The Galaxy Nexus "Real-user" Review: Part 1 - Initial impressions, design/build quality, benchmarks, software and user experience

Image courtesy of GalaxyNexus.com

Sometimes being a gadget loving geek can be tough. I have to manage two Android phones, an Android tablet, play with accessories like the Breffo SpiderPodium and sometimes NZtechfreak even has the audacity to send me new devices! I mean who wants to test out a cutting edge devices all the time?

Well, actually I do! And that’s why I’m now writing a review for the official Google handset of 2011, the Galaxy Nexus. While you poor sots are stuck with devices running Gingerbread (or earlier), I’m being treated to a much tastier morsel – Ice Cream Sandwich, with a pretty sweet piece of hardware to boot.

If you’re interested in finding out what I thought then keep reading after the jump:

Initial Impressions

Looks kind of small in my hands right?

Ok, so I didn’t get to unbox the device, it came to me in a courier bag containing only the handset and a 1750mah battery. While slightly disappointing, it did provide the advantage of being able to get it up and running in a matter of seconds. While many of these seconds were spent trying to figure out how to clip the battery cover back on, I did eventually figure it out. Having packages delivered to work has the advantage of actually receiving them (most of the time); however this resulted in a rather unproductive morning at work.

Holding the device I would never have guessed it was only 135g, it feels much sturdier and with the rubber textured back fits snugly into my rather large hands.

The textured back feels rather nice

Having a reputation as a gadget geek at work meant that within minutes I had half of the people in my office coming to have a gander at whatever new gadget I’d gotten my grubby mitts on. Since I spent a lot of time watching videos of the Galaxy Nexus I was well aware of the many nuances of this latest iteration of Android, version 4.0.1 – to be precise. With my prowess at navigating the slick Ice Cream Sandwich interface I was sure to impress, and that I did.

I think my favourite thing right off the bat was the sharpness of the display. Despite concerns about the Pentile matrix used in the Super AMOLED HD display, I can safely say 720p on a phone is frigging awesome.

Overall I had a very positive first impression, so the question is - do first impressions last?

Hardware Design

While the screen of the Galaxy Nexus (GN) is a rather large 4.65”, the phone itself is only slightly longer than the Galaxy SII (GS2) at 135.5mm vs 125.3mm. With the replacement of physical and capacitive buttons for dynamic onscreen buttons, the display takes up most of the front face of the device. I find this actually makes the GN very attractive and it has a rather distinctive look. The device is by no means oversized and is far less square looking than say the GS2. No one is going to mistake this phone for an iPhone, that's for sure. 

Sorry, terrible photo

The rear of the device is distinctive gunmetal grey, although the materials used are obviously plastic. The battery cover for the device has a sort of rubbery feel to it and is textured quite nicely. 

The rear is also where the main camera and LED flash are located. One of the touted features of the Galaxy Nexus has been the camera’s super-fast shutter speed – which, while impressive is only using a 5MP sensor. This means that potentially the image quality won’t be able to compete with existing high end handsets.

As for loudspeakers, the GN loudspeaker externally appears to be pretty much identical to the one in the GS2. Unfortunately, the GN has a much lower volume output so don't expect to be able to hear much in loud environments. That said, loudspeakers on phones are not exactly made for music listening so I expect you'll likely be using headphones anyhow. 

One change from many devices on the market today is moving the 3.5mm headphone jack to the bottom of the device. This took me a little getting used to but now I actually find it better than having it on top. It means I can put my phone into my pocket while listening to music and when I get it out again I no longer have to rotate it or switch hands. There is also a micro USB port on the bottom of the device that allows you to charge the device or connect to a PC to copy files over USB 2.0

The left hand edge of the device holds the volume rocker, and the right has the power button. This configuration is identical to the GS2 so should be familiar to those who have used a GS2. One difference here is that with the GS2 you might be used to pressing the centre home button to turn the display on, the GN does not have hardware keys so you will be using the power button a lot more frequently.

That's a 1750mah battery btw

Once you take the rear battery cover off you might start to wonder whether it’s going to snap. Suffice to say it appears to be quite durable. You’ll also notice you can now see a sim card slot and a place for the battery. I bet you’re wondering where the Micro SD goes. Well, sorry to say it doesn’t go anywhere. That’s right – there is no Micro SD slot. For some this may be a design flaw too great to overcome. For the average user this generally won’t be a problem, especially if you use cloud services for streaming music.

Build Quality & Ergonomics

The Galaxy Nexus is made out of plastic so it's not overly heavy, however it definitely does not feel cheap. Compared to phones such as the Galaxy S2 or original Galaxy S it feels downright sturdy. This is probably due to an aluminium frame which adds a small amount of weight and definitely makes the device feel solid. 

