Samsung Galaxy Nexus Discussion Thread

[Innovation]

I've ordered my 4S but this phone looks fantastic. The camera is a downside tbh, the 4S' camera is easily the best on the market. I mean 4.0 looks good, but it's still Android. I don't know, I'll probably just stick with my 4S for Game Center (so damn good), the camera, the best app store etc.

[Innovation]

I've ordered my 4S but this phone looks fantastic. The camera is a downside tbh, the 4S' camera is easily the best on the market. I mean 4.0 looks good, but it's still Android. I don't know, I'll probably just stick with my 4S for Game Center (so damn good), the camera, the best app store etc.

Yes I agree, the camera is a letdown but thankfully I'm not that needy on the camera side .. and the iPhone 4s' camera is something else word.

The thing that's pissing me off is the lack of SD card though, if the 32GB version is expensive or wasn't released in time then I'll have to back off, maybe wait for another 4.0 or that Droid Razr (Which is sweet-looking, great camera and Super AMOLED without Samsung's shitty interface, and it was announced that it'll get the 4.0 update) .. or maybe get the Sensation that I originally wanted to buy before I decided to wait .. As long as phones are getting the update tbh it's all cool, only NFC and that 720p display.

And tbh you can't be blamed if you preferred iOS for Android afterall, it's all down to preferences .. For me why I buy Droids is their customizations. It just feels 'limited' for me to use an iPhone or a WP7 haha. Their simplicity and function is another side of the story though. So yeah, it all comes down to preferences.

I've been with iOS since the second generation iPod Touch. I then moved onto the iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4. In between the 3G and 3GS I got a HTC Hero. As I've been with iOS so long, it's getting stale for me. When I see some of Android's customisation options I'm amazed. I love widgets, I love customisation, I love a lot of the features.

However, Android is a pretty laggy OS for the most part. I'm sure 4.0 has addressed a lot of the lag issues and with the new hardware coming out on phones, I'm sure it'll be near as smooth as iOS. Another problem I have with Android is the awful battery life because it's so intensive on the phone's hardware. 1gb of RAM is pretty much essential for Android phones, and the iPhone 4S is rocking 512mb. My HTC Hero was awful with battery. Again, 4.0 is probably tweaked to preserve battery life.

Here's some of the features on iOS which just force me to stay:

• Game Center - practically Xbox Live for iOS. Match making on phones? Ridiculous.
• Smoothness - no surprise here, iOS is just smooth and consistent.
• App Store - The Market has nothing on it, the App Store's quality of apps is miles ahead. Some of the 3D games are amazing.
• Multi-touch - Apple pretty much innovated this so it's no surprise it works best on their OS. Safari's multi-touch zooming gesture is so smooth.
• iTunes - just being able to use it on your phone to get podcasts etc is fantastic.
• iMessage - a lot of my friends are getting the 4S so having the ability to send pics, vids etc for free is awesome.
• Notifications - I wouldn't dream of saying this pre-iOS 5 lol. But now, notifications are beautiful on iOS. Yeah we took the notification bar off Android lol.

But equally, I could list things about Android I love. For example, how I could develop applications for it as I'm not required to have an Apple Mac. I could talk about the UI, customisation.. the list can go on for that too.

Ah I don't know. I know if I move to Android again I'll regret it. At the same time, the 4S isn't really a "new" phone per say for me, as I've had the 4. That's one of the main reasons which is making me doubt my purchase. I think Apple will be shipping my phone on Monday so I need to make a decision fast before £500 = gone.

Did you see Steve Jobs' quote about wanting to "destroy" Android? It's in the Steve Jobs book which is coming out soon. He said he'd spend all of Apple's $40b in the bank and his last breath to destroy it as it's a copied product. I agree to be honest, Android took so much from Apple.

Long post but yeah, at least it's a decent topic to discuss instead of how Eminem's "sold out" or "fallen off".

[Innovation]

Lol, that's true. I have a huge range of interests though. From sports to computer programming, from gaming to music. I much prefer broadening my horizon instead of sticking to what I know. Having an interest in various things means you can contribute to more conversations.

I love phones and it's good to see you also interested!

[mdemaz]

I loved the Galaxy, but I think this is really just an update overall..The whole concept is cool.
I think it's weird that Google slapped their name there though..

[Innovation]

I loved the Galaxy, but I think this is really just an update overall..The whole concept is cool.
I think it's weird that Google slapped their name there though..

