are any decent games on Android yet (everyone I see is playing puzzle games on their swanky G2 phones!) Nice curved design, but it doesn't begin to make up for the lack of quality apps which still afflicts Android, so I'll be getting a 4S thanks. Would be interested to see the battery life on this one also.
Nexus phones are not built to be flag-ship designs, they are built as reference models.
i.e. The lowest (or close to lowest) spec needed to run the new version of Android. One of the main reasons being these will get bought by developers, so they have a reference Android 4.0 device to develop and test with.
Expect far batter phones to come out very quickly, including from Samsung themselves.
Similarly looking forward to seeing what the other manufacturers come up with based on this reference spec.
Declaring my interest. HTC Hero owner for 2 years, never rooted, broken, not a comp. sci. Would like a better camera in low light to help me rebuild whole story from the night before the morning after.
Paris because if I'd wanted something rooted.....
yep.... very happy with my Hero, had it just about 18 months and have been very pleased with it, like you I*really* miss the camera from my renoir but thats the only thing I'd change... oh I'd like to have had a flash as well.
have just started to look at phones for my forthcoming upgrade.
The way Android handles SD makes swapping cards a theoretical possibility that no-one would ever actually except for SD size or phone upgrades. So much app data ends up on the card your phone breaks without it, syncing between swaps is time consuming and almost impossible on the road.
Right now the SD card is not dumb storage expansion. That could be changed for devices with large onboard flash but don't hold your breath - or choose a device with a slot and hack it yourself.
In the sense that Apple don't support them, you're right.
On the other hand, most users on most other platforms seem to find them useful, on the whole. Leaving them out of something like a handset smacks of a plan to charge a tenner a gigabyte for upgrades...
Nice reference model. I'll wait for the production versions, I think. Without butter.
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