Apart from the snap off battery cover the GN is pretty much a seamless design dominated by the huge screen that is reinforced with hardened (but not gorilla) glass. The battery cover itself is made of flexible plastic with a rubberised texture to it. While it feels very thin it doesn't feel flimsy at all and I'd be surprised if it was damaged very easily.

One issue people might be wondering about is the size. While not anywhere near the size of the gargantuan device known as the Galaxy Note, the GN is definitely not small. However despite the fact that it has 4.65" of viewing goodness, the GN is not a lot taller than the GS2 and it is about the same width giving it a nicer heft to it overall. 

One of the reasons the Galaxy Nexus does not feel oversized is that it has a rather slim form factor and an ever so slight curve that fits into your hands. At 8.9mm the GN is almost as slim as the GS2 and has a similar lip at the bottom of the battery cover that allows you to hold the device more easily.

While I have no trouble using the device one handed, I do have fairly large hands so for some a two handed approach might be better. 

Overall the Galaxy Nexus is very nice to hold and feels like it is a premium quality product. 

The Screen

Boy, that 720p sure is good

Wow, just wow – The 4.65" 720p Super AMOLED HD is really a sight to behold. One of my main qualms with the GS2 has always been the low res WVGA display – in fact that is one of the main reasons I always preferred reading text on the HTC Sensation which has a qHD LCD display. Now my prayers have been answered, an AMOLED with an awesome resolution.

So earlier I mentioned that the Super AMOLED HD display in the GN uses a Pentile Matrix. Basically this means the display uses an RGBG configuration whereby there is a Red, Green, Blue and Green subpixel for every two pixels. A similar setup was used for the original Galaxy S i9000 device and resulted in some ugly crosshatching of text. I can tell you now – there is no cross hatching of text on the Galaxy Nexus. In fact, if I hadn’t seen haters nay saying about this fact when it became known I wouldn’t have known at all. Even when I did find out, I knew it wouldn’t make a difference on such a high resolution screen.

At this point some of you might be wondering what use a 720p display is on a phone. I’ll tell you right now – it has a lot of uses, especially for those who consume media, read eBooks or browse the web. The best example I’ve found is viewing full desktop websites at the most zoomed out level and still being able to clearly read the text. For those without 20/20 vision this might not be a possibility but virtually everyone will appreciate the sharpness of the display.

Overall the display is very impressive but has a few flaws which I will cover later in the review.

Speed & Synthetic Benchmarks

I’ll start off by saying that synthetic benchmarks are definitely not something to base your entire judgement of a device on. They show only one aspect of the device and oftentimes not even very accurately.

The Galaxy Nexus is running a snappy OMAP4460 dual core processor clocked at 1.2GHz, 1GB of dual channel memory and a PowerVR SGX540 GPU clocked at 384 MHz. While the GPU might sound familiar it is actually clocked much higher than previous iterations and also has access to dual channel memory – mitigating a potential bottleneck. I’m not entirely sure why Samsung would move away from their renowned Exynos SoC for the GN but Google may have made the decision for them. I’m no expert but it may be because the Exynos SoC doesn’t support LTE radios and Google planned for an LTE version of the Galaxy Nexus. 

Before I move on to actual benchmark results I’d like to talk a little bit about the speed of the Galaxy Nexus in day to day use. While it may be partly due to Android 4.0, the GN is a very smooth device. Web browsing has been improved to the point where it is virtually on par with a desktop experience. In some ways it is even better since you can scroll using your fingers which is infinitely more fun than scrolling a mouse wheel. Animations all run smoothly and I have not experienced stuttering in list scrolling. All of this is quite a feat considering this device is pushing so many pixels around.

Benchmarks

I currently have 4 android devices to compare; the Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy SII, HTC Sensation and Asus Transformer. All are running similar speed dual core processors and have similar amounts of memory. The main differences here should be around GPU, resolution and the version of Android. Here’s a quick comparison table for your perusal:

	Galaxy Nexus	Galaxy SII	HTC Sensation	Asus Transformer
CPU	1.2GHz OMAP4460	1.2GHz Exynos 4210	1.2GHz MSM8260	1.0GHz Tegra 2 T20
Ram	1024MB	1024MB	768MB	1024MB
GPU	SGX540	Mali 400	Adreno 220	Geforce ULP
Resolution	1280x720	800x480	960x540	1280x800
Android OS	4.01	2.3.5	2.3.5	3.2.1

As for the benchmarking tools themselves I’ll be using a number of different apps and websites to test 3D performance, web performance and general performance across all four devices. If you’re looking out for Quadrant, prepare to be disappointed – as far as I’m concerned it’s only worth is as a number generator.

Web Performance

We start off testing web performance with Sunspider 0.9.1 which runs in the browser and tests JavaScript performance, providing a time to completion at the end.

