Samsung appears to be the exception to the rule, fashioning a line of tablets up to the task of competing with Apple’s iPad, considered to be the best option on the market today. Google is still struggling to figure out Android’s tablet strategy, but that hasn’t stopped companies like Samsung from releasing a bevy of slates ranging from enormous to pocketable.

The Galaxy Note 8.0 is the best Android tablet currently available, as it manages to be both relatable to the iPad’s best traits while taking advantage of Android’s inherent flexibility. Its integrated S Pen and Wacom digitizer makes for a stunningly responsive surface on which to write, draw and paint, and its screen size makes upsized phone apps appear less awkward, while still playing nice with native tablet apps.

But for the price — the Note 8.0 can be found for between $399 and $429 depending on retailer — this is the first must-buy Android tablet.

Specs:

- Android 4.1.2 with TouchWIZ
- 8-inch 1280×800 pixel Wacom-optimized LCD (189ppi)
- 1.6Ghz quad-core Exynos 4412 SoC
- 2GB RAM / 16GB internal storage (microSD slot)
- 5MP back camera / 1.3MP front camera
- 4600mAh battery
- S Pen, WiFi, WiFi Direct, Bluetooth 4.0
- 210.8 x 135.9 x 7.95 mm
- 130g

Introduction

The Galaxy Note 8.0 borrows from and enlarges the design elements of its Galaxy Note 2 sibling. Despite being a tablet, it retains the hardware home button and capacitive back and menu buttons of Samsung’s phone line, which can be awkward when used in landscape mode. But because the tablet is so compact, its preferred use case is in portrait. It’s not not as long and thin as a typical 16:9 tablet, as its 1280×800 resolution retains a more manageable 16:10 aspect ratio.

But you wouldn’t be called a fool for mistaking the Note 8.0 for a giant phone — it really does look that way. The power button, along with an IR blaster, is on the device’s right side, while the S Pen is tucked away seamlessly into the bottom right of the tablet. There’s a microUSB charging port centred along the bottom and a 3.5mm headphone jack near the top left of the perimeter.

The Note 8.0 also feels much like Samsung’s phone line, with a reinforced polycarbonate body and a plastic chrome bezel. Because there is no removable back cover, the Note feels sturdier and less creaky than the average Galaxy smartphone, but it doesn’t rival Asus or Sony in its premium tendencies.

The S Pen is a huge improvement over previous versions, and almost single-handedly justifies the Note 8.0′s premium price tag. Almost. Samsung wants users to feel at home with the not-a-stylus, but I still found it relatively difficult to integrate it into my daily life. Still, its presence alone is reassuring, and the odd times that I used it left me feeling like I did something good with my time. That’s more than I can say for the majority of Android tablets.

Software & Performance

The device runs a modified version of Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean, and if you’re familiar with Samsung’s software flourishes you’ll feel right at home here. On the home screen, there is a heavy focus on colour and widgets, as they’re the first things you interact with on the tablet. There is nothing inherently wrong with Samsung’s garish palette or its emphasis on using its own services over Google’s, but the implementation often feels forced.

Nevertheless, you can comfortably use the majority of Android apps here without issue; phone apps upscale relatively painlessly, while the 8-inch screen comports well to software designed with Android tablets in mind, few and far between may they be.

This is still a major issue with the Android tablet ecosystem, and one that even Samsung, with its software development clout and huge market share, cannot alter. Unlike what Nokia is doing with Windows Phone’s comparative app scarcity — building its own ecosystem to accommodate for holes in the experience — Samsung has not endeavoured to fix what it considers isn’t broken. Because Android’s app selection for phones is so strong, there is an expectation that these developers, for whom Google has only recently begun enticing to build in tablet support, will take it upon themselves to improve the experience on tablets. This is happening, to some extent, slowly, but not quickly enough to compete with the iPad’s enormous competitive advantage.

Samsung hasn’t left users entirely without new toys (and tools) to play with. ANote, a version of the popular iPad productivity app Awesome Note, has been built exclusively for Galaxy tablets, and it’s a remarkable and rewarding ride. The Note 8.0′s S Pen has been improved, not only in its size but calibration, from the Note 2, and the pressure sensitive pen excels at sketching, note-taking and annotating. Even better is the Note’s palm detection algorithm, which appears more intelligent than on the Note 10.1 despite the smaller real estate.

Still, the S Pen will only be useful for some users, and most of the time I either forgot to use it or didn’t want to. Many of the features found on the Galaxy Note 2, such as Air View, are present here, but feel superfluous when using the slate for mundane tasks. Few, if any, third party games take advantage of the S Pen, and the productivity apps, such as the excellent Papyrus note-taking tool, are only useful up to a point.

Because the device is running Android 4.1.2 with reasonably modern hardware — this is the same 1.6Ghz quad-core Exynos 4410 processor and 2GB RAM combo found on the Note 2 — we were impressed by the slate’s performance in apps and games. The screen’s relatively low resolution helped in this regard, as it struck a good balance between UI smoothness, benchmark performance, pixel density and battery life. The higher the screen’s resolution, the more backlights are needed to ensure acceptable brightness, a larger battery is necessary to power the screen, and a more powerful GPU is needed to keep the whole thing smooth.

Battery Life

A tablet lives and dies by its battery life, and the Note 8.0 rides in the middle lane. It lasts around 8-10 hours on a charge, which should be enough for the average user. Better yet, it charges with a regular microUSB charger — no proprietary cables here.

The slate is a great size for watching movies, especially when paired with a stand case. You’ll get around 6-8 hours of movie watching, more than the average smartphone, thanks to the larger battery and lack of cellular connectivity. Using it as a dedicated e-reader or browsing tool, you’re likely to get closer to Samsung’s advertised 12-14 hours, but I was never able to get anywhere near that number.

Conclusions

The Note 8.0 is one of the best Android tablets on the market, but it’s difficult to recommend over the cheaper and in many ways superior iPad mini, based on the latter’s app selection alone.

If you’re a fan of the S Pen for note-taking or sketching, this is really your only choice — the Note 10.1 is too slow and buggy to accommodate your needs. The Note 8.0 is fast, fluid and extremely stable, and should benefit from many of Samsung’s impending Android 4.2.2 updates if the Galaxy S4 is any indication. Its construction still feels remarkably plasticky for a high-end tablet, but improvements have been made to Samsung’s manufacturing methods over the past two years, and if you’re rocking a Galaxy Tab of any sort, this is an entirely different beast.

You can find the Galaxy Note 8.0 for around $400 from major retailers, but it should come down in price fairly shortly. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it at $299 or even $349, but at $399 it’s a bit of a stretch.

What Works

- Fast, stable and phone app friendly
- Screen is relatively sharp with good viewing angles
- S Pen is hugely improved over previous generations
- Battery life is sufficient for most use cases
- Preloaded pen-centric apps are useful

What Needs Work

- Build quality leaves a lot to be desired
- Strange array of hardware buttons biases portrait mode
- Expensive
- Limited selection of tablet apps
- Rear camera is grainy and unnecessary

Who would have thought that barely eight months after the Canadian release of the original Galaxy Note we’d be at it again?

The Galaxy Note II embodies the very idea of incremental progress: its screen is bigger, but its body is narrower; its resolution is lower, but its display is clearer, brighter; its processor is more efficient, but its battery is larger. Progress.

Coming so soon after the original Note, the sequel isn’t necessarily aimed at the original fleet of owners. Rather, it is after a whole new demographic, one that has enough time to embrace phones with larger footprints — and higher prices.

The Note II boasts a number of excellent improvements over the original, and over the smaller Galaxy S III. But is it worth your money and, more importantly, the extra space in your pocket? Read on.

Specs

- Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean with TouchWIZ Nature UX
- 5.5-inch 1280×720 pixel HD Super AMOLED display
- 1.6Ghz quad-core Exynos SoC with Mali-400 GPU
- 2 GB RAM, 16/32GB internal storage, microSD slot
- 8MP back camera / 1.9MP front camera
- 3100 mAh battery (removable)
- 151.1 x 80.5 x 9.4 mm
- 180g
- EDGE/HSPA+ 21Mbps/LTE 75Mbps

Device & Display

There is no question that the Galaxy Note II body is based almost entirely on the soft curves of its smaller sibling. The Galaxy S III has a striking and divisive design; some users claim its plastic does not feel robust and scratches easily, while others love its ergonomic shape and feather-like weight. Due to its considerable size and heft, the Note II feels like a more premium product than the GS3, but is made of the same HyperGlaze-covered plastic.

Despite its size, it is far more pocketable than the original Note, largely due taller-and-narrower design. Its bezel is also narrower, compensating for the extra space taken by the modestly larger 5.5-inch screen. While this is very much a two-handed device, the Galaxy Note II can be used, with difficulty, in one hand.

It’s hard to overlook the fact that despite Samsung’s success in the smartphone market, it puts its products at a marketing disadvantage by using more inexpensive materials than its competitors. It doesn’t help that those competitors have drastically increased the amount of metal, glass and high-end polycarbonate in their phones. Motorola and LG in particular are creating gorgeous, well-designed Android phones with high quality materials at entry prices lower than Samsung’s flagships. Then again, neither company earned $24 billion from their mobile phone divisions in the last quarter, so plastic is clearly not impeding Samsung’s ability to sell phones.

The placement of buttons is where you’d expect them to be on a Samsung device: power button on the upper right side, single volume rocker on the upper left. The back cover feels sturdy, but comes off easily. Inside is a 3100mAh battery, larger by a quarter than the original Note and just under the standard set by the Droid RAZR MAXX. Being removable, one can order replacement cells for the device, making the Note II somewhat more versatile than the majority of recent smartphones.

Despite the lower resolution, the Note II display is significantly sharper than the original. Samsung has managed to do away with the PenTile display of the original – and the Galaxy S III – and the Note II is better for it. Because the underlying technology is still AMOLED, colours are rich and vivid while black levels are perfect. Whites still retain a slightly blue tone, but are not as obviously discolored as earlier models.

Mainly, due to the new subpixel arrangement, text is much sharper and more pleasing to the eye. Viewing angles, too, are improved over the original Note. The Note II looks fantastic, and has by far the best Super AMOLED panel available on a phone today.

Then there’s the fact that Samsung added a Wacom digitizer to the screen to interact with the S Pen. The included stylus is more versatile than a regular capacitive pen: it is pressure sensitive, and allows for far more nuanced application over a finger.

