Verizon Wireless will sell Samsung's Galaxy Nexus smartphone sometime this year for a price to be named later.
Verizon Wireless Oct. 21 said it would
sell
Samsung's Galaxy Nexus smartphone this year, but
fell short of naming a launch date and a price.
Samsung and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) introduced the Galaxy Nexus,
based on the new Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" operating system,
Oct. 18 in Hong Kong. The high-end, 4G Long-Term Evolution/Evolved High-Speed
Packet Access (LTE/HSPA+) smartphone has a 4.65-inch, high-definition Super active-matrix
organic LED (Super AMOLED) screen with 1,280 by 720 resolution, a 1.2GHz processor, a
1,750mAh battery and dual cameras.
While the
partners promised to launch the device in November, neither the platform
provider nor the OEM would reveal who would carry the phone in the U.S. or
abroad.
That Verizon
would be the first U.S. carrier should come as no surprise. The company passed
on selling a version of Samsung's high-end Galaxy S II Android 2.3 Gingerbread
handset, which has sold over 10 million units worldwide.
This move
prompted many to
speculate that Verizon would be the first to launch the
Galaxy Nexus, the latest in a line of smartphones whose software
choices are hand-picked by the search engine provider as part of a "pure
Google" branding play.
With Verizon's
announcement, that speculation appeared to prove true, and not a moment too
soon.
Verizon sold 2 million smartphones, compared with 2.7
million sold by rival AT&T. More than half of Verizon's
smartphones were Android handsets.
Meanwhile,
Ice Cream Sandwich features a number of new
software perks, such as the holographic user interface and software navigation
from Android Honeycomb tablet software.
There is also
Face Unlock, a facial-detection application to let users access their phones,
and Android Beam, which allows users to share Web pages, applications and
YouTube videos with friends by tapping ICS phones together.
The latter application
is enabled by near-field communication (NFC) technology, which is becoming
increasingly prevalent on Android phones.
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