It's Google's flagship device. It's a new one every year. I have to admit though, Samsung are bringing out some quality devices.

[mdemaz]

Yeah, no doubt, no doubt..

[TommiTMX]

Totally want to jump in on this thread.

I've been with iOS since the second generation iPod Touch. I then moved onto the iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4. In between the 3G and 3GS I got a HTC Hero. As I've been with iOS so long, it's getting stale for me. When I see some of Android's customisation options I'm amazed. I love widgets, I love customisation, I love a lot of the features.

However, Android is a pretty laggy OS for the most part. I'm sure 4.0 has addressed a lot of the lag issues and with the new hardware coming out on phones, I'm sure it'll be near as smooth as iOS. Another problem I have with Android is the awful battery life because it's so intensive on the phone's hardware. 1gb of RAM is pretty much essential for Android phones, and the iPhone 4S is rocking 512mb. My HTC Hero was awful with battery. Again, 4.0 is probably tweaked to preserve battery life.

The reason Android is so laggy (especially if you had a HTC Hero) is because of poor customisation by third parties. HTC Sense (while adding some nice features) is stupidly laggy, I had a HTC Desire HD at one point (for about 2 months) and while I liked a lot of the features and styling it just seemed so badly optimized.

The prime example of this being if you compare the Galaxy S to the Galaxy S II. In the original Galaxy S Samsung were slow at releasing updates and not only did they slap TouchWiz on top of Android (again adding some pretty nice features) they hadn't optimized it at all causing the slight lag that is evident between using an iPhone and the Galaxy S. Fast forward to the Galaxy S II and everything changed (regardless of the Dual Core processor) Samsung went the whole way in completely adding Hardware Acceleration to the UI (so that it used the GPU to perform animations instead of the CPU) which is what iOS uses. The reason stock Android doesn't do this is because of the varied hardware it supports (giving freedom for quite innovative phones instead of Apple being king).

Android 4.0 though does fix this partially, if you look at the Galaxy Nexus the UI is buttery smooth because of Hardware Acceleration, if you use a Honeycomb tablet you'll also find the browser there is perfectly smooth too. The only thing it will rely on is the third-parties using the GPU drivers and enabling the acceleration.

Here's some of the features on iOS which just force me to stay:

• Game Center - practically Xbox Live for iOS. Match making on phones? Ridiculous.
• Smoothness - no surprise here, iOS is just smooth and consistent.
• App Store - The Market has nothing on it, the App Store's quality of apps is miles ahead. Some of the 3D games are amazing.
• Multi-touch - Apple pretty much innovated this so it's no surprise it works best on their OS. Safari's multi-touch zooming gesture is so smooth.
• iTunes - just being able to use it on your phone to get podcasts etc is fantastic.
• iMessage - a lot of my friends are getting the 4S so having the ability to send pics, vids etc for free is awesome.
• Notifications - I wouldn't dream of saying this pre-iOS 5 lol. But now, notifications are beautiful on iOS. Yeah we took the notification bar off Android lol.

Preference but:
The Game Centre is definitely a good idea, given the amount of people gaming on their mobile devices it was definitely a logical step forward.
The smoothness like I said is due to Hardware Acceleration, you'll likely find a lot of manufacturers implementing it shortly (the Galaxy S II using the stock firmware is amazingly smooth).
The App Store is undoubtedly better for iOS, thankfully though the Android Market Place is catching up quite well.
Multi-Touch is tied into Hardware Acceleration, the Galaxy SII (I know I'm using it for comparison a lot but hey) browser is a prime example of this and is amazingly smooth, even compared to an iPhone.
iTunes I hate so I can't really comment here without being biased.
iMessage is a cool concept, so was BBM but I'd much rather email xD
Notifications are something iOS missed greatly, I'm happy to see they implemented it but it does make me cringe every time Steve Jobs used to moan about how Android copied iOS yet they literally copy-pasted this xD

But equally, I could list things about Android I love. For example, how I could develop applications for it as I'm not required to have an Apple Mac. I could talk about the UI, customisation.. the list can go on for that too.

For me to develop for iOS it would cost me near £1,500 - £2,000, that seems completely ridiculous and makes me cry (I tried convincing my boss to cover the cost, I'm getting there lol). Android on the other hand is nice and free, and best of all can be done on any platform , this I honestly believe will open it up to a lot more independent developers that will program for fun making nice applications instead of trying to make nothing but money.