Performance

The Galaxy Note II is one of Canada’s first quad-core devices to ship with LTE support. Until now, Samsung hadn’t been able to ship its Exynos 4 SoC with a LTE baseband chip, relying instead on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 solution to do the trick.

It’s possible that the Exynos 4412 inside the Galaxy S III, built on Samsung’s 32nm process, was too power-intensive to use with the smaller device’s 2100mAh battery, but it’s more likely that Qualcomm’s solution was cheaper at the time. Paired with a 3100mAh cell, the Note II does not suffer from poor battery life despite the 1.6Ghz CPU, higher-clocked Mali-400 GPU and a LTE baseband. And the phone flies.

Going head-to-head with Qualcomm’s quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro solution, the Exynos-powered Note II is one of the fastest mobile devices I’ve ever used. I regularly achieved benchmark scores 20-30% higher than the dual-core Galaxy S III in CPU tests, and 30-50% higher in GPU tests. Combined with the “buttery” speed inherent to Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean, the Note II is truly able to be a computing replacement.

Samsung has maintained the “picture-in-picture” mode from the Galaxy S III, allowing you to watch video while inside other apps. It didn’t work so well on the smaller display, but two things have made the feature worth using now: the physically larger display, and the ability to easily resize the viewing window. Even when watching 1080p clips the Note II never stuttered or showed any hint of slowdown.

Canadian carriers have yet to push out an important update to allow single-screen multitasking. This feature was pushed to international Note II’s in an update shortly after release, bringing the ability to use two apps side-by-side in landscape mode, with no appreciable lag. The feature debuted on the Note 10.1 tablet but from what I’ve seen, the Note II implementation is much better.

Like the screen, the Note II takes what made the original so fantastic and PC-like and improve upon it. Few high-end Android smartphones these days are slow; the Note II is just exceptionally fast.

S Pen

The new S Pen, built into a small slit on the bottom right of the phone, is improved over the original. It is slightly wider and therefore more comfortable to hold. It also brings far improved sensitivity, making the Note II the closest to a notepad replacement I’ve used to date.

Air View allows you to hover the S Pen above the screen, adding a third layer of interactivity to the mix. A small dot, like a mouse cursor, appears on the display, letting you preview images inside photo albums or find the right spot in a video without leaving your spot.

As always, the S Pen’s greatest virtue is in annotation. Remove the stylus from its slot and a “creative” home screen appears, begging you to create a diary entry or travel log. Simply, the updated S Note app is fantastic, combining a painter’s palette and a sketcher’s kit in one place. The interface is slightly clunky – it often takes too many steps to find what you’re looking for – but no other OEM is as dedicated to the creative crowd as Samsung. Indeed, that’s how they’re marketing the phone.

Simply, the S Pen is fun. I’m not a huge note-taker on a good day, but being able to take a screenshot and write a note to my friends or post it on Facebook is a huge draw for me, even if I seldom take advantage of it. The Note II comes at a premium, but even those who will use the S Pen once or twice a week, the added c0st is worth it.

Camera

The Galaxy Note II incorporates the same excellent 8MP camera as the Galaxy S III. Simply, it takes some of the best photos found on a mobile device.

From stable 1080p video to vivid, high-fidelity daytime shots, the Galaxy Note II is a great portable camera. It’s also a superior viewfinder, as the large screen means you can more easily frame your photos.

The quad-core processor and Jelly Bean software give the shutter an added speed boost, making an almost instant shot even quicker. While I yearned for a physical shutter button on the slightly-unwieldy body, Samsung’s camera UI is one of the best in the game.

There are some improvements to the camera experience over the Galaxy S III: Best Face is Samsung’s implementation of a blink suppressor. It will begin caching photos before the shutter is pressed, and if one or more subjects close their eyes, you can “rewind” a few frames to find one in which they’re open. Best Photo takes eight successive shots and asks you to pick your favourite; it’s almost like a game. Then there are the requisite HDR and Panorama modes, as well as Samsung’s highly-marketed Share Shot, which connect to other “S Devices” over WiFi direct to synchronize your recent photos with other Samsung owners.

Then there’s Low Light mode which, unlike solutions from other companies, actually seems to improve the state of low light photography. To the left is the photo taken with the setting turned on. You can see more noise, yes, but also far more of the actual subject matter.

Software

The Galaxy Note II is the first non-Nexus device to ship in Canada with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. While I noticed few performance improvements over the Galaxy S III running Ice Cream Sandwich, the experience was consistently fast and fluid.

The two main benefits to using Jelly Bean are Google Now – the company’s Siri competitor – and expandable notifications. The former is accessed, rather unfortunately, by holding down the home button and tapping the too-small “G” next to the “End all tasks” and “App Manager” shortcuts. In other words, Samsung is burying Google Now in favor of its own S Voice solution. To put it mildly, S Voice is terrible, especially when compared to the passive intelligence of Google Now, recently updated to provide even more pertinent information. By default, Samsung uses a double-tap of the physical home button to activate S Voice; I’d love to be able to do the same for Google Now, but I imagine it’s impossible without rooting the phone.

Expandable notifications are another fantastic inclusion in Jelly Bean: the ability to preview your email or see which apps have updates available in the Play Store are more than merely “nice to have.” They fundamentally change the way you interact with your Android phone.

Most Android apps work quite well on the larger screen of the Note II. There were times I wished that the device would display the tablet version of an app, but for the most part I never felt as if UI elements were too big. Reading books on the Note II is a fantastic experience, as is browsing on Chrome or watching HD movies. While the screen is too small to replace your 7- or 10-inch tablet for productivity purposes, consuming content on the Note II is a joy. With a microSD card slot, the process of transferring music and movies to the phone is a cinch.

Battery Life & Network Speed

You likely already know the answer to this question, but how is the battery on the Note II? In a word: fantastic. Even when connected to LTE I was able to get nearly two days’ usage out of the battery. If you’re willing to spend $50 on a replacement battery, the phone can last even longer.

With heavy use – several email accounts, constant Twitter and Facebook notifications, several photos and videos, some YouTube streaming and the occasional phone call – the Note II lasted 16 hours on a single charge. Not quite the beastly lifespan of the Motorola RAZR HD LTE, but close.

By lowering the brightness, turning off Bluetooth and WiFi when not in use, and disabling LTE, the Galaxy Note II managed two days of moderate use.

The phone managed just under 10 hours of video playback in our battery rundown tests at 50% brightness and LTE turned on. With LTE turned off, the device eked out an extra hour and 45 minutes, bringing it up to nearly 12 hours.

Of course, the Galaxy Note II is LTE-connected, and available from Rogers, TELUS and Bell. We tested the phone on Rogers and Bell and obtained speeds of between 20Mbps and 50Mbps down and 6-30Mbps up depending on the network and the time of day. In other words, the phone is impressively fast.

Holding the phone to your ear may seem a bit absurd given its size, but if you decide to use the Note II as a phone you’ll be greeted with excellent reception regardless of network. The back speaker, like most mobile devices, is underpowered but sufficient to fill a room with thin sound.

Conclusions

Samsung recently boasted that it has already sold over three million Galaxy Note II devices. It’s not quite the monumental 30 million number of the Galaxy S III, but it’s on pace to outsell the 10 million number of the original in short order.

As an evolution over the original, the Note II is better in every way. It’s not for everyone, but one can’t penalize a purposefully large device for being cumbersome. It may fit in the palm of LeBron James’ hand, but for the rest of us regular-sized people, it takes a short adoption period before all other phones feel laughably small.

The Note II is screaming fast, extremely versatile, well-built despite its plastic body, and runs considerably newer Android software than the majority of recently-released devices. Whether it’s enough of an upgrade over the original to warrant breaking a three-year contract after eight months depends on your needs. To the uninitiated, it’s easy to imagine transitioning from the 4.8-inch Galaxy S III to the 5.5-inch Note II. Ultimately, it comes down to price, size and, well, the S Pen.

The Galaxy S3 is here, and it’s going to be one of the biggest launches of the year. Let’s run down what you can expect.

Specs
- Android 4.0.4 with a new version of TouchWiz
- 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED display (1280 x 720)
- 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor (North American version), 1.4Ghz Exynos 4 Quad processor (international version)
- 1GB of RAM
- 16/32GB versions (64GB coming later) with optional microSD slot
- 8MP camera with no shutter lag, 3.3fps burst
- 1.9 front-facing camera with face tracking
- NFC with S Beam
- 2100 mAh removable battery
- HSPA+ (international version) and LTE (North American)
- 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm, 133g

Main features

The Galaxy S3, in addition to being thin, light and big, is a very iterative upgrade in terms of hardware. At launch there will be two models, Marble White and Pebble Blue. It will come to North America with a 1.5Ghz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, while international variants will get a quad-core Exynos 4 Quad chip. Before you get your pants in a bunch, as we showed on on the HTC One X, the S4 chip is plenty fast and plenty battery-efficient despite being dual-core. We’ll have to wait and see how much faster the Exynos 4 Quad is than the Tegra 3, but that shouldn’t discourage you from looking forward to the North American variant.

We’ve also heard that the versions that will come to Canada will retain the popular home button, eschewing the row of four capacitive buttons from devices like the Galaxy SII LTE and Galaxy Note. The phone has many improvements to its build quality, too, which Samsung is summing up as a ‘premium polycarbonate finish.’ There is a removable 2100mAh battery, a microSIM slot and room for a microSD slot up to 64GB in size.

The biggest features are the ones inside the software, and we’ll run them down for you really quickly:

S Voice - A Siri-like feature that responds to your voice. Ask questions like, “What is the weather?” or “Can you play this song?” and it responds quickly and intelligently. You can even launch apps like the camera, separating it from its Apple counterpart in many ways. It will support eight languages out of the box and be configurable with five custom activation methods.

S Beam - An advanced version of the Android Beam feature, S Beam creates a connection with another Galaxy S III using NFC and then uses WiFi Direct to perform a high-speed transfer across devices. Media such as photos, video, MP3s, web pages and contacts are compatible.

SmartStay - A feature that uses the front-facing camera to keep tabs on where your eyes are. If they are reading, the display will not dim. If you lie down and are holding your phone on an angle, SmartStay knows not to switch orientations.

Direct Dial - “It knows when you want to talk: if you’re messaging and want to call instead, simply lift your phone to your ear and it will dial your friend automatically.”

Social Tags - Uses face recognition to detect your friends and incorporate their social networking information directly into the gallery.

