There was a time back in the day when the Samsung Galaxy Nexus was the most popular Android-powered device in the market. This is because for a time, the once Google flagship device was the only handset that ran Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for its operating system. Looking back, the handset was released late last year to coincide with the release of ICS, then the latest iteration of the Google mobile operating system. Because of this, a lot of our smartphone-crazed brethren considered the Samsung Galaxy Nexus as the best Android-powered smartphone despite the fact that some of its components are mediocre at best.
However, with the recent unveiling of the LG Nexus 4, the new Google flagship smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is now officially on its way out and headed to retirement. In fact, the handset has already been pulled from the Google Play Store and is no longer available for sale from Google. Despite that, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus will still ride off to the sunset with a feather in its cap – the handset already runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean for its operating system while other more powerful and more capable handsets are still stuck on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
This update to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean was made possible because the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is a Google developer device. This simply means that the handset runs a fully-stock version of the Android operating system with no custom user interface overlaid atop its OS to complicate and unnecessarily delay the update process. And despite the fact that the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is already being put to pasture, its specs sheet is still pretty impressive for a handset that has spent almost a year in the shelves already.
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The Samsung Galaxy Nexus was unveiled back in October of 2011 and made its debut in the shelves a month later. The handset looks like your typical Android-powered smartphone with its black paint job and form factor that makes it look like a slab of black plastic. The handset itself has dimensions of 135.5 x 67.9 x 8.9 mm and it tips the scales at 135 grams.
Under the hood, the components in the internals of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus are still pretty impressive despite its aging status. The operation of the handset is powered by its Texas Instruments OMAP4460 chipset which brings into play a dual-core 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor and a full gigabyte of RAM. It also has a dedicated PowerVR SGX540 graphics core to take care of graphical situations.
The handset comes with an onboard storage pegged at a very generous 32GB however, this is all you get because the Samsung Galaxy Nexus doesn’t have a dedicated microSD card slot for memory expansion purposes. As for its display, the Contour Display of the handset measures 4.65 inches diagonally and is of the SuperAMOLED variety with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. Its major paint point however is its below-par camera department with only a 5MP shooter at its back panel and a 1.3MP snapper at its front bezel.
