Earlier this week we were lucky enough to get some time with the first Android 2.3 ‘Gingerbread’ handset, the Samsung Galaxy S and the latest Google phone, following the T-Mobile G1 and Google Nexus One .
Read our full Google Nexus S review here
The Nexus S is a gorgeous handset; it’s far slicker version than the Samsung Galaxy S, with more curved edges and a unique curve, which is called the 'Contour Display' and makes the phone fit more comfortably to your face. The body is a very deep black, which apparently saves battery life on the front of the screen. Four touch sensitive buttons sit along the bottom: for menu, home, back and search.
Check out our Samsung Nexus S pictures
The interface is vanilla Android, but it feels more refined and less cluttered the the Nexus One.
The Super AMOLED 4-inch screen is a highlight. Put simply it’s gorgeous and one of the best we've seen on a handset. Playing back videos on You Tube colours are rich and punchy thanks to a fantastic contrast ratio, with deeper blacks that seem to merge into the edges of the phone.
Supporting full multitouch, the capacitive touchscreen responds quickly. They keyboard has been improved too, there’s more space between each key and accessing the numeric keyboard is far smoother when typing. You get to it simply by holding a key down, instead of having to press and re-press the Symbol button. It’s also much easier to copy text from within emails or web pages, simply by picking start and end points and copying the word.
Samsung has emphasised the gaming prowess of the phone. At the heart of the phone is a three-axis gyroscope, so as well as tilting back and fourth when playing games you can physically flick the phone.
Google pre-loaded a couple of games on to the Nexus S; these involved moving a floating shape by waving the phone back and forth. It was fun, but not likely to be something that you’d want to use for very long – or in public. Although as with all gaming features, a lot depends on the quality of the games, so we’d really like to try it with games from different genres, perhaps sports games.
Gingerbread is the fastest version of Android yet, and thanks to the 1Ghz Hummingbird processor and 16GB flash memory, it certainly feels very speedy. Over WiFi web pages, including a picture-heavy website like T3.com render quickly and we could quickly swap between tasks without sluggishness. The dedicated Graphics Processing Unit also helps ensure video and games playback smoothly
One of the most interesting features of the phone is the NFC Chip (near field communication) chip, which lets you use the phone to read tags that are found in everyday objects – like T-Shirts and posters. Hold the phone up to the item and it will read information: including URLs and text, which can be saved to the phone. NFC technology is popular in Japan, but yet to launch here.
Along with a 5-megapixel camera, the Nexus S captures 720x480 videos, there’s forward facing VGA camera for video calls, unfortunately we weren’t able to try this.
We're really excited about the Samsung Nexus S. It looks great, the screen is amazing and we can't wait to try out the features properly. We'll bring you a full review as soon as we can.
Samsung Nexus S release date: Dec 20th, from Carphone Warhouse
Posted by Hannah Bouckley
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