The Nexus One was a ground breaking device. It was the first Android phone to house a 1ghz processor, it brought us Android 2.1, a rather large leap in the OS in itself, live wallpapers and all. How excited I was then, at the thought of a second Nexus device… how disappointed I was when I saw the specs it would have. It didn’t really bring anything new to the table other than Gingerbread.  Stick that on a Galaxy S and add an LED flash, do you have the Nexus S?  Even more worrying was the initial price given at £550.

When the price dropped to £430 just a couple of days before it was due to be released in the UK, I decided it would be worth taking a look. (You can see my unboxing video on YouTube.)

Design

I’ve not mentioned design in previous reviews, but I think it’s appropriate to bring it up here.  I have seen it mentioned on Twitter that the Nexus S is the sexiest phone available right now and the ‘Ooooh’ that people make when I pass them mine would back this up.  Some people say the plastic cover and light weight design of the SNS make it feel cheap.  I don’t agree.  For me the build quality of the Nexus S is fantastic.  The smooth, rounded edges.  The totally black front.  The sturdy feel of the casing, no creaks or movement as you press different parts of the phone.

At 129grams the Nexus S isn’t quite as light as the SGS, neither is it quite as thin.

The slight curve of the screen to fit better round your face.  The hump at the base to fit better in your hand.  If we were holding awards for the looks of phones, I think you’d be hard pushed to beat the Nexus S out of first place.

The Screen

This would be a good point to say, the Nexus S being such a close relative to the Galaxy S is no bad thing.  I very much liked the SGS and the screen was one of it’s strengths.  The Super AMOLED screen on the SNS looks fantastic.  If you’ve seen the SGS screen, you’ll know what to expect.  The blacks are very black and the colours are vivid and vibrant.  With the screen off, you can’t see where the bezel ends and the screen starts.  With it on, the black parts (like the notification bar) still seem to blend into the black edging round the screen.

While the glass on the front of the phone is slightly curved, it should be noted the screen underneath is still flat.  As you would expect, the screen is 800 by 480 and 4 inches in size.  One of the most amazing things is how well this screens anti fingerprint coating works.  I usually buy a anti glare screen protector for my devices as I hate the greasy build up left by fingers.  You really do notice how well the Nexus S hides finger prints.  That’s not to say you can’t leave streaks or marks on the screen, but they’ve not yet got to that greasy point and whatever you do build up, very quickly and easily leaves with one quick wipe on your trousers or shirt.

Hardware

Most of what’s under the hood is what you’d expect at this point.  A 1ghz Cortex A8 Hummingbord processor and 16 gig of on board storage are nice, but not ground breaking.  The first dual core CPU is due within the next month, I think it’s a shame Google didn’t take that route.  Also, no MicroSd card slot is an odd choice, apparently being sacrificed for the NFC chip built in to the SNS.  I can’t see this being of much use for the next year or so, but I guess Google wanted to get it introduced to let devs start things moving that direction.

As with the Galaxy S, the speaker is reasonably good.  I wouldn’t say great, but is plenty loud enough when showing friends a YouTube video for example.

There is also a front facing camera, ready for when Google Talk finally adds video calling!

The buttons come in the form of touch sensitive buttons that light up when the screen is on.  Unlike the Nexus One, these function perfectly.  There’s no trackball (like the N1) or physical home button (like the SGS) which might be seen as quite a big down side by some.

The only other point worth mentioning is the Nexus S has a gyroscope, made fashionable by the iPhone 4. This apparently will be useful for games and game devs, giving more precise information of movements of the phone.  Move it away from your body and the gyroscope will be able to detect it.

GPS

The Samsung Galaxy S had some big problems with it’s GPS, so I was interested to see if they’d been resolved in the Nexus S.  Here’s my video test, comparing it against the Desire HD GPS -

So definitely not the problems the SGS had, but kind of odd it wont lock to the exact location like HTC phones do.  This may be improved with firmware updates over the coming months, like the Galaxy S did.

