Sleek Front
Turned off, the Galaxy Nexus doesn’t look like much—just another candy-bar-styled Samsung smartphone with rounded edges.
Gray Back
The Nexus has a textured gray back surrounding the lightly bezeled camera, with the Verizon 4G and Samsung branding and little else.
Side
Here is the Nexus from the side. It measures 0.37 inches thin and is contoured for a better grip. It won’t be mistaken for the super-svelte Motorola Droid Razr, but it’s thin enough so as not to be bulky. The Nexus also weighs only 5.1 ounces, packing an 1,850-mAh battery.
Powered On
The Nexus sports a 4.65-inch HD Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1,280-by-780 pixels. In other words, a gorgeous screen for playing games and firing up applications. Note the presence of Android soft keys instead of physical buttons. They are the back button, home button and the application tray.
Netflix
To test that screen, we downloaded and logged into Netflix, which streamed Sesame Street super well over Verizon’s 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network.
People
Here is the new People application on the Galaxy Nexus. Users may browse friends, family and other contacts, including their profile pictures in high resolution.
ICS Keyboard
Ice Cream Sandwich boasts a cleaner keyboard than the previous Android 2.3 Gingerbread build.
Dialer
The ICS dialer is vastly different from Gingerbread, and worth a side-by-side comparison with our Motorola Droid X (on the left) here.
Apps
We like what Google did with the application launcher in ICS. Note the options atop for applications, widgets and the Android Market.image: Nexus Apps
Widgets
We tapped the “widgets” option and saw this: Choices for customizable widgets that we can press, hold and drag to any of the phone’s five customizable home screens.
Google Mobile
There’s even a widget that launches a Google Mobile App Launcher–that is, a special widget just for Google Mobile applications, including the new Google Music streaming application, Google Maps Navigation, Google Talk and Gmail.
App Tray
The application tray shows users all the applications they’ve been browsing. First introduced on Honeycomb tablets, the feature allows for better multitasking.
Camera
The improved Nexus camera is a 5-megapixel shutter (1.3MP front camera) that promises and keeps to zero lag time and an option to shoot in continuous panorama mode.
Gallery
The great gallery application imports photos from users Picasa accounts, noting specifically instant uploads from Google+.
Face Detection
ICS is famous for its facial detection. The phone’s camera will scan your face and use it to unlock the phone in the future. Of course, if someone who looks like you tries it on your phone, they may fool Google’s software.
Unlocked
The phone, unlocked with Face Unlock.