Ah I don't know. I know if I move to Android again I'll regret it. At the same time, the 4S isn't really a "new" phone per say for me, as I've had the 4. That's one of the main reasons which is making me doubt my purchase. I think Apple will be shipping my phone on Monday so I need to make a decision fast before £500 = gone.

Did you see Steve Jobs' quote about wanting to "destroy" Android? It's in the Steve Jobs book which is coming out soon. He said he'd spend all of Apple's $40b in the bank and his last breath to destroy it as it's a copied product. I agree to be honest, Android took so much from Apple.

Long post but yeah, at least it's a decent topic to discuss instead of how Eminem's "sold out" or "fallen off".

Buyers remorse is something I suffer from greatly, it never stops me making a purchase, the only thing I can say to that is at least when you buy Android you know there are LOADS of things you can do to play around. When you buy into the iOS ecosystem there's not really much going on, new apps come out that are kind of cool, you'll use them once or twice and more than likely forget about them.

As for Steve Jobs wanting to destroy Android Apple are still trying, it really is a horrible way to conduct business, when the first iPhone came out I wanted one immediately, compared to any other "smart-phone" out at the time it was revolutionary. Android started out and wasn't anywhere close in terms of quality. Over the years Android evolved into a wonderful open platform with lots going on, iOS seems to have barely changed. Whether that's a good thing I don't know but I prefer evolution instead of "lets stay the same and sue the competition away".

P.S. Custom ROMs (go go CyanogenMod and MIUI) make Android even more refreshing because you can rid yourself of poorly optimised devices (HTC) and use something that feels a lot smoother. Admittedly I used Cyanogenmod on my Galaxy S II and even without the hardware acceleration that Samsung worked hard on it's amazingly smooth (that's the power of the Dual Core processor)

P.P.S - Whoever said that Android battery sucks I just had my phone run over 40 hours on a single charge including calls, music and games! I've never seen an iPhone do that

[Innovation]

I appreciate you taking the time to read through my post. I know a lot of people would have just skipped through it due to its length, but maybe we can now get a decent phone debate going!

As a side note, I actually went to a shopping center today with a mate and got to play around with an S2. I loved it.

The reason Android is so laggy (especially if you had a HTC Hero) is because of poor customisation by third parties. HTC Sense (while adding some nice features) is stupidly laggy, I had a HTC Desire HD at one point (for about 2 months) and while I liked a lot of the features and styling it just seemed so badly optimized.

The prime example of this being if you compare the Galaxy S to the Galaxy S II. In the original Galaxy S Samsung were slow at releasing updates and not only did they slap TouchWiz on top of Android (again adding some pretty nice features) they hadn't optimized it at all causing the slight lag that is evident between using an iPhone and the Galaxy S. Fast forward to the Galaxy S II and everything changed (regardless of the Dual Core processor) Samsung went the whole way in completely adding Hardware Acceleration to the UI (so that it used the GPU to perform animations instead of the CPU) which is what iOS uses. The reason stock Android doesn't do this is because of the varied hardware it supports (giving freedom for quite innovative phones instead of Apple being king).

I can't remember where I heard it, but you're correct, the iPhone does use hardware acceleration. With the A5 chip, the GPU performance is absolutely ridiculous. In one benchmark the iPhone actually peaked higher than the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9. (link). With that sort of GPU powering hardware acceleration, it's no wonder why the 4S slaughter's the competition in regards to how slick it runs.

Android 4.0 though does fix this partially, if you look at the Galaxy Nexus the UI is buttery smooth because of Hardware Acceleration, if you use a Honeycomb tablet you'll also find the browser there is perfectly smooth too. The only thing it will rely on is the third-parties using the GPU drivers and enabling the acceleration.

The Nexus did looks amazing. The navigation was very smooth, but at the same time, we all know they made sure they didn't have many applications running in the background to preserve RAM. I've also noticed that Android itself tends to be RAM intensive. It doesn't matter how great you've integrated hardware acceleration, if your phone is running low on RAM, you're going to know about it. This is why Android phones are now typically packing 1GB DDR2 RAM. The nature of Android with its pure multitasking (which I'll get into in a sec), widgets, eye candy and often custom UI's from the manufactures makes it very intensive on RAM. Like you said TouchWiz is something which is a plus in regards to custom UI's, but that overlay still adds to the RAM usage.

