Nexus S from Samsung (and Google) is finally here. It’s the faster Android phone currently on the market, mostly because of the more optimized Android 2.3 Gingerbread version, because the hardware is pretty identical to a Galaxy S phone. This shows that how important software optimizations are, and that you shouldn’t always look at the hardware specs to compare how fast phones will be running.
The Nexus S phone comes with a 1 Ghz Hummingbird chip (Cortex A8 CPU+PowerVR SGX 540 GPU), has a 4″ Super AMOLED display, 16 GB of internal storage with a virtual SD partition (no SD card slot), 5 MP back camera, VGA front-camera, video recording at a 720×480 resolution and of course the usual connectivity options. Two special hardware things that it has that no other Android phone has right now are a gyroscope, and a NFC chip. The NFC chip won’t be very useful yet, but we should see a lot more things we can do with it within a year or two. It basically acts as a QR code scanner, but it works automatically when you put your phone close to anything that has NFC support.
As for Gingerbread, it doesn’t bring too much to the tablet, but some updates are important, like it works much smoother and faster, and it makes it a lot more easier for developers to make games for Android. There are some other slight updates, like UI changes, but I feel these 2 are the biggest ones. They’ve also added built-in SIP support for VOIP/Internet Calls, but it seems that it won’t be so useful out of the box, as you’ll need a SIP account (which might not be free) to make it work. I assume it will be useful once 3rd party developers will integrate it into their apps. Stil I don’t know why they didn’t make Internet calling more direct- and also through Wi-fi.
You can pick the Nexus S right now from Best Buy on 2 year contract (on T-mobile) for $199, $249 for adding a new line to an existing contract, or for $529 off contract. In case you were wondering, it doesn’t support T-mobile’s fast HSPA+ network, so you’ll only get the regular 3G speeds from T-mobile.