Camera

The Galaxy S had a reasonable camera, but couldn’t beat the Desire HD.  The Nexus S apparently has either very similar, or the exact same camera.  As I was taking pictures, they looked fantastic on the phone, but maybe this was more to the credit of the SAMOLED screen rather than the lens on the Nexus S.  When I bring them over to my PC and delve a little deeper, it doesn’t look so great.

That’s not to say they’re bad, but they’re perhaps relegated down to ‘average’ instead.  Take a look at the sample shots found here to see for yourself.

Here’s a comparison shot, the Nexus S and the Desire HD -

Nexus S Sample Shot

Desire HD Sample Shot

As I have before, I cut out the same area of a Nexus S photo and compared it to the same area of a Desire HD photo -

Here’s some sample footage of the video camera in action -

In a similar way, I would class this as average.  On the phone itself, I must say it does look amazing…

Software

A big feature of the Nexus S is of course that it comes with Gingerbread, plain vanilla Gingerbread.  Is this a good thing?  I’ll leave that for you to decide.  For me, plain Android is very basic looking.  Grey icons, simple menus and built in apps like contacts and the camera app.  No touch to focus there.  It does let you add your Facebook account and it will sync your contacts and put pictures on your linked contacts where possible.

What else does Gingerbread bring?  Well, apparently better power usage, but I’ll cover battery life further down. The keyboard is quite a change to previous versions, but again, I’ll talk about that later.

As mentioned above, Gingerbread supports NFC, but I don’t see that feature making many sales for the device.  NFC is what things like your Oyster card uses, you simply swipe your device near a reader and it identifies you.  At some point in time, you will perhaps be able to pay for things in shops by waving your phone at the till.  This probably wont happen for a couple of years though.  Perhaps sooner would be ‘tags’ at a restaurant that would load their page in Yelp, or something similar.  Kind of like a QR code could.

There is also better internet calling support on Gingerbread, but I have to be honest, I didn’t delve into SIP calling and such.  Let us know in the comments if you use this!

Of course, I have to mention the turning off animation that sees your screen squeesh down to a dot, like a 1970′s TV.  It’s kinda cool to be honest.

Although the hardware isn’t spectacular, Gingerbread runs very smooth.  Even with live wallpaper (what I find causes a little lag on the OS) everything runs silky smooth.

Browser

There’s no real change in the browser, but I thought I’d put Gingerbread up against FroYo, here’s the result -

Pretty similar, but the Nexus S does win 3-0 (or maybe 2-0-1…)

Keyboard

A few months back Google bought out a company that made a product called Blind Type.  This keyboard let you mash away at the keypad and it would work out what word you were going for.  To me, this is how touch keyboards should have been working all along, but anyway, Google have obviously used this technology to produce the new keyboard found in Gingerbread.  For me it’s quite a strong draw to the SNS, the way it works out each word means I hardly ever have to correct it, even when typing at speed.  It’s also fully multi touch capable.  Hold down the shift and hit a key to get a capital, release the shift to go back to the normal keyboard.  This also works with the control key to get to characters and numbers.  If it worked on my Desire HD, I’d seriously be tempted to replace Swype, that’s how good the keyboard is.

Battery

Battery life is often one of the most talked about features within a phone and usually Android devices don’t fare too well.  The Nexus S, or maybe Gingerbread, could be ready to change this.  The Nexus S comes with a 1500mAh battery, 100mAh bigger than the Nexus One had and the same size as the Galaxy S.  My SGS usually managed around 4% per hour while on standby on 3G.  The Nexus S seems to manage around 2% per hour.  Yesterday, following just less than a full charge I went a day at work averaging less than 2½ % per hour!  Even with my best settings on any other device I’ve never averaged below 3% for a day.  This included around an hour of listening to music while travelling to work, but limited screen on time.