Pop-up Play - Uses picture-in-picture abilities to watch video while you’re messaging or browsing. Very cool feature seen in person.

Best Photo - The fast camera can take a burst of eight photos and automatically pick the best one based on facial recognition. It detects who has his or her eyes closed, etc.

AllShare Cast/Play - utilizes DLNA to beam media content and documents to your connected TV. Optional AllShare Cast dongle provides DLNA support to TVs that don’t have it.

Dropbox - Buyers of the Galaxy S III get their Dropbox storage increased to 50GB (much like buyers of the One Series get 25GB). Not bad, Samsung, not bad.

Music Hub - Overhauled interface and an iTunes Match-like feature. Offers 17 million songs for an unknown monthly price.

Accessories

AllShare Cast - As above, the dongle plugs into your non-smart TV and makes it smart, allowing for the wireless streaming of music, movies and photos to your television (Image courtesy of Engadget)

S-pebble MP3 add-on - It’s a 4GB MP3 player that syncs to your phone via a USB cable. No desktop needed.

Flip case - It’s a folio case. That flips.

Spare battery, HDMI dock, car dock, etc. - All these things will come in time.

Canadian Release Dates

At this time, it’s not known when the Galaxy S III will arrive in Canada, other than “this summer.” We also know that the LTE version will come to multiple carriers, likely Rogers, Bell and TELUS; the international version will likely be sold on the new entrants such as WIND, SaskTel and Mobilicity.

Considering the unlocked version is going on sale for £499 on Clove at the end of the month, it will likely sell for between $599 and $699 outright in Canada and the US.

Dual-core vs. Quad-core

With great speeds come compromise, or something along those lines. The international variant of the Galaxy S III will eschew LTE speeds for a quad-core Exynos processor. Initial benchmarks of the 4x Cortex-A9 SoC with an overclocked Mali-400 GPU show results that align with the Tegra 3. In other words, the dual-core Snapdragon S4 SoC is still faster than the the quad-core Exynos 4 chip. Not bad, Qualcomm.

Much of the marketing racket this year is going to be made over dual- vs quad-core, and by virtue of the “moar is better” mentality most consumers have, this will be a difficult battle for manufacturers to win. HTC is facing the same problem, as on paper the Snapdragon S4 chip is much less exciting than a solution with double the cores. But at this stage in the game, double the cores does not equal double the speeds. As we showed you in our One X review, the Snapdragon S4 SoC is currently the world’s fastest smartphone solution, period.

We’ll wait until retail versions of the Galaxy S III with its quad-core Exynos chip hit the market to pass judgement, but until then Snapdragon rules.

Samsung vs. Android

Samsung is playing a very interesting game with the Galaxy S III. By alluding to pebbles, water and many other earthly adjectives to describe its upcoming flagship, it is differentiating its product from the hoards of “droid”-like phones out there running Android.

The word “Android” was barely mentioned during the keynote today. In many ways it doesn’t matter; the Galaxy S III runs TouchWIZ, and it looks remarkably like its predecessor, which ran Gingerbread. Some think TouchWIZ is too cartoony, others too simplistic; others love it, some hate it. But we can all agree that since the original Galaxy S Samsung has kept its software aesthetic remarkably consistent, more so than any other manufacturer. Indeed, the features added to the Galaxy S III — S Voice, S Beam, AllShare Play, SmartStay, Direct Dial — these are all value-added features that can be disabled for whatever reason, but the company is trying very hard to make peoples’ lives easier.

As they said, the phone is made for humans, implying that previous Android devices, including former Galaxy S phones, were more difficult to use than they needed to be. Android has always been labelled as unstable, confusing and user-unfriendly. The SGS III is Samsung’s attempt to change this.

The Verdict

Is the Galaxy S III going to be the phone to buy this summer? Considering how much is riding on its launch, I’d say yes. It’s a capable, fashionable and ultimately worthy successor to the hugely popular Galaxy S II, and with Samsung’s brand power it promises to be equally successful.

What do you think, of the phone and of the surrounding accessory ecosystem sprouting around it? Will you purchase a Galaxy S III in June?

Gross margins are up to 12.9% on over $40 billion in revenue; leading the way were an uptick in mobile phone and displays profits, two areas that consumers have benefited from increased competition and lower component prices in the last year. The company’s profits are up 98% year over year, and much of the thanks can be given to “brisk sales of flagship Galaxy Note and Galaxy S II devices.”

More importantly, a company exec outed the official name of the next Galaxy phone: the Galaxy S3 (or Galaxy S III). This was widely expected to be the case, but we can now piece together a few more morsels of information before next Sunday’s announcement.

As we know, it will likely have a 1.4Ghz quad-core Exynos processor (at least internationally), a 4.6-inch 720p Super AMOLED Plus screen, 1GB RAM, an 8MP camera, 16/32GB internal storage and a 2050mAh battery.

Source: Samsung
Via: The Verge

This makes a lot of sense — we haven’t heard anything about the Exynos 4 Quad being compatible with LTE, and Samsung swapped out its Exynos for a Snapdragon S3 chip in the LTE-capable Galaxy Note and Galaxy S II LTE last year. And while the dual-core Snapdragon S4 is a beast of a chip and would have no problem making the Galaxy S3 scream, it’s disappointing that Canadians will potentially miss out on that quad-core goodness.

As we learned with the One X and its Tegra 3-powered international version, there are both pluses and minuses to having a dual-core chip. In the case of the S4, it excels at CPU-intensive tasks but lags behind its quad-core brethren in gaming performance.

Would you be happy with a Galaxy S3 if it came with a dual-core Snapdragon S4 chip, or will you try to import the international quad-core version even if it doesn’t have LTE?

Source: Android Central

Ok, that’s not entirely fair, but it’s close enough. Picture the original Galaxy Tab — the single-core 7-inch behemoth that emerged as practically the only iPad competitor in mid-2010 — slimmed down, rounded off and much, much lighter.

The tablet runs Android 3.2 Honeycomb, which was released to accomodate tablets such as this one. When the 7.0 Plus was released last year, Honeycomb had yet to be succeeded by Ice Cream Sandwich, and for this the Canadian release of the tablet is somewhat behind. While it is a pleasure to pick up at 9.96mm thick, and at 345g immeasurably lighter than most other tablets (the new iPad, by contrast, is 652g and the original Galaxy Tab was a portly 380g and 12mm thick) there is nothing otherwise remarkable about it. Which is just fine, because as 7-inch Android tablets go it is one of the best.

My first test was using the Galaxy Tab as an eReader, and it succeeds at this task very well. Since it is running Honeycomb, tablet-optimized apps such as Play Reader and Aldiko Reader render beautifully, and the crisp 1024×600 screen is crisp enough not to be a nuisance.

It must be said, however, that the TFT display poorly reflects the capabilities of recent tablet screens, even without bringing the new iPad into the equation. Considering Samsung is outfitting the only-slightly-bigger Galaxy Tab 7.7 with a Super AMOLED Plus HD at 1280×800 resolution, the 7.0 Plus seems dull as a result, its potential largely untapped but is priced accordingly at $349. On the positive, viewing angles are fantastic for a TFT display, with saturation, brightness, clarity and contrast on par with the BlackBerry Playbook’s excellent screen.

The 1.2Ghz dual-core processor and 1GB RAM keeps everything zipping along nicely, though TouchWIZ is the bottleneck here. Everything from screen transitions to scrolling through widgets to opening the app drawer appears to strain the tablet, though realistically the Exynos processor is capable of that and more. In many ways, the Exynos processor is still one of the fastest on the market, and the Tab 7.0 Plus is only the second product in Canada to utilize it.

The Tab 7.0 Plus excels where it counts, though: browsing and gaming. The tab renders web pages effortlessly, and makes even the most graphics-intensive games like Shadowgun look easy.

It also does very well in benchmarks, achieving a 2639 on the Quadrant Standard suite, and 59.53MFLOPS on Linpack multi-threaded.

To say that its oversized nature seems out of place on a tablet is putting it mildly; on the Tab 7.0 Plus, everything just seems really big and unwieldy. You can install a custom launcher such as ADW EX or Go Launcher HD to cure the home screen problem, though, and save yourself the aesthetic eyesore.

The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus has a 3MP back camera that can shoot 720p video, and a 2MP front camera, both of which are inconsequential as features go. The back camera will do in a pinch, and even though the size of the tablet is far easier to justify the artifice of photography on such a device — certainly more so than on the iPad — it still performs rather poorly, with 1+ second shutter speeds and questionable quality even in the best of conditions.

Besides being a fantastic eReader, a consummate browsing companion and possibly the best 7-inch tablet I’ve used since the original Galaxy Tab, the 7.0 Plus has great battery life. Despite being significantly smaller than most 10-inch tablets, the 4000mAh cell provides about 7-8 hours of regular use over WiFi.

The tablet-specific app selection still trails the iPad by a lot, and the quality of cross-platform apps is hardly comparable. But due to the size of the screen, phone-specific apps work much better at 7-inches than at 8.9- or 10.1-inches, so I found myself gravitating towards this one over the larger Galaxy Tab in most cases, especially with apps developed in the new Holo style.

There’s no word on whether the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus will be updated to Android 4.0, but there is a work-in-progress port of CyanogenMOD 9 for the GT-P6200, and for $349 you’re getting one of the best 7-inch tablets on the market for a decent price. Hopefully it will drop below $300 soon enough, and will then be one of the best values in that size category, hands down.

The high-resolution 5.3-inch screen and LTE capabilities are kept under control by a massive 2500mAh battery, while its Wacom-powered S-Pen tries to be more than just a built-in stylus. In Part One of this review, we’ll take  you on a hardware tour to see if this big phone is really a big deal.

Specs:
- Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread with TouchWIZ 4
- 5.3-inch 1280 x 800 pixel HD Super AMOLED display with Gorilla Glass
- 1.5Ghz dual-core Snapdragon APQ8060 processor w/ Adreno 220 GPU
- 1GB RAM / 16GB internal storage (expandable to 48GB)
- 8MP back camera / 2MP front camera
- 1080p video capabilities
- Dual-band WiFi (b/g/n), Bluetooth 3.0, A-GPS, NFC
- HSPA 850/1900/2100Mhz, LTE 700/1700/2100Mhz
- HSPA 21Mbps, LTE 75Mbps (theoretical maximum)
- 146.8 x 83 x 9.7 mm
- 178g

Part Phone, Part Tablet

Here is a tale of a device too big to be a phone and too small to be a tablet. Hence, a “phablet.” While the Note maintains many of the stylings that debuted with the original Galaxy S II last year, it would be safer to say that it is a giant Galaxy S II LTE, since its back cover and faux-metal chrome border pays tribute to its smaller cousin.

