I have never used the Galaxy Nexus as my primary device since it was first announced (or before that....) mostly because I am a tech freak and never liked the fact that it was inferior to the Galaxy S II hardware wise . I always felt that the SGX-540 even at a higher clock rate than the one used on the first Galaxy S , was not enough to adequately drive the 1280x720 screen .
I must admit that some times I become a victim of the trend that makes people want devices that can do things that most of the time they will probably not use . With that being said , I could not imagine myself using a phone that would drop frames when trying to play a 1080p video file .
Apart from that , the only drawback I could find on the Galaxy Nexus was the poor video codec support ( I am a fan of watching episodes from my favorite series on my phone ) and the absence of native support for text input on my native language .
All of that changed when I updated the phone with the Jelly bean update . Everything was improved except the poor video codec support . "Project Butter " vastly improved the fluidity of the menu transitions to the point that I enjoy scrolling through menus and pages and the update finally brought native support for the Greek language text input . These two improvements made me willing to use a different device to watch videos , which by my standards means a lot since I usually hate carrying more than one phone or even making sure that an extra device is charged even when I am at home .
Switching from my Galaxy S III made the AMOLED screen of the Galaxy Nexus at least bearable since let's face it , this screen was never the device's strong point .
I realized that stock Android may have some things missing compared to Nature UX and Touchwiz from Samsung and even when compared to the UI of phones made by Sony Ericsson and now just Sony but at the same time is more nicely designed as an overall UI and actually works without any problems .
I guess this is the advantage of using a "pure" Android device , the fact that everything is optimized to work on your device exactly as they should be and on top of that some applications are designed way better than the ones found on Samsung , HTC devices etc.
As always , since I am a hardware friendly guy I cannot refrain from commenting on the job done in hardware optimization once again . I find it amazing that Google's engineers squeezed out every last drop of performance especially from the SGX540 GPU . Scrolling is smooth almost everywhere and you notice some droped frames only when you try to scoll a large heavy web page .
Although clocked quite high for an SGX540 , this GPU was not particularly fast by no means .
The OMAP 4460 SoC offers dedicated hardware for video encoding and decoding so the fact that the Galaxy Nexus can record at least decent 1080p videos is also welcomed .
On the other hand the scaling range for the two ARM A-9 cores is limited and the lowest possible frequency is the 350 MHz one which is 150MHz more than the second highest sleep clock I've seen on Samsung's SoCs . There is also no seperate clock and power schemes for each core and they always scale up and down together at the same frequency . This may improve the responsiveness of the device , it also consumes greater amounts of power for no reason .
The jumb to the APQ8064 on the Nexus 4 will probably bring quite an improvement at least in stand-by times since Qualcomm's scaling and powering schemes are a lot better .
Finally , despite the huge changes made across the OS and all the added features , sadly the camera can not be upgraded as a hardware piece and the 5Mpixel unit is well... useless .
After using the Galaxy S III , the One X and one iPhone 4s , I also got the habbit of taking pictures of various things around me without any particular reason .
With the Galaxy Nexus I stopped after one day , when I got the time to review the pictures I had captured .
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