Like I stated above, I finally got to play with an S2 today! I first went into Carphone Warhouse and their S2 was lagging more than I've ever seen my old iPhone lag. It was pretty much unusable. I added the running applications widgets to try to kill everything but it said it no running were applications. I'm sure a reboot would have fixed it but I was very surprised by that. I didn't let it knock me off the S2 though, I went into an O2 store and their S2 was running as smooth as you'd expect. As I was using it and I was saying to my mate "I want a Galaxy S2", I was really loving it. I was trying to find some games to play on it to put my mind at ease in regards to the quality of the Android Market games and it did slightly. Fifa 10 looked decent.

When you buy into Android, you buy into what I see to be a bulky OS. Like I stated above, it features true multitasking. Admittedly, I'd love my iPhone to have this but in reality, it's a drain on the battery and unless you manage the applications in the background, your phone is also going to eat up CPU and RAM. I know there's automatic task killers but I've heard they're not very good. I just don't like the fact that every time I hit the home button, that application is now running in the background. I would have rather a gesture of some sort to close it and to keep it running. That's something the iPhone jailbreak community gave us, and is something I love.

As an addition, I sort of like the way Apple handled multitasking. It doesn't keep the whole application running in the background and it has a few states it can get back to. For example, Angry Birds would pause itself until you re-open it. It's all good battery preservation as it's not true multitasking and in the case of Angry Birds, I believe it's just remembering a state to resume when opened.

Preference but:
The Game Centre is definitely a good idea, given the amount of people gaming on their mobile devices it was definitely a logical step forward.
The smoothness like I said is due to Hardware Acceleration, you'll likely find a lot of manufacturers implementing it shortly (the Galaxy S II using the stock firmware is amazingly smooth).
The App Store is undoubtedly better for iOS, thankfully though the Android Market Place is catching up quite well.
Multi-Touch is tied into Hardware Acceleration, the Galaxy SII (I know I'm using it for comparison a lot but hey) browser is a prime example of this and is amazingly smooth, even compared to an iPhone.
iTunes I hate so I can't really comment here without being biased.
iMessage is a cool concept, so was BBM but I'd much rather email xD
Notifications are something iOS missed greatly, I'm happy to see they implemented it but it does make me cringe every time Steve Jobs used to moan about how Android copied iOS yet they literally copy-pasted this xD

I used the web browser on the S2 today and it was impressive. The multi-touch was extremely smooth for an Android device. I don't know, I want to say it wasn't as smooth as a 4S, but it did seem that way. It had a weird zoom animation though, so maybe that's the reason why I don't feel inclined to say it's as smooth as the 4S.

For me to develop for iOS it would cost me near £1,500 - £2,000, that seems completely ridiculous and makes me cry (I tried convincing my boss to cover the cost, I'm getting there lol). Android on the other hand is nice and free, and best of all can be done on any platform , this I honestly believe will open it up to a lot more independent developers that will program for fun making nice applications instead of trying to make nothing but money.

Isn't there like an initial fee of around £30 to be an Android develop and to publish to the Market? My mate told me that so I can't be too sure. I'd love to develop for Android but obviously, I'd need an Android device. It's something I can't pull myself to do just yet.

Buyers remorse is something I suffer from greatly, it never stops me making a purchase, the only thing I can say to that is at least when you buy Android you know there are LOADS of things you can do to play around. When you buy into the iOS ecosystem there's not really much going on, new apps come out that are kind of cool, you'll use them once or twice and more than likely forget about them.

You're correct but as Steve Jobs used to say, iOS "it just works".

P.S. Custom ROMs (go go CyanogenMod and MIUI) make Android even more refreshing because you can rid yourself of poorly optimised devices (HTC) and use something that feels a lot smoother. Admittedly I used Cyanogenmod on my Galaxy S II and even without the hardware acceleration that Samsung worked hard on it's amazingly smooth (that's the power of the Dual Core processor)

My friend who bought a Hero back when I did introduced me to custom ROMs. I didn't get the chance to check them out though as I got rid of the Hero but I've seen them on YouTube and they look impressive. His Hero was running pretty much lag free, now that's impressive.

[Innovation]

^ That looks really nice.

I can't believe how cheap the S2 is, it's like £380 on Amazon right now.