Samsung's Galaxy Nexus is claimed to be Android's answer to the iPhone 4S, and Android Ice Cream Sandwich is the response to iOS 5 and Siri. The iPhone 4s Farmville app comes with a large 1.2 GHz processor as well as 1GB of RAM, on the surface making it sound superior to the iPhone and fairly evenly matched with the Samsung Galaxy S2.The Nexus, however does come with an older GPU than the one used in the Galaxy S2 and so it doesn't offer quite the same level of graphical performance as the bestselling Android of 2011. A new dual core GPU has also been touted as one of the best new additions to the iPhone 4s, offering it an unparalleled level of graphical performance. Saying that when using the Galaxy Nexus we experienced little lag and it was very smooth running.
One of the most prominent things about the Galaxy Nexus is the fact it comes with the new Android 4.0 operating system. This OS manages to change a number of things from Android Gingerbread and offers a more comprehensive system in a number of ways.
The biggest change on the phone comes with the face recognition service. This allows users to lock and unlock their phone by using their faces and the front facing camera. This is an innovative piece of technology for a phone, but it has been used in PCs for some time now.Face Unlock offers the most novel method of locking and unlocking a phone, and sits alongside the Pattern Unlock as one of the many methods that people can keep their Android phones secure. The iPhone 4S is still limited to a simple slide to unlock mechanism and password. Although Face Unlock can probably be broken more easily than a four digit password (by tricking the camera with a photo of your face for example), it is certainly a nice feature to show off to your friends.Ice Cream Sandwich also comes with a new font called Roboto. This font has been specially designed for smaller touchscreen devices, rather than just being a hang-over from earlier desktop computers. The corners are more rounded, and it is far easier to read on the smaller displays found on smartphones.The other most prominent new feature of Ice Cream Sandwich is Android Beam. This is a data sharing feature that operates on Near Field Communication (NFC), allowing you to share music, videos, web pages and contact details with other Android users, simply by tapping two phones together.While the new font, Face Unlock and Android Beam may not be grabbing all of the headlines in the same way as Siri is on the iPhone 4, they do add a great deal to Android and will be far more beneficial to most users on a day to day basis. Android Beam alone is a feature that will transform the way people use their smartphones, but Siri is unlikely to have longevity except for phone users with eyesight difficulties.On the hardware side of things, the Galaxy Nexus comes with an excellent camera. While this may not be 8 megapixels like the camera on the iPhone 4S, it does share the Apple phone's zero shutter lag - allowing you to capture the image you are seeing when you press the camera button.Like the iPhone's camera, the impressive thing here is not the megapixel count. Anything greater than 5 megapixels is not likely to be noticeable by most day to day users, and has no bearing on quality. Apple and Samsung have both invested a lot of resources in producing high quality cameras, rather than just trying to pull a fast one with a high image resolution.
The Nexus' camera offers 720p video, which is not quite as mouth watering as the 1080p provided by the iPhone 4S. But again, 720p will be a good enough quality for many people's everyday needs.
The most noticeable thing about the Galaxy Nexus is its screen. It is very large at 4.65 inches and really looks fantastic as it is a Super AMOLED HD screen. The Galaxy Nexus has the highest screen resolution of any smartphone yet released.However, the iPhone 4S does offer a sharper image quality as it comes with a smaller 3.5 inch display. This is the same Retina Display that was found on the iPhone 4, and has not really been changed. The screen does benefit from the additional power from the GPU, but some people may feel a little let down by the lack of improvement made to the hardware.The smaller screen will make the iPhone 4S a more comfortable phone for many, but the Galaxy Nexus is actually surprisingly more comfortable to hold than you would imagine. The larger screen is disguised by the curved nature of the phone's body, making it seem a lot smaller than you would expect from reading about it on paper.In terms of hardware, neither the Galaxy Nexus or iPhone 4S offe rs anything drastically new. The iPhone 4S makes use of a lot of the hardware that was already in place in the iPhone 4, and Samsung have produced other phones with more impressive spec sheets.The software is where these two phones are placing all of their emphasis, and where the two phones really compete. Siri is grabbing a lot of headlines but it is likely that many people will revert back to a more familiar method of using their phones within time, while some of the features of Ice Cream Sandwich, such as Android Beam, may have more far reaching influence.
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