While made entirely of plastic, the quality of the materials has been improved considerably. Though much of this can be attributed to the mere size of the device, Samsung has not overlooked the need for a thicker battery cover, nor a more sound, creak-free body.

Like any Samsung, the power button is on the right while the volume rocker remains to the left, with a headphone jack on top and a microUSB port on the bottom. Eschewing the front-side hardware button for separate capacitive buttons was a choice likely necessitated by AT&T, since all its Android phones have dedicated search buttons, but I’m not too upset about the loss. Over time I found the Galaxy S II’s physical hardware button to give trouble, refusing to register a click that wasn’t exactly centred. This format eliminates that issue but also crowds what could have been a nicer layout. I am of the opinion that Android phones should not have dedicated search buttons, and an increasing number of OEMs seem to be agreeing with me.

The Note is surprisingly comfortable to hold despite its massive 147mm width, likely because it is under 10mm thick. It will fit into most pants pockets, though it may cause trouble in a tighter pair of jeans. Using the Note with one hand is decidedly more difficult: without massive thumbs and a double-jointed nature it won’t be possible to reach the top left of the screen without some serious maneuvering. This is most definitely a two-handed machine, and not just for typing. You’ll find it more comfortable to grab the Note between forefinger and thumb, as if you were holding a golf club, though this means your thumb will often be resting on the right (or left) side of the screen.

Using the Note as a phone means coming to terms with either looking like you have an absurdly small head, or investing in a good Bluetooth headset. There is no getting around this: your hand will cramp and feel uncomfortable unless it is large enough to wrap entirely around the device. Nevertheless, Samsung and carriers alike are marketing the Note as a smartphone, and for good reason.

Usability & Display

As I said, this is a two-handed device. But with such a large screen comes a significantly larger usable area, and Android is nothing if not adaptable. Instead of a 4×5 grid of icons, the Note’s TouchWIZ launcher is 5×5, expanding horizontally by one, and supports a wide range of larger widgets as a result.

The first thing you’ll notice when turning on the display is the ridiculous 284dpi pixel density; though slightly less than the Galaxy Nexus, the Note is no less vivid. With a notebook-like resolution of 1280×800 pixels, Samsung chose to make everything crisper instead of smaller. The usable area is greater, yes, but you’ll mostly notice the extremely sharp text and endless viewing angles. Like all Samsung AMOLED products, colours are vibrant to the point of saturation, while blacks are deep as the sea. Whites seem far more accurate than in previous Super AMOLED variants; even at half brightness they lack the blue tint of their lower-resolution peers.

Its screen is also sufficiently bright, matching the Galaxy Nexus in overall luminance. It does not compare to most Super LCD displays, but for daily indoor use the Note’s screen excels. Outdoors in direct sunlight I found the screen to be rather muted but still navigable.

The added screen resolution coupled with the larger screen size makes the Galaxy Note perfect for three things: web browsing, gaming and media consumption. Though the aspect ratio is slightly less “wide” than the Galaxy Nexus (16:10 compared to 16:9) it suits landscape use very well; unlike the more cumbersome 7-inch tablets of yore, the Note is very easy to cradle in one hand, and has enough of a bezel to avoid encroaching on the screen space. While it is possible to use a thumb to reach diagonally across much of the screen, there is little chance of that same hand holding and navigating the Android UI alone. This will become even more wearisome in Android 4.0 as many of Google’s own apps rely on a top-left “back” area that doesn’t always correlate to the action of the back button underneath the screen.

Typing on the Galaxy Note should be fantastic — big, sharp keys and plenty of room — but for whatever reason the stock Samsung keyboard isn’t as responsive as I’d like. After a couple sentences, the keyboard was having trouble keeping up with me. Thankfully the Note comes preloaded with Swype, and there are plenty of other fantastic third-party keyboards in the Marketplace like Swiftkey X, Smart Keyboard Pro and Thumb Keyboard.

The only negative thing I can say about the screen on the Galaxy Note is that it uses the PenTile matrix in its pixel makeup, meaning that instead of a full red/green/blue palette, it interleaves a number of smaller green pixels between the regular-sized blue and red. This creates an aliased look to text and disrupts the uniformity of certain colours. Though not nearly as noticeable as on the Motorola RAZR or earlier lower-resolution models, due to the size of the screen it is easier to see individual pixels.

Performance

Unlike the international HSPA+ version of the Galaxy Note, which uses a 1.4Ghz variant of the blazing fast Exynos 4210 processor, our LTE version uses sticks with the Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. First used mid-2011 in the HTC Sensation at 1.2Ghz, it later got a speed bump to 1.5Ghz and has powered everything from the Galaxy S II LTE to the Galaxy Tab 8.9 LTE.

Samsung was hamstrung into using this comparably slower SoC because it is the only one currently compatible die-compatible with Qualcomm’s own MDM9600 LTE chipset. While still a perfectly fast solution, the relatively slow GPU speeds are being met by the high-definition screen. As you can see by the benchmark results, when tested at its native resolution (Vellamo, Smartbench 2012) the Galaxy Note suffers a nasty performance hit. Resolution-agnostic tests, or ones that are done at WVGA resolution like Smartbench 2011, exhibit almost exactly the same performance as the Galaxy S II LTE, both of which are sorely beaten by the original Galaxy S II with the Exynos processor.

Most users won’t notice a performance hit between the original Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Note, or will be too blinded by the insane LTE speeds and gorgeous HD screen to notice, but it’s hard to avoid the fact that a brand new device being released at the beginning of 2012 is using the same processor as the Galaxy S 2 X released last summer. It’s the same issue I had with the Samsung Infuse 4G, which used an overclocked Hummingbird chip over a year after the release of the Galaxy S i9000.

Samsung loaded several of its recent ads, all encoded at 720p, and they looked absolutely amazing. The Snapdragon processor had no issues keeping up with the x.264-encoded clips, and frame rates stayed at a leisurely 24fps. General UI performance, too, was pretty snappy, with smooth window transitions and quick app load speeds.

Since the Note feels more like a small tablet than an oversized phone, I tried to use it as such: I watched a lot of live TV using the new Bell Mobile TV app, played a bunch of 3D games (Sleepy Jack! GTA 3!), loaded a ton of desktop-heavy web pages, read a chapter in Google Books, answered a few emails or tweets, and took a few notes with the S-Pen. I never quite shook the fact that what I could be doing was either better suited for a larger tablet screen, or would be less cumbersome on a smaller phone screen.

Performance-wise, though, it was rare for me to bemoan the Note’s internals as being insufficient. Being able to play back 720p content natively is fantastic, but the processor couldn’t keep up with anything of a higher resolution, namely 1080p movie trailers. Most games played flawlessly, including the very graphics-intensive Riptide GP, though frame rates did crawl in certain areas of GTA 3′s Liberty City. My issue with the Note is more philosophical than practical: for a device this expensive and top-of-the-line, there is no excuse to not include the best hardware in the business. Tegra 3 trounces the Snapdragon S3 across the board, and with the release of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 in mere weeks, the Note’s superior performance will shortly be surpassed.

Camera

The Note has a fantastic 8MP camera that, much like the Galaxy S II, is fast and colour accurate. In many ways the sensor equals that of the iPhone 4S, which is considered to have the best optics in the business. Even in low light the Note takes great stills, and when needed the flash does not overpower.

As you can see from the sample photos, there is plenty of detail and rich colour, though they do come at the expense of some artificial sharpness and grain. Holding the Note to take photos is a little awkward since cradling it with one hand between your thumb and middle finger, using your forefinger to take the shot, is difficult unless you have a second hand to support the left side. Supporting the bottom right side in you palm, supporting the top with your forefinger and using your thumb to take the photo is a bit easier for one-handed operation, but I always felt like the Note was about to drop out of my hand unless I held it steady with another.

The camera UI is unchanged from previous iterations of Gingerbread, which makes it minimal and simple. The right-side virtual shutter button, when held halfway down, will correct the white balance and focus, completing the shot when you take your finger off the trigger. It’s a good system that works most of the time. Unfortunately the screen itself cannot seem to keep up; the image on the screen only simulates the shutter half a second to a second later, which is disorienting. Nevertheless, you’ll be happy with the Note for still photos.

The Note comes with a comprehensive editor, too: once in the Gallery app you can crop, resize, rotate, add filters to, and share your photos to various apps. You can also use the S-Pen to draw on, or annotate, your photos, something I found increasingly useful as I thought of funny things to do with photos of cats.

The Note also takes 1080p video at 30fps, which looks just as great today as it did a 8 months ago on the Galaxy S II. Smooth is one story, but there is also minimal motion blur to be found. The lens adjusts well to changes in lighting, and Samsung employs some fantastic image stabilization technology to keep the results looking far less wobbly than my hands would suggest.

As with all recent Samsung devices, the 2MP front-facing camera is not only of higher quality than most of its peers, but using it on the Galaxy Note it’s actually more fun. As more apps like Skype and Google+ support video chats, a high-resolution front facing camera is going to be increasingly important. The Note works extremely well as a video chat solution since not only does recipient look great, but that little box in which you can see yourself is actually more than just a thumbnail.

Battery Life

(Left: Results of video looping tests with LTE on / Middle: Example of average daily use, WiFi on / Right: Example of mostly-idle day, WiFi off)

Though there is a 2500mAh battery in the Galaxy Note, we must keep two important things in consideration. First, the 5.3″ 1280×800 pixel screen is a huge power draw, with over double the pixels of the Galaxy S II (1,024,000 vs 384,000). Second, the LTE chip inside the Galaxy Note is an independent, high-draw chip as it is not built into the CPU itself like most HSPA+ solutions. As a result, the Galaxy Note has the potential for largely the same or only slightly higher battery life than the average Android smartphone running Gingerbread.

However, since the average user doesn’t keep his or her screen on for more than a couple hours a day, nor watch movies on repeat until the battery dies, it’s safe to say the Note will last longer than your average smartphone. Whereas I achieved 6-8 hours of mid- to high-usage on the Galaxy S II LTE (which has a 1750mAh battery), it wasn’t uncommon for the Note to last nearly double that number, between 8-18 hours. The huge variation depended on a few things: the brightness of the screen, and whether LTE was enabled.

