The phone we’ve all been waiting for is finally here. Google and Samsung announced today the Nexus S phone that will start selling on December 16th at Best Buy and T-mobile and on December 20th at Carphone Warehouse in UK.
Nexus S is the first Android phone to come with a stock version of Gingerbread, which is great news for all Android fans. If Samsung promotes it the way they promoted Galaxy S all over the world, it’s going to be much more popular than Nexus One, and it would be good if Samsung themselves, as well as other manufacturers see that people want a stock version of Android on their phones.
That being said, I don’t think the Nexus S phone even the new version of Android are some kind of breakthroughs. They both seem minor updates. Nexus S doesn’t seem to be much more than a rehashed version of Galaxy S spec wise.
It features the same Hummingbird chip, an AMOLED display that seems to be of high quality, 16 GB of internal storage which I hope becomes a standard for all new Android phones, a 5 MP back camera, a VGA front-camera, gyroscope and movement sensors, a NFC sensor which should be useful for many things in the near future, and of course the usual Wi-Fi 802.11 n, GPS, and Bluetooth 3.0.
Unfortunately, Nexus S doesn’t seem as groundbreaking as Nexus One was almost a year ago and it won’t set the standard performance wise going into 2011. It would be much more exciting if it would be the first Android phone with a dual-core chip, just like Nexus One was the first Android phone with a 1 Ghz CPU. Surely a Tegra 2 chip should have been put in it, since there are already Tegra 2 tablets out, but I think Google didn’t have the code ready for dual cores in time. Android will start being optimized for dual core chips and hardware acceleration with version 3.0.
Still, I hope Nexus S will gain some popularity, because we need to make a statement that we want more stock Android phones, and who knows when it will be the next time we’ll see a pure Android experience phone again. Maybe with Android 3.0 or maybe not.
Nexus S will be available for $529 unlocked, or $199 on a 2 year contract on T-mobile. If you want to read the Android 2.3 guide, get it here.