I’d be reasonably comfortable that the Nexus S could make it through one night to be charged the second night and I don’t think I’ve ever been in that position with an Android device before.

One odd point is, I don’t seem to be able to charge to 100%.  It wavers between 95% and 97% and has even gone up after I’ve unplugged the power. This might be related to information I read about how the battery read out lies to you when it gets to full.  It has to then let a little charge out and charge it back up again, rather than pouring more charge in to a full battery, which could limit battery life long term.  For more information, read this.

Gingerbread itself is set up better to let you monitor your battery life too.  Once in ‘battery use’ you get the usual list of what’s draining your power, along with a graph at the top.  Tap this graph and it expands, also showing other factors such as WiFi, Awake, Screen on and more, along the bottom.  I think the list of what’s been using battery is more accurate too.  I’ve never believed that my screen might take 75% of my battery power.  This would mean my device would last for ever on standby, and it doesn’t!

Right now, on 7 hours of use, at 69% with screen on time of 52 minutes Display is said to have used 29%.  As a comparison, after 6 hours on my Desire HD, with 29 minutes screen on Display is at 52%.

Bottom line here, the battery life on the Nexus S could be a big selling point for the device.  It will be real interesting to see if it’s the device or Gingerbread that is helping here.

Benchmarking

Linpack

• Nexus One (Froyo) – 42
• Desire HD – 39½
• Nexus S – 14
• Galaxy S (Speed Fix’d) – 9.9
• HTC Desire – 7
• Dell Streak – 4

Quadrant

• Galaxy S (with speed fix) – 2,200
• Nexus S (No textures) – 2,100
• Desire HD – 1860
• Nexus One (FroYo) – 1,300
• Galaxy S – 800
• HTC Desire – 520
• Milestone – 350

Some interesting results there.  The Linpack score is kinda disappointing and doesn’t really match up with the high Quadrant. It should be pointed out though, Quadrant would only work once I had the MoDaCo Custom ROM on the device which contains a hack, but Quadrant still wont actually load the textures.  I don’t know what effect this has on the result, but I would expect it would score higher without textures to slow it down.

Which ever launcher you use will run nice and smooth, but I did notice a few bits of lag when playing Angry Birds, so perhaps not the best choice if your a big mobile gamer.  Having said that, when I tried Raging Thunder 2, it ran beautifully.

Hackability

Google want people to hack about with their phones, I think this is the main reason for them to produce the Nexus S.  Not for it to be a ground breaking device, but to give Android devs a new toy to play with.  With this in mind, unlocking the bootloader was a simple matter of a couple of adb commands.  Rooting was similarly easy and it was a very short time before I had a custom recovery and custom ROM on the device.

It’s still very early days, but I would imagine we’ll see plenty of custom ROM’s appear on the Nexus S over the coming weeks and months.

Conclusion

As with other devices, let me break this down -

Why to buy

• Gingerbread
• Amazing Super AMOLED screen
• Slick and smooth performance
• Seemingly fantastic battery life
• Good speaker

Annoyances

• Very basic interface compared to Sense UI
• Plastic casing
• No physical home button/trackpad
• No MicroSD card

Why not to buy

• Poor camera

I’ve included the plastic casing as an annoyance, even though I don’t mind it, I know many hate the feeling.

All in all this is a fantastic phone.  It’s a shame they didn’t get a better camera built in or it could be close to perfect.  So, I guess what you need to do is decide of the points above, which are important to you. If you never use the camera on your phone and aren’t put off by the light weight plastic feeling, this could be the phone for you.

If you prefer the polish provided by Sense UI, the Desire Z or Desire HD might be a better option to take.

Is this the new crowned king of Android devices?  Probably not.  The Desire HD still sits safe in it’s throne due to it’s shear power, huge screen and flawless interface.  The Nexus S definitely challenges hard for the position though and I’m sure Android purists would happily turf out the DHD for the Nexus S to take its place.

Which device is best is a personal preference though, hopefully this review will help you decide for yourself.