The Galaxy Note’s screen is very bright, even when set to Automatic. Lowering it to around 25% leaves it extremely readable for most indoor activities and saves an hour or so for every charge. So too does turning off LTE, though the battery saving potential is much higher here. After using the Note on Bell’s LTE network for five days, averaging between 8-12 hours depending on what I was doing, I turned it off to test its effect on battery life. The disparity was considerable: whereas on LTE the Note would be almost drained by 6pm (at 25% brightness), on HPSA+ the meter was hovering at 50%. Though there was a considerable drop in network speeds, I’d almost be inclined to suggest, unless LTE speeds are absolutely necessary, to use it on a need-by-need basis.

One also has to keep in mind that despite national availability of LTE devices, the networks themselves (across all three major carriers) are still being deployed, and signal strength is still a big problem. Where I live, just outside Toronto, TELUS, Bell and Rogers have limited LTE penetration. The harder a device has to search for a signal, the more battery life it will eat up attempting to keep it once it’s attained. In many ways, the Note will have improved battery life under LTE when A) the carriers launch their 700Mhz band after the auction and B) more towers are deployed in remote regions to handle increased load.

With a strong LTE signal, and brightness set to Auto, the Note lasted 4 hours 57 minutes looping a 720p video in the Samsung video app.

With a strong HSPA+ signal, and brightness to to Auto, the Note lasted 6 hours 19 minutes looping a 720p video in the Samsung video app.

As with any burgeoning network standard, Bell’s LTE network load is currently light, so top speeds are quite high. Unlike HSPA+ networks, LTE can manage very high speeds with 2-3 bars of signal strength, or RSSI levels lower than -100dBm.

On average, I achieved LTE speeds of between 20-30Mpbs download and 6-12Mbps upload, though the results depended heavily on where I was in the GTA and whether I was in- or outside. Since none of the networks are currently using the heavy wall-penetrating 700Mhz band, indoor signal strength tends to suffer. Luckily handover between LTE and HSPA+ is pretty seamless with only a fraction of a second between both.

LTE’s advantage on a mobile device shows itself most prominently when combining its superior download speeds with its extraordinarily low latency. This was put into practice when streaming HD video from YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix and Bell’s own Mobile TV app. Whereas on HSPA+ buffering a MB or two would take up to 10 seconds, eating into precious “time wasting” time, over LTE the same video would launch in half a second, at full HD quality.

I’ve spoken at length of LTE’s advantages and disadvantages. It’s really, really fast — at times more so than your home broadband — but that speed comes at the expense of battery life. Luckily turning off LTE and falling back to Bell’s 21Mbps HSPA+ network is effortless, but once you’ve had a taste of the good stuff it’s difficult to go back.

Call, Sound and Speaker Quality and Miscellaneous

The speaker on the back side of the Galaxy Note is loud. It’s also quite vibrant, which is a great deal more than I can say for 99% of the smartphones on the market. Samsung must have understood that the Note would be used as media consumption device, since you can easily fill a room with decent sound from the tiny mono speaker on the back of the device.

The experience of making calls, on the other hand, is merely good. Whether awkwardly holding up the Note to your ear, or connecting through a headset, Bluetooth or otherwise, callers sounded far away to me, and me to them. However, the quality itself is high, with no distracting sibilance, echoes or delays. The Note comes equipped with a second microphone for noise cancellation, though because many of my callers sounded so distant I can’t vouch for its usefulness.

Playing music from the headphones was also a good experience, though as you’ll see in Part 2 of the review Samsung has done little to nothing with the unsightly music app. WiFi, GPS, NFC and all other acronyms worked as expected, with no problems to report. It was nice to find that the Galaxy Note is dual-channel WiFi compatible, and connected to my 5Ghz WiFi network at wired-connection speeds.

The only issue I had with the connectivity was pairing and transferring files between the Note and my MacBook Air. Though the two devices would pair successfully, transferring a file would fail each time it was initiated. Similarly, I could not get my MacBook to “see” the photos on the Note when plugged in using USB using the MTP protocol. WiFi Direct also failed across all devices. Connecting directly to a Windows PC fixed the problem, but considering Google’s own OS X-compatible Android File Transfer app wouldn’t even acknowledge the Note’s existence, I worry for Mac users. There are certainly other ways to connect (WiFi File Explorer Pro!) but the basic methods need to work, period.

Part One Conclusions

Yes, yes. We haven’t talked about the S-Pen, nor Samsung’s alterations to TouchWIZ 4. That is coming in Part Two.

But if you were to omit the second part, and consider buying the Note on the merits of its “phone” hardware alone, it would be a difficult decision. For starters, the Note is easily the most well-made Galaxy device to date. It has a gorgeous, business-friendly backing, a chrome bezel that is more tasteful than garish, and a stunning 720p screen. It’s hard to find fault in the 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED display in spite of the PenTile formation; colours are vibrant, blacks are deep and whites more accurate than any previous Samsung device.

Internally things are a bit more same-same. Its 1.5Ghz Snapdragon S3 processor has been used in everything from the Galaxy S II LTE to the Galaxy Tab 8.9 LTE. It mimics much of what made the international Note, with its Exynos, so attractive, but there is evidence that the CPU/GPU combination can’t now, and won’t in the future, be able to keep up with next-generation Android chips. That would be fine if those solutions were coming in six months or a year, but they’re not. Phone with the quad-core Tegra 3 should be available in April or earlier, while Qualcomm’s own S4 chips with built-in LTE are expected no later than June.

One must also consider whether the size of the Note is a barrier for practical, daily enjoyment. Sure, the novelty of a HUGE PHONE might lure you to the cash register, but most people are going to be signing a 3-year contract, and some (gasp!) may even use it for the duration. The wow factor is obvious; less so is the potential for weariness.

As we’ll go over in Part Two, the Galaxy Note is more than just a phone/tablet hybrid. Samsung says the S-Pen is an integral part of the experience and we’ll take a look at whether that’s true, what other goodies the Note has in store, and when we can expect an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Note is available now through TELUS, Bell and Rogers.

Form

The first thing you have to consider is whether the phone is too big for you. If you’ve played with the Galaxy S II you have a good idea of the size, but we find the Galaxy Nexus more comfortable to hold; that “contoured” backing really does conform quite well to your hand.

Admittedly, there have been times we wish the screen was smaller. More often, Android apps are being designed with an internal “home” button in the top left corner. The official Twitter app, for instance, allows you to touch the top left to change accounts, while the popular FriendCaster Facebook app uses that area to go back to the app’s starting screen. This area is not possible to hit when holding the device in your right hand, period. You must cradle it in your right hand and press with the left. While these commands can often be emulated by going into the context menu and pressing “Accounts” or “Home” respectively, it isn’t as intuitive or comfortable.

Every owner of the Nexus S we’ve shown the Galaxy Nexus to has remarked on its size. For better or worse, this is a big phone and while it is extremely comfortable, part of us wishes they’d kept it at the 4″ sweet spot (which would make it 4.3″ with the software buttons). We still think the Nexus S is one of the most comfortable devices ever released, and the perfect size.

If there is one advantage to having a larger screen, it’s how fantastic everything looks. The screen on the Galaxy Nexus continues to amaze, even after the initial “shine” has worn off. This is honestly the most stunning mobile display we’ve ever seen, period.

Speed & Ease

We’ve done a lot of LTE reviews lately, and going back to the Galaxy Nexus is a clear step down. That being said, it’s not a deal breaker either. The HSPA+ connection is plenty fast for what we need it to do, and it’s noticeably faster than the same network on the iPhone 4S, which supports 14.4Mbps to the GN’s 21Mbps. There are times when we miss the 40+Mbps speeds of the LG Optimus LTE or Galaxy S II LTE, mainly when downloading large files or loading heavy web pages. It’s just unfortunate that we won’t be able to import the Verizon Galaxy Nexus to Canada and use it on our networks here.

As for the phone UI, we are even more thrilled now than we were in the beginning. The phone is consistently smooth and fast, and constantly delights us with its stability. Little things like being easily able to create folders, or to get to the settings menu from the notification bar, or being able to swipe unwanted notifications away — they’re all small, iterative improvements that we realize in hindsight we couldn’t live without.

The new multitasking menu is not only brilliant but saves so much time. Being able to cycle through your open apps with one touch is by far the best experience we’ve had on any mobile platform. We only wish it were possible, like with the Playbook, to cycle through open applications as we can emails in the Gmail app. Would take multitasking to that next level.

Battery Life

We had loaded the Galaxy Nexus with all our favourite apps, which means more than ever the 1750mAh battery is being taxed with background updates and push notifications, in addition to the regular barrage of emails, phone calls and tweets.

To be honest we’re not entirely satisfied with the battery life situation. It’s quite easy to eat up 50% in a couple hours of furious use. We had hoped that Google would have made background data an opt-in rather than opt-out scenario. At the moment, if you want to prohibit an app from using background data it’s either all or nothing: WiFi-only or unrestricted. There is no ability to granularly set background data based on time of day, location, or limit an app to a specific limit in Megabytes.

If Android wants to win the war on battery life, it needs to impose restrictions to apps the way that iOS does. Yes, we know this is a core tenet of what makes Android “open,” and to some people better, but it will always be at a disadvantage to iOS or WP7 as a result. Would you rather have to explicitly allow an app to use background data, or bring along a spare battery when you leave in the morning? To some extent, these are your options. Third-party apps like Juice Defender have been doing a great job in regulating background updates for years; it’s incumbent on Google to make this more transparent to the end user.

Camera

Going back and forth between the iPhone 4S (left) and the Galaxy Nexus (right) really exposes the Android device’s inferiority when it comes to camera quality. It’s great to be able to shoot instantly, but those times you need that function the shots turn out blurry. If you take the time to line up your subject, autofocus and shoot, the advantage over the iPhone shrinks to nothing.

We’re not talking about a night-and-day difference, but there is a noticeable drop-off in detail and colour reproduction, and an unsightly amount of grain when you compare the Galaxy Nexus to the iPhone 4S. Keep in mind, when you look at the photos, that the iPhone 4S shoots at 8MP and the GN at 5MP, so a 100% comparison is not helpful. We have set different zoom levels to compare them at certain stages.

The iPhone 4S is typically warmer, too, with reddish tints and softer whites. It’s better at detecting overexposure in certain scenes and adjusting accordingly. Like the Nexus S, the Galaxy Nexus shoots true and accurate, even if it doesn’t benefit the photo.