Blazing fast Sunspider time

You can see that the Galaxy Nexus excels, perhaps due to a supercharged ICS browser with hardware acceleration.

Moving on to Browsermark, another browser based benchmark intended to test multiple aspects of web browsing. The results are given at the end of the test as a score.

The Galaxy Nexus excels at Browsermark

From the Browsermark benchmark we get a clearer picture of the GN’s browser capabilities – it’s pretty darn fast.

And finally for browser performance in a mixture of scrolling, animations and JavaScript we have the Qualcomm developed Vellamo app which runs a series of web benchmarks

Vellamo results are very close

In Vellamo the results are a lot closer with most of the devices within just a few points of each other. It is worth noting that the Galaxy Nexus did come out on top.

Overall, when it comes to browsing performance the Galaxy Nexus can be considered top of the class.

3D Performance

3D performance is an interesting challenge for the Galaxy Nexus since it is running at 1280x720 pixels it is pushing 2.4X more pixels than the Galaxy S2 is. Another difficulty for the GN is the older GPU, the PowerVR SGX540 - can increased clock speed make up for older architecture?

Westart off the 3D testing Nenamark1 and Nenamark2, both very similar tools that purely test 3D performance at whatever native resolution the devices run at. 

Nenamark2 is clearly a much harsher test

We can see that the Galaxy Nexus struggles a little when compared to lower resolution devices, but compares similarly to the Asus Transformer. 

GLBenchmark 2.1.0 is a tool that contains many benchmarks that test OpenGL ES performance across multiple platforms. It also has the ability to perform benchmarks off-screen at a higher resolution than the device supports, so should give a clearer picture of how the Galaxy Nexus GPU stacks up.

Results are fairly close here

Unfortunately the HTC Sensation was unable to complete any of the GLBenchmark offscreen tests. You can see from the results that the PowerVR SGX540 in the Galaxy Nexus is showing its age, it still competes with the Geforce ULP used in Tegra 2 devices but falls short of the stellar performance coming from the Mali400 in the GS2.

Considering the fact that Tegra 2 games look great and perform well at a similar resolution on tablets, I have a feeling that the Galaxy Nexus will be more than powerful enough to play current games. 

General Performance

There are several different benchmarking tools on Android that test general system performance. I’ve chosen a selection of three that I consider the most useful; Antutu, Linpack and CF Bench.

First up are the Antutu SD Card speed tests. SD Card read and write speeds affect many things including apps that run from SD, video recording and playback and general copying of files to and from the SD Card.

Here the Galaxy Nexus performs very competitively, only losing out to the powerhouse GS2. The HTC Sensation's Class 4 SD card can't even come close. 

Antutu performs a series of synthetic tests measuring RAM, CPU, 2D/3D graphics, database IO and SD card speeds. At the end an overall score is given and can be used to compare overall performance between devices.

The Galaxy Nexus shows up very well in the Antutu synthetic benchmark, however all devices were fairly close so I’m not entirely sure that you can read a lot into it.

CF Bench is another synthetic benchmark, this time created by the well known developer Chainfire who is the author of Chainfire 3D as well as bringing Root to many Android devices. CF Bench tests CPU performance running applications natively as well as on the Dalvik Java VM and then gives an overall score.

The final benchmark is the venerable Linpack CPU benchmark. It measures performance in Millions of Floating Operations Per Second (MFLOPs)for both single and multithread capable processors.

Overall the Galaxy Nexus is not likely to win any performance awards, however it does hold its own and certainly excels in the web browsing department. Even if you intend on playing the latest and greatest 3D Android games I think you’ll find that the Galaxy Nexus is up to the challenge and things will certainly look pretty on the 720p display.

Software Design & User Experience

One of the most important features of the Galaxy Nexus is the latest version of the Android operating system. Dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich, Android 4.0 brings together the Gingerbread phone and Honeycomb tablet variants of the operating system (OS). Matias Duarte, Director of the Android User Experience has been quoted as saying that ICS was designed with a Magazine UI layout in mind and this definitely shows throughout ICS. There is a lot to be said for having a UI with a clear design and gestures that are consistent right across the OS. It feels like Android is finally becoming a mature, user experience oriented OS.

The new ICS lock screen

The new lock screen is very intuitive, replacing the sliders with a Honeycomb style padlock icon that lets you choose between opening the camera or unlocking the device. Sadly it's not configurable so you can't choose other applications to open, that's where WidgetLocker might come in handy.

Probably the most noticeable change with the Galaxy Nexus and ICS is the replacement of physical or capacitive buttons with on-screen ones. This might not sound like a large change but it greatly affects the consistency of the UI. One thing that many people have been complaining with so many Android devices on the market is the lack of consistency with button layout. Hopefully with ICS we will see more devices coming out with software buttons instead. One of the great things with software buttons is that they can easily change position when rotating the screen or disappear entirely when watching video.

