Google unveils Galaxy Nexus phone, Ice Cream Sandwich

There’s no doubt that the smartphone industry is a competitive one. Although Apple was one of the late entrants into the field, their extremely popular iPhone has managed to grab a substantial share in the market. In fact, Apple’s latest addition to its line of smartphones, the iPhone 4S, is currently on a roll, raking in over a million pre-orders just 24 hours after it was made available.

And now it’s Google’s time to take the spotlight. The Internet giant had earlier planned to reveal the newest handset in their line of Nexus smartphones, but postponed the San Diego event as a show of respect to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who had just passed away.

The Galaxy Nexus smartphone was finally announced at an event held in Hong Kong earlier this week. Instead of physical buttons, users can now navigate the phone using software and motion-based equivalents. This means that there is now more space available for the screen, which measures an impressive 4.65 inches.

The Galaxy Nexus is equipped with a dual-core 1.2 GHz processor and runs on 1GB of RAM. It also comes with two shooters to take quality shots on the front and the back, with a 1.3-megapixel camera on the front and a 5-megapixel shooter at the rear which is capable of recording 1080p video. The phone is also programmed with a new application that makes use of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, allowing two users of Android handsets to share data directly. Aside from these impressive hardware specifications, the Galaxy Nexus will also be the first to run on Android 4.0, which is also known as Ice Cream Sandwich.

Android 4.0 was officially announced at the 2011 Google/IO. Of the OS, Google’s Senior Vice President Andy Rubin commented that it “makes Android simple and beautiful, and takes the smartphone to beyond smart.” It might be biased, since it is coming from someone within Google, but here are just some of the features users can expect with Ice Cream Sandwich:

- Voice typing by speech recognition and text conversion
- Widgets access in a new tabDrag-and-drop style of modifying and accessing folders
- Fully customizable launcher
- Visual voicemail feature that allows users to speed up or slow down voicemail messages
- Offline search functionality with a two-line preview and action bar in the Gmail app
- Calendar pinch-to-zoom feature
- Swiping to switch between Gmail conversations
- Facial recognition service, Face Unlock
- Improved voice integration and dictating capabilities

Source – BBC