Software

Ice Cream Sandwich has caught up to iOS in so many features, it’s now down to preference. Both have great notification systems, multitasking menus, customization and aesthetics.

Widgets and the home screen paradigm is still a huge advantage for Android — it adds a layer of personalization and intimacy that is not possible on any other mobile platform. Google has improved the experience dramatically in Ice Cream Sandwich, too, making it easier to pick up and use, and far more attractive than any previous version.

Really, it’s now only third-party apps that suffer from the “Android effect.” Equivalent apps on both platforms look and perform worse on Android. Many apps that are available on Android have merely been ported over from iOS, retaining the same design which is often a problem. Android apps need to be customized for different screen sizes, resolutions and usage patterns. Every phone has a back button, and there needs to be uniformity between apps and app developers as to what that back button does; sometimes it returns to the previous screen, but more often than not it just exits.

Ice Cream Sandwich unifies the look of Android phones and tablets, and improves the usability of both. But it’s incumbent on app developers to use the tools given to them by Google to not only make functional apps, but ones that are beautiful and perform consistently. One of the best parts of ICS is that most of the native applications — SMS, Dialler, Browser, etc. — are now good enough to use without resorting to downloading third-party alternatives.

Issues

There are some lingering problems with the Galaxy Nexus. Google has done away with Mass USB storage on non-removable media, so it is not possible to plug and transfer as we could in the past. On our MacBook, plugging the device in allows us to view photos or media, but Aperture does not read the contents properly, meaning there are hundreds of corrupted non-photo files detected. It makes transferring files to and from the device extremely difficult, and while we understand the need for added security, it inhibits one of Android’s most useful features.

Google advertises the Galaxy Nexus as having reinforced glass, and while so far it has been resistant to scratches it is also a fingerprint magnet. To put it bluntly, we have to wipe the the Galaxy Nexus clean every few minutes.

We also want to reiterate from our review that call volume, and external speaker volume, are unacceptably low, and the auto-brightness setting is too sensitive, keeping the screen too dark even in low-light situations. These are things that can likely be rectified with a software update, but they’re annoying.

Wrap-up

A day in the ife of the Galaxy Nexus is a privilege. It’s fast, clean and smart. The OS is the biggest improvement to Android since its inception, and but for a few third-party apps that we’d love to see improved, or ported, from iOS, the experience is just as good.

We love the form factor, the screen and the experience. If it wasn’t for the lower-quality camera, battery life and occasional software bug, we’d call it the best device on the market. In its current form it is the best Android device to date, and depending on your priorities, the best on the market.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Take the phone out of your pocket. It’s clean, black, unassuming. A soft white LED pulses at you. You grip the phone firmly in your right hand — it is comfortable, secure. Slide your thumb to the power button, its tension satisfying, just the right amount of feedback. The black screen alights, a crisp image of a city at dusk stares back at you, makes you long for a room with a view. Text is like ink on paper, in a font you’ve seen somewhere before but different, new. You unlock, a comforting fade to black as a home screen appears: icons floating in air, a small analog clock ticking away.

This is Android. More so, this is function. No more scraping for context — where is the menu? why does the back button exit the app? why is everything so hard? — this is consistency.

Welcome to Ice Cream Sandwich. Have a taste.

(Check out Part One of our review for an in-depth hardware overview. Part Two covers mainly the Ice Cream Sandwich software)

Performance

As we teased in Part 1, the Galaxy Nexus is a beast. Despite having some 40% more pixels to process, it holds up extremely well in most of the real-world and synthetic benchmarks we use in our suite. More importantly the device feels faster than perhaps any other Android phone on the market. The real test will be if and when Samsung brings its Exynos processor to a Galaxy device with a 720p screen.

We’d say the experience of moving from Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich is comparable to how much faster the Nexus One felt moving from Eclair to Froyo (2.1 to 2.2). When you take a look at the benchmark results, keep in mind that for any graphical test the Galaxy Nexus is running at its native 1280×720 resolution; the GPU is pushing some 40% more pixels than a qHD display, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. That being said, the device holds up extremely well — superbly even — given the circumstances. The one non-graphical benchmark, Sunspider Javacript test, scores higher than any other device to date, including the venerable Bell Galaxy S II.

The Home Screen

Google has wisely kept things fairly unchanged from Gingerbread, except in the areas that count. There is a permanent four-icon dock at the bottom of the screen, two icons on either side of the new app drawer. The dock is customizable, fluid; you can put individual apps or folders on it, or leave it blank. Mimicking iOS it is possible to create a folder by dragging an icon atop another, though in many ways we prefer this implementation. Once a folder is created, it doesn’t open and force you to interact with it; you can leave it unnamed if you wish as Google doesn’t presume to know what you’re thinking.

When moving an app or widget around the screen, a subtle grid appears, showing you the allowable space. Much of the aesthetic has been taken from Honeycomb; certain widgets are now resizable, according to whether they adhere to the new Ice Cream Sandwich APIs.

One of the more contentious changes made in ICS is the permanent Google Search bar that floats below the notification area. Supplanting an optional search widget from previous Android versions, the bar serves as both local and web-based search. You can choose what local content to index, but we found that at its default setting (which indexes apps, contacts, bookmarks and music, among others) results were almost instantaneous. We suppose you could put a Bing or Yahoo widget below it if you really wanted to, but we really got used to using the bar as a Google Instant replacement. It also supports the new instant voice transcription feature which we use in the car all the time: “Call Dad home” for example.

The notification area has been tweaked to allow for swiping away seen or unwanted messages. In fact much of the OS has been overhauled for gesture and swipe support — we’ll see this later in Gmail and Calendar, among others.

Once in the app drawer, you can hold down an app to bring it to one of the home screens, or drag atop to uninstall. This is a feature we graciously used in ADW Launcher, and are pleased it made its way into ICS. (We have to note that the notification swipe-to-disappear debuted in CyanogenMOD 7 — Google owes a lot to the open-source modding community for some of ICS’ best features). Widgets, instead of holding down on the home screen, are now accessible in a separate tab of the app drawer. This allows for a larger area in which to seek out the appropriate choice, but can get cluttered and frustrating having to swipe horizontally page after page to find the right one.

We love the new look of the home screen, and although it is not a drastic overhaul in functionality, we believe most of the changes are for the better. While we’d like to see an option to scroll vertically through the list of apps, we understand Google wanting to adhere to consistent swipe-based navigation throughout the OS.

First-party apps

As we showed you in our short hands-on video, Gmail, Calendar, Contacts (now known as People) and a few other first-party apps have received upgrades. The simple description would be that each has been modified to support swipe gestures and pinch-to-zoom (though for some reason Gmail still does not support pinch-to-zoom in the email body) but that’s too simple.

Gmail looks fantastic, with a minimalist interface that opens up only if you want it to: most of the more advanced options are hidden in the multiple deep context menus, but the majority are within one-touch reach. You have complete control over your labels and the new Priority Inbox, and the sender has a dedicated blue banner just above the message that links up with the People app.

People is the new Contacts and brings a magazine-like aesthetic to the interface. Google wants your friends to be presented in big, bold photos and easy to read text. You can swipe between views (you even have your Google+ circles in the Groups tab) and your favourites are presented as large photos pulled down from their Google account.

Calendar now supports pinch-to-zoom to expand or contract the selected view, though it doesn’t switch between day/week/month automatically. The Gallery app has thankfully eschewed its accelerometer-sensitive 3D proclivities in favour of a more touch- and swipe-friendly horizontal overview. You can edit photos directly from the app with built-in filters (hello, Lomo), auto-fix, crop, rotate et al. This is really a full-blown editing solution, though it won’t replace your copy of Picasa.

Messaging and Email have received aesthetic overhauls, too, and support the new instant transcription feature present on the greatly improved keyboard. Seriously, this keyboard is amazing. We won’t claim the third-party keyboard market dead, but it’s certainly no longer necessary, and that’s good news.

Camera

The camera interface, like the gallery app, has been completely redone, though Google insists on using a shade of grey on the right-hand bar that should be relegated to wool dress pants. Nevertheless, most options can be enabled or disabled with two touches, though we wish it took less time to enable or disable the flash. This has been a point of contention for us that only HTC seems to understand: instead of having three separate buttons for Auto/Flash/No Flash, have a permanent icon on the settings bar that cycles through the options.

The quality of the sensor depends completely on the available light; unlike the iPhone 4S or HTC Amaze the Galaxy Nexus does not perform well in poor lighting conditions. Outside in the sun we were able to take beautiful, dynamic shots that focused quickly and accurately; indoors, or in shadow, the lens seemed to have trouble focusing on a foreground subject, often resulting in the whole image being blurry.

The sensor seemed to adjust to changes in the environment very well, seemingly the result of a well-tuned white balance algorithm. Autofocus generally excels, though the aperture doesn’t appear to be high enough to achieve true depth of field. ICS also includes a cool face detection feature that automatically adjusts exposure according to the foreground subject (and allows for real-time face morphing in videos). You can touch the screen to focus at any time, and when you’re done taking photos there are a number of filters and settings to play with, adding up to a powerful still shot experience.

Ultimately, though, Samsung and Google made too high an image quality sacrifice in order to achieve an instant shutter. While 90% of photos turn out great, it’s the blurry 10 percent that ruin the fun for everyone. The shutter is indeed instant, so you may be able to take that candid action shot your other phone wouldn’t have been able to. It’s a tough trade-off, and will be the obvious choice for most people.

Google has implemented a very cool and usable Panorama feature. We enjoyed being able to pan across a room and have the phone do the work of keeping us steady and straight. It may be a little-used feature but it shows off how powerful the processor is in the Galaxy Nexus: results were available in seconds.

Video looks good at 1080p, though overall quality doesn’t remind us enough of the excellent sensor from the Galaxy S II family. There is a noticeable softness to what is captured, though frame rates maintained fluid even in difficult conditions. Our main issue with the end product, however, was not the quality but the smoothness. If you look at the video sample above you can see that while the sensor handles light changes with aplomb there is a noticeable shakiness to the camera movement that the Galaxy S II was able to overcome. And while continuous autofocus is a fantastic feature to have, it created a woozy judder to a simple outdoor scene.

Overall the camera experience is much better than the camera quality on the Galaxy Nexus. While most of the photos and video exhibited ample detail and accurate colour we can’t wait until other OEMs integrate their higher-quality sensors into the existing ICS architecture.

