The Galaxy Nexus Will Redefine the Smartphone

 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Google and Samsung’s joint announcement this past week. The two tech giants teamed up to unveil their latest innovations in the mobile computing industry: the Galaxy Nexus and Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0. Both products, the hardware and the software, bring forth many new changes and improvements over their predecessors. Android 4.0 adds a new layer of beauty, polish, and features to the stock Android platform (which has been in dire need of these improvements) and the Galaxy Nexus may be Google’s most ambitious smartphone yet. So ambitious, in fact, that it may end up redefining what a smartphone is.

When Google announced the Nexus One it practically leapfrogged every other smartphone on the market specs wise. As a result, the Nexus One ushered in a new era of unnecessarily high powered smartphones. Google’s second smartphone, the Nexus S, wasn’t as groundbreaking or bar raising as the Nexus One but still brought forth key new features (NFC and a curved display come to mind). Many people expected Google to continue the trend with the Nexus S and give it crazy, unfathomable hardware specs all enclosed in a high quality chassis. Needless to say, this didn’t happen. Flash forward to October 2011 and Google has managed to take the tech community by surprise again with a new mind blowing smartphone.

 

The Galaxy Nexus, Google’s third official handset, claims many “first” titles. It is the first smartphone to have a 4.65 inch display, a screen resolution of 1280×720 pixels, run on Android 4.0 (which is a huge improvement over Android 2.3), have a true “buttonless” interface, new content/info sharing features via NFC, and a camera with zero shutter lag. The Galaxy Nexus is pushing the boundaries of what we expect from our smartphones and more importantly, what we expect our smartphones to be. The Galaxy Nexus is literally a new breed of device, a tablet/smartphone hybrid if you will. When a smartphone’s display gets past a certain size (let’s say 4.5 inches), people begin to think of it more as a computer and less of a phone. Although the Galaxy Nexus should be a good phone before anything else, it can just do so much more. Arguably all smartphones have a lot of added fuctionality with their respective app stores, but having such a large and high resolution display will make the Galaxy Nexus feel like a full fledged computer.
Thanks to the eye-melting resolution and screen size you’ll be able to see extreme amounts of content on web pages at one time and text will be crystal clear. Also, don’t forget that the Galaxy Nexus features a true 16:9 HD aspect ratio screen, this will give you an unparalleled multimedia experience. Everything, whether it’s emailing, gaming, web browsing, maps/navigation, multimedia etc., will be enhanced greatly by the resolution and screen size. These large 720p resolution displays will change the way people look at smartphones once they become more commonplace.



In the United States, Google has the NFC race on lock. Android 4.0 and the Galaxy Nexus bring forth many new features and enhancements to NFC. First off, you can literally share anything between two Android 4.0 phones with NFC: contact info, restaurant locations, games, applications, websites, and so much more just by tapping two phones together. Moreover, Google Wallet is really beginning to take off and once it becomes enabled for more handsets it’s going to revolutionize the industry. In 5 years everyone will be paying for things and sharing contact info by swiping their phones around and Google is the leading pioneer in this movement. NFC will play a huge role in the future of smartphones.

 

The Galaxy Nexus will not be the phone for everyone, but it isn’t meant to be. Many will find the screen too big or Android 4.0 just too daunting of an OS. The Galaxy Nexus’s purpose is to literally redefine what a smartphone should be, forcing other companies/manufacturers to reconsider their strategies. Most, if not all Android manufacturers will start pumping out big screened 720p NFC enabled Android 4.0 handsets as soon as they get the chance. It’ll be very interesting to see how the other giants in mobile computing, Apple and Microsoft, react to these new movements.