The stock Launcher

The stock Launcher application is very slim, with no fancy 3D animations or configurable settings. This is good in a way as it means the average user won't have any problem with normal usage. Unfortunately for some geeks it won't suffice, and thankfully Android is still accommodating in that regard allowing you to replace the Launcher with one of your choosing. There are some additions since Gingerbread, including being able to create folders by dragging one icon on top of another, as well as the ability to resize widgets. 

Multi-tasking in ICS is great

One of the main qualms with previous version of Android has been how unintuitive multitasking is. Long pressing on home and then selecting from icons is definitely not the nicest way to switch tasks. Thankfully ICS brings an entirely different and clearly Web OS inspired method.

Now you can easily switch tasks by first selecting the window icon. You are then presented with a scrolling list showing previews of your running applications. While this feature was first introduced in Honeycomb, the new addition – swiping away tasks to close them is very welcome indeed.

This fundamental idea of swiping is consistent right across the OS, even applying to the notification system. When you receive notifications they appear as usual in the notification bar, however now you can individually swipe away each one instead of only being able to clear the whole lot.

The notification bar, it's transparent

Another nice addition for geeks is the ability to take screenshots. Just hold volume down and power and a screenshot will be taken. You can then select it from the notification bar to view and share it. While I'm unsure of its use for the general public, I'm definitely thankful as a geek.

Something I was definitely curious about was the browser since the tabbed chrome-like approach in Honeycomb is not suitable for a phone I was definitely keen to see how Android could keep a consistently usable interface in this particular aspect.

Yes, that's our site

So as you can see there are no tabs displayed along the top, however you might notice the icon that looks like little windows on top of each other. That icon is where you go to see all of the windows you have open. From there you can add new tabs, go to your bookmarks or switch between tabs.

Tabbed browsing

What's really neat though is that like the rest of the OS you get to use your swipe gestures here as well. While in portrait orientation you swipe left or right and in landscape you swipe up or down.

While the software design of ICS greatly affects the user experience there is far too much to cover for me to give it justice in this section. Overall the user experience with ICS is a pleasant one but I will explore the many nuances in one of the future review parts. 

What's not so good
So while there are many, many good things to be said about the Galaxy Nexus it wouldn't be very fair if I ignored the imperfections that I've noticed during my time with the device.

Storage problems


First off is something I mentioned earlier - the lack of a Micro SD slot. While this may be a deliberate move in a push for cloud services I think it severely limits the pool of potential buyers of the device. Another issue regarding storage is that the device only supports Media Transfer Protocol (MTP), this means you can't mount the internal storage as a USB Mass Storage Device on your computer. You can still copy files to/from the device, however now it appears as a media device and is incredibly slow. There is a good design reason for this but I wish they had found another way.

How the Galaxy Nexus appears in Windows 7

Stability 


While this may be just something related to me, I have had the GN lock up three times on me, two of which were during music listening and caused loud screeching noises to blare into my eardrums. It was unpleasant to say the least. I am unsure if this is a common occurrence for other people so can't really say whether this should affect your buying decision.

The Display


AMOLED displays are not perfect, especially not without proper tuning. The Galaxy Nexus has unusually low auto brightness levels. It also has issues at low brightness levels with white or grey backgrounds causing ugly banding to become visible. This is something I have noticed that is in stark contrast to the GS2 which by default is a lot brighter and the banding is a lot less visible. Most of the time this won't be an issue, but when it is visible it can be a tad irritating for elitist jerks such as myself.

There are of course other flaws to be found but so far there's nothing that can't wait for the other parts of my review.

Summary

So in this first foray into the world of the Galaxy Nexus I've covered the following topics:

• Initial Impressions - I thought it was good
• Hardware Design - I liked the design, mostly
• Build Quality & Ergonomics - I found the build quality to be high
• The Screen - I was impressed with the resolution
• Speed and Synthetic Benchmarks - The GN was quite comparable to other devices on the market
• Software Design & User experience - I love Ice Cream Sandwich and find the GN a pleasure to use
• What's not so good - I covered off a couple of small flaws to be aware of if you're buying

So what will I be covering in the future?

While I certainly want to explore Ice Cream Sandwich more thoroughly and will probably dedicate an entire article to that I will also be writing about the following:

• Entertainment and media - music and video playback, gaming
• Connectivity - GPS, telephony and browsing
• Everything else - Addendums, bugs, battery, camera

At the end of the review process I'll be covering who should and shouldn't be buying the Galaxy Nexus. 

If you have requests for other things I can cover let me know in the comments below.