Keyboard & Typography

We feel like this deserves its own section for a couple reasons. First, because Gingerbread’s keyboard was terrible, and second, because Google finally got it right.

Let us put it another way: the delta between the Gingerbread keyboard and this one is enormous — entire cities could fall into the gap. Even though they share more than a close resemblance, we can trust the ICS keyboard in a way that was never possible before. Not only is autocorrect good but it’s smart. Any word that the software is confident enough to change is underlined in a light grey: you can always tap on it to change back to the original. If deemed misspelled, a word is underlined in red and will bring up a list of alternatives.

Perhaps a combination of a stellar touchscreen digitizer and software optimization but this is the first time we can confidently just type without checking every few words for the inevitable double-letter or, worse, a missed space. Gingerbread was notorious for inserting the first letter of a word twice, and even more for missing spaces. Nor did we notice any slowdown, another common trait of the Gingerbread keyboard: however fast we typed our presses were picked up.

Dictation has been improved and localized, meaning it is no longer necessary to be connected to the internet to speak a note to your phone. Transcription is almost instantaneous, too, and only seldom got the input wrong. The worst offenders were words like ‘Nexus’ which got turned in ‘Texas’, but generally we were pleased with the results, especially for the speed.

Google has changed up the traditional Droid font in ICS, opting to create their own dubbed Roboto. While it adheres pretty closely to Helvetica and a few san serif iterations, it is a pleasure to read on the Galaxy Nexus’ crisp 720p screen and a drastic improvement over previous Android versions. Read more about Roboto on Google+.

Browser

In a word, blazing. Not only can you request the desktop version of a web page, but when loaded those desktop pages scroll like the wind. Pinching to zoom is effortless, though we noticed the occasional stutter when loading a graphics-intensive page. Thankfully the ICS browser can sync with your Google account for bookmarks, and all the settings are located conveniently on the top right corner Action Bar.

One thing we noticed was that, occasionally, the request desktop feature would not work, relegating us to a lifetime of mobile simplicity. We also found no apparent way of getting into the Downloads app from the browser itself — if you accidentally remove the Download Compete notification you have to exit the browser and open the Downloads app separately. The tabs menu, like the new multitasking paradigm, utilizes big static pictures of a web page which can be swiped to the left to dismiss. It’s these small functional flourishes that help cement a consistent and enjoyable user experience throughout ICS.

In terms of overall performance, we achieve a ridiculously fast 2023.2ms result on the Sunspider Javascript benchmark. HTML5Test.com scores a 230+3, some 50 points better than the stock Gingerbread browser. Unfortunately ICS does not comply quite as well as Mobile Safari in iOS5: our iPhone 4S achieved a 296+9.

This is clearly the Honeycomb browser ported to phones, as the Labs feature with its awesome Quick Controls is present. This hides by default the address and top action bars, which are then activated by sliding your finger from either the left or right side of the screen. This was one of our favourite features of the Honeycomb browser, and we’re thankful for its presence here.

Diving Deep & Tidbits

There is a lot more going on in ICS under the new veneer and updated apps. It’s a fundamental change in how we interact with our Android phone. Here are a few snippets of some of the more miscellaneous improvements.

- Google has implemented per-app data administration to prevent specific programs from using too much bandwidth. It’s nice to know that you can natively restrict a data-hungry app’s ability to max out your monthly allotment. For example, due to Google+’s auto photo upload feature, it used 104MB of data in less than two hours. Many apps, like the browser, have their own bandwidth management settings, bringing a level of granularity to an OS that was notorious for errant background bandwidth usage.

- Google has also included a number of APIs to aide developers make more beautiful, functional apps. While few third-party apps have been updated to take advantage of ICS’ features, we’re excited to see many of the swipe-and-gesture elements implemented into phone apps.

- We must talk about the fact that SD card storage is now available to apps, meaning that OEMs no longer need to set aside a portion of the internal memory for app storage. This is also brought over from Honeycomb, and essentially eliminates the issue of low app storage space.

- Android 4.0 introduces Android Beam, the NFC-enabled API that allows two ICS-powered devices to touch, back-to-back, and share content. While we haven’t had a chance to test it out, the possibilities are pretty much endless as Google has opened up the API to third-party developers. Also present is WiFi-Direct, which allows two devices connected to the same SSID to share content directly without explicit routing paths. We first saw this on the Galaxy S II and are pleased it’s been brought over natively to ICS.

- Because there is no longer a dedicated menu button, it is not possible to access the Settings app with that method any longer. Instead, swipe down the notification bar and there is a small icon that quickly enters the Settings.

- Visual voicemail is now standard within the People app, so if your carrier supports it and you subscribe to it a transcription of that person’s message is available.

- If you get a phone call and want to ignore it without being too impolite, swiping upwards reveals a list of pre-canned text messages that can automatically be sent to the despondent respondent.

- To kill an app, open the multitasking menu and swipe it away. The gesture kills the process. You can also do this for tabs in the browser, though only a left-hand swipe works in that case.

- There is no explicit USB Mass Storage Mode in ICS (or, at least, on the Galaxy Nexus). Instead there is a Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) and a Camera Transfer Protocol (PTP). This allows for greater compatibility across systems, but is ultimately much less flexible than a generic Mass Storage Mode. You also, by default, don’t have access to the SD card contents (which is likely why apps are allowed to share the same partition as SD storage).

- There is a special Developer Options section on the Galaxy Nexus that allows you to enable debugging features such as Show FPS and, for apps, Don’t Keep Activities which explicitly kills an app process whenever the app leaves the foreground. You can also limit the number of background processes to 1, 2, 3, 4 or none.

- The Music and Video apps have been separated, allowing for easy consolidation of your Google purchases from the Marketplace. Though Canadians do not have access to the new Music Store, we are able to rent movies which will be stored in the Videos app. The music player has received a nice boost in functionality, too.

- Finally, Google have taken the Movie Studio app from Honeycomb and shrunk it down for phones. While it is fairly simplistic, we achieved good results piecing and editing brief video clips for home use. Unfortunately the Galaxy Nexus does not have an HDMI-out for HDTV mirroring.

Battery Life, Redux

We hate to admit to being wrong, but perhaps we were a little bit hasty heaping praise on the Galaxy Nexus’ battery life. While not bad per se, it by no means impressed us. After 9 hours of admittedly thorough use we were left with 19% of the 1750mAh battery remaining.

While it is possible to prevent background data from eating up too much battery, we suspect that anyone looking for the Galaxy Nexus and ICS to dramatically change their perception on Android’s traditionally poor battery life will be sorely disappointed. We understand that three days is not ample time to judge a phone battery long-term, so we’ll monitor it over the coming weeks and report back.

Further issues

After using the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich non-stop for a couple days we can safely say there are some problems that need to be resolved.

First, on the phone itself. We found that noise cancellation, depending on the type of ambient noise, is not cut as much as on, say, the Motorola RAZR. While wind seems to be at the right frequency for the algorithm to suppress much of the ‘whoosh’, walking around a mall with its more varied din of screaming children and hushed talking caused our friend to ask whether we were sitting next to a loud family.

We also found maximum call volume to be low — equal to the Galaxy S II line, which we also faulted for the same thing — and we found it hard to hear the person on the other end of the call in certain circumstances. The same thing can be said for the speaker which, paired with a default ringtone that would put a symphony orchestra to sleep, caused us to miss several important calls throughout the day. By default call vibration is turned off, so that’s something you will need to set manually in the settings.

Auto-brightness is a little too sensitive for our tastes. While we understand the need to save battery life at times we could barely read what was on the screen.

We continue to have issues with the Android Marketplace. While we like the new design the software itself is flaky, prone to crashes and unresponsiveness. Occasionally when downloading an app it will not proceed past the initial “Downloading” prompt, forcing us to exit the app and start again. We saw this on previous versions of Android, but it is high time Google fixes whatever outstanding bugs remain; apps are the gateway to user adoption.

Development

Of course the Galaxy Nexus is going to have an extremely lively developer community — it’s the name of the game. Being an unlocked pentaband device brings it into a whole new market, one that need not trouble itself with contracts and subsidies.

The CyanogenMOD team has recently announced it has begun work on CM9, the follow-up to CM7 (they’re skipping 8 because Honeycomb was not open sourced) and for anyone who wants to dip his or her feet into the community, XDA-Developers already has a lively forum for the Galaxy Nexus.

The Upgrade Dilemma

Let’s break this down into three groups: those who already have a developer phone such as the Nexus One or Nexus S, those who already have Android devices less than, say 18 months old, and finally those who don’t have an Android device or have one pre-2010.

To the first group: by all means upgrade your device as this is Google’s new testing platform. Nexus One users should note that they will never officially get upgraded to ICS, while Nexus S owners should begin receiving the OTA update in the coming weeks. Though significantly sleeker, faster and more capable than the Nexus S, the Galaxy Nexus is not a home run and, considering its predecessor was released just under a year ago we wouldn’t push you to upgrade unless you’re dying for that 720p screen. With the ICS upgrade the Nexus S should get the majority of hardware-accelerated software enhancements that are present on the Galaxy Nexus, and a speed boost as a result.

To the second group: ask yourself why you would want to break a contract for the Galaxy Nexus. Is it the fastest phone on the market? No. Does it have the best camera? Nope. The best build quality? Uh-uh. What is currently has is a piece of software that, unless you’re using a cheap Asian knockoff, your device will eventually get in some form. HTC, Samsung and Sony Ericsson have already committed to updating their latest fleet of devices to ICS in 2012; whether that means in two months or twelve months remains to be seen, but you will get it. Unless you are particularly unhappy with your device, or again, looking for that gorgeous screen upgrade, hold onto your device.

To the third group: buy the Galaxy Nexus. You won’t regret it.

Final Thoughts

The Galaxy Nexus is the best Android device ever because it’s the best all-round Android phone. Not only is the design almost flawless but the screen is sharp, the camera capable and the software  a huge leap forward. Considering it will have a software lead of at least three to four months on any new device being released with ICS, for many people it is reason enough to upgrade. Ice Cream Sandwich is the biggest leap in smartphone operating systems since perhaps iOS 2 to iOS 3 (or maybe iOS 4 to iOS 5, we can’t decide) but it fundamentally alters the way Android users interact with their phones.

Gone are the hardware-dependent capacitive touch buttons. Out are the design inconsistencies, ugly context menus and frustrating, stuttering performance. Google has proven that without embossing the Galaxy Nexus with the fastest everything it can easily compete, both in performance and enjoyment, with any device currently on the market. The Galaxy Nexus is fast because the hardware and software were designed to complement one another. We believe that it competes with, and bests, iOS 5 in many areas, though it cannot quite pull out the flawless victory card just yet. There are some lingering hardware and software issues that mar an otherwise perfect experience.

Be that as it may, Android will never be the same, and we’re so, so happy to be saying that.

Hardware Rating: 9/10

Pros:

-     Stunning 720p screen makes graphics, text and media a pleasure
-     Excellent performance throughout the OS
-     Very good still camera quality, instant shutter a real boon to candid photography
-     Build quality greatly improved over previous Samsung devices
-     Design is perfect marriage between Galaxy S II and Nexus S
-     Excellent sound quality from earpiece and headphone jack

Cons:

-     Earpiece and speaker volume very low
-     Video produces soft results; stills often out of focus
-     Low-light shots quite grainy
-     Battery cover quite thin and flimsy
-     Disappointing battery life
-     Lack of LTE will disappoint some users
-     Auto-brightness too sensitive

Software Rating: 9.5/10

Pros:

-     Incredible new design changes everything about Android
-     First-party app improvements dramatically increase productivity
-     New camera software makes Android photography fun
-     Honeycomb features like re-sizable widgets and virtual many buttons implemented well
-     Noticeable performance improvement in apps, games and general UI throughout OS
-     Lock screen features legitimately useful
-     New APIs such as People and Android Beam open doors to third-party devs
-     Browser much faster than previous versions
-     Unique style complemented by Roboto font
-     Multitasking dramatically improved
-     Data usage caps a potential money-saver
-     Many more subtle changes, mostly for the better

Cons:

-     Still buggy in places
-     Overall “smoothness” can’t quite match iOS (though smoothness is highly subjective)
-     Android Marketplace still unreliable
-     App drawer cannot be set vertically
-     Permanent Google search bar should be removable

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If there are any questions or comments, or requests for future articles please email me at daniel [at] mobilesyrup.com or find me on Twitter @journeydan 

Good things come to those who wait, and we’ve been waiting a very long time.

The Galaxy Nexus is not only the most anticipated Android device of 2011, but perhaps the most desired smartphone of any kind this year. Google and Samsung have created a blank slate on which to showcase Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich — a form-fitting, high-resolution dual-core powerhouse blank slate, mind you — and care shows in every pore. The interface has been completely overhauled, hardware-accelerated and beautified. This is the first Android version we can confidently say is pretty.

Like the Nexus S before it, the Galaxy Nexus is not the most powerful device on the market, but it doesn’t matter. From our time with the device, we can safely say there is no going back. Every piece of Android hardware from this day on will be judged not on the speed of its processor or its pixel density but on whether it is running Ice Cream Sandwich. The Galaxy Nexus has a market lead so vast as to be a chasm; the experience is just that much better. While there are minor aspects of the hardware we’d love to see improved, Samsung has wisely taken the best design aspects of the Nexus S and Galaxy S II variants and created the first best Android device ever.

Specs:
- Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
- 4.65″ 720×1280 pixel Super AMOLED display
- 1GB RAM, 16GB internal storage (no microSD slot)
- 5MP camera back camera / 1.3MP front camera
- 1080p video capture
- WiFi (b/g/n), Bluetooth 3.0, A-GPS, NFC
- 1750mAh battery
- 135.5 x 67.9 x 8.9 mm
- 135g
- HSDPA 21Mbps HSUPA 5.76Mbps (850 / 900 / 1700 / 1900 / 2100)

There is something immediately friendly about the Galaxy Nexus, as if you’ve seen it  somewhere before. In spite of its curved silhouette, the design owes a lot to two previous Samsung devices: the Nexus S and, more effusively, the Galaxy S II. It retains the slight bottom hump, though less marked, and the pitch-black Super AMOLED display. The front is remarkable in its austerity; there are no capacitive touch buttons to interrupt the bezel and its symmetry. It’s as if you’re staring into a black hole.

Turn the device onto either side and you’ll a brushed metallic plastic rim, sturdily made as ever, but not rugged. At only 135g it feels extremely light due to even weight distribution, but it’s missing the satisfying heft of the iPhone 4S or HTC Amaze. It does, however, help the device disappear in the hand and lends it that blank slate effect Google is aspiring to.

Like all Samsung devices, the volume rocker is on the left and the power button on the right; the plastic buttons do a fine job and feel sturdy and strong. The bottom chin houses the microUSB port and headphone jack, an odd placement to be sure but likely necessitated by the 8.94mm thin top portion. We’ve actually come to prefer a bottom headphone placement, as it’s easier to jump right into using the device when taking it out of a pocket or bag, top down.

The battery portion almost exactly emulates the Galaxy S II 9100 with its textured plastic tab design. Samsung has wisely used a flexible matte plastic that bends easily but does not break. Underneath the housing is a 1750mAh battery, SIM card slot and, alas, no microSD slot.

The Galaxy Nexus takes on a teardrop design, elongated and stretched over the dimensions of the Nexus S but clearly its kin. It is a pleasure to hold, and despite a 4.65″ screen size, pocketable and comfortable. The curved glass is even more pronounced than its predecessor, and aides in visual acuity and overall touch accuracy. There is a white pulse light below the screen, reminding you of forgotten emails or unseen texts.

The Display

Stop worrying about PenTile.

The Galaxy Nexus has one of the most stunning screens we’ve ever seen. The pixels are so small as to be microscopic, and unless you utilize one you’re not going to see a PenTile grid. What you will see is sharp text, incredible viewing angles, perfect blacks and outstanding clarity. If this is the future of mobile displays we can only say, “It’s about time.”

Let’s start with colours. Reds, greens and blues are accurate; this isn’t your mother’s oversaturated Super AMOLED display. Either Google has done something with the colour temperature or Samsung has finely calibrated its parts but for the first time we can say that colour accuracy is equal to a Super LCD display. At full brightness whites are evenly toned, though they take on a slight yellow tinge at half brightness. Blacks stay true throughout owing to the AMOLED technology, and viewing angles are 180 degrees in all directions.

In sunlight the Galaxy Nexus fares pretty well, though most of the detail gets washed out. We wouldn’t recommend reading Anna Karenina on a hot June day, but it does about as well as other AMOLED displays, which unfortunately is less so than most LCDs. Maximum brightness is phenomenal, though we don’t have the correct equipment to measure it.

The most significant improvement over previous Super AMOLED displays is in the clarity of text. Reading an article or a desktop-formatted web page is not only attainable but enjoyable. With Android 4.0′s new Roboto font much of the interface is a pleasure to read, and it’s nice seeing Google taking an interest in typographic fundamentals.

Performance

Our full benchmark results will be in our Software Overview, but from hours of subjective usage there is no need to worry about occasional stuttering and slowdown. We are using the production build (ITL41D) and the operating system took everything we threw at it and then some.

The dual-core TI OMAP 4460 SoC runs at 1.2Ghz, 300Mhz lower than the chip is traditionally clocked at, but it seems like Google has taken a page from iOS and is finally utilizing hardware acceleration throughout the UI. Unlike a custom skin which has taxing animations and garish flourishes, ICS pares down excess, exciting us with mature design decisions. Press down on the new software home button and a blue glow emanates from where your skin touched the display. It’s organic and friendly. Meander through your list of apps and the new page pops up like an old friend. We have noticed no slowdown or app instability.

Before we received the device, what troubled us was the idea of a last-generation GPU pushing 1280×720 pixels of the Galaxy Nexus’ screen — we can now say that fear is unfounded. We picked up and played a few games of Wind-up Knight and found it performed better in its native resolution than did the Motorola RAZR at 960×540. The RAZR uses the same GPU at a slightly slower speed, but has 40% fewer pixels. Google has done some serious tweaking to the graphics drivers to achieve such amazing results.

Battery Life

So far, so good. While we’ve only had the device with official software for a day, the Galaxy Nexus has held up remarkably well. It doesn’t hurt that the majority of Ice Cream Sandwich is dark, which means fewer pixels are actually turned on at any time, but Google and Samsung were wise to choose the TI OMAP 4460 chipset for the job; it has proven to be one of the most power-efficient on the market.

We will do a complete battery run-down test in a future post.

Connectivity

Unlike the Nexus S which was released in multiple versions, the Galaxy Nexus has a 21Mbps pentaband UMTS radio inside. This means that out of the box it is 4G-compatible with every major carrier in Canada, including the new entrants. And, yes, the phone is unlocked by default so carrier portability shouldn’t be an issue.

We had great results making phone calls and downloading files using Bell’s HSPA+ network. While some users may be upset at lack of LTE support, the nascent technology is still too battery-hungry for long-term usage and most Canadians still don’t have access to it. Instead Google and Samsung Canada made the right decision to launch the HSPA+ model, on which we found download speeds consistently exceeded 5Mbps. Ping times were usually under 100ms, though occasionally they jumped over 150ms.

Call quality through the earpiece and speaker left us impressed: our recipients heard us loudly and clearly even while walking outside on a blustery fall day. Similarly the mono speaker on the back delivered loud, punchy audio in line with most of its Samsung kin.

A quick word on GPS: we used the free turn-by-turn navigation for over an hour with no signal jumps or losses. We obtained a signal in around eight seconds, and it never wavered.

What’s Next

In the coming days we will do a full in-depth review of the Android 4.0 software and its myriad improvements. Our initial impressions are good: this is the first time Android is visually contiguous throughout the OS, consistently fast and stable. Existing apps that haven’t been explicitly updated for ICS will see performance improvements and design changes; the menu is now at the top of the screen, dubbed the Action Bar.

The 5MP camera seems to take fantastic shots, and the speed at which they are taken is remarkable. It has been explained to us that Google and Samsung didn’t want to sacrifice shutter speed in place of a more capacious sensor, but five million pixels should suffice for most point-and-shooters. We’re going to take a look at the camera and video quality, and the new panorama mode.

From what little we’ve used of it, the keyboard has graciously been overhauled for the better. We really disliked the Gingerbread keyboard and so far have found this one not only extremely responsive but accurate and smart. Google has also revamped the copy-paste menu, so it’s no longer hold down-tap-hold down to perform a simple function.

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We understand how excited you are to get a glimpse of the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich and we look forward to taking you on that journey with us. There is lots more to come in the next few days, so stay tuned.