According to the site 4chan, a user claims to have been up close and personal with the new Nexus device rumored to be called the Nexus Prime made by Samsung. Looks like this will be slated to be a Verizon exclusive as this will be their first carrier-supported Nexus device. If this turns out to be true, this could be the reason VZW passed on offering a Galaxy S II variant.
The Nexus Prime looks to offer a 4.65inch Super AMOLED Plus display w/ 1280 x 720 HD resolution, powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Exynos processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, a 2000mAh battery, metal body that is 8.8mm slim, and the first device to run Android’s newest Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 2.4.1). Here are some details on some changes coming with ICS:
The app drawer has three sections at the top that you press and it goes to the drawer for your selection. There are sections for apps, games and widgets. The apps section is what we are all used to. Just drawer for all the apps on the phone. The games section is just a drawer for all the games you’ve downloaded, the widgets section shows all the apps that have widgets available. The cool thing is you can click the widgets in the widgets section to get a view of what they look like. So you don’t have to screw around with applying a widget on a homescreen, seeing you don’t like it, deleting it, doing it again wit a slightly different setting etc etc to see the difference. On ICS you get a visual representation of the widget, you can swap easily between the widgets the app provides, change the settings in real time, and then you can go ahead an apply it on a homescreen.
– Best of all with the drawers is that you can create and name your own app drawer if you want. I think the ICS comes with three standard drawers mentioned above (apps, games and widgets) and then demo phone had app drawers created called “Sports” and “News” which contained all the sports and news related apps that you download. I’m not sure if the sports apps you download automatically go to the sports drawer (with some settings like auto push sports apps to drawer “Sports” or something) or if you have to put it there manually. Either way, it was very good and reduced the amount of searching for an app. With the Galaxy phones, if you didn’t know where the app was, which page it was on, it would take a while to search through it because they weren’t in alphabetical order, they were just in the order you downloaded them. This is a LOT cleaner, organised and feels more polished.
– I’m not familiar with Honeycomb, so I don’t know really what it pulled from there. I’m guessing quite a bit because visually it’s quite different to current Android phones. I always thought that Android phone manufacturers made great phones, but the Android software lacked polish and user-friendlyness I was told the glassy look is from honeycomb and there are a lot more blues and purples on the phone rather than green. The icons look different, more shiny. The marketplace app is the same as the current one. Not sure if a new one is being worked on.
– The Gmail app is a lot better looking than the current one. If you flip the phone to the side, it has the preview pane, like how Outlook works, with the emails on on the left and the message on the right. It looks really nice. Vertically, it works similar to the current Gmail app, but looks a lot cleaner and on an email the reply button says “reply” rather than having that arrow. There’s a down arrow next to the reply button which has “reply all”, “save as draft” etc etc. The threads are smaller (could be due to the higher resolution screen) and around 10-12 threads can fit on the screen. Other than visual tweaks, it’s the same thing you know.
– Calendar app is revised, a lot less cluttered, glassy bluish look. A new calendar widget available.
– The internet browser is leaps and bounds better than what you currently get. It has a completely revamped interface and the icon is no longer the blue earth icon. The icon is now an Android behind the earth which is green and blue. Name is still “internet”. But it’s really easy to use. I personally hated the stock browser for Android but I’d actually consider using this. It has its tabs at the bottom of the screen now, similar to Opera Browser mobile. The pinch to zoom is better than before, the rendering is excellent, no checkerboards. Zoomed out the text is pristine. Really liking the browser app.– Best of all with the drawers is that you can create and name your own app drawer if you want. I think the ICS comes with three standard drawers mentioned above (apps, games and widgets) and then demo phone had app drawers created called “Sports” and “News” which contained all the sports and news related apps that you download. I’m not sure if the sports apps you download automatically go to the sports drawer (with some settings like auto push sports apps to drawer “Sports” or something) or if you have to put it there manually. Either way, it was very good and reduced the amount of searching for an app. With the Galaxy phones, if you didn’t know where the app was, which page it was on, it would take a while to search through it because they weren’t in alphabetical order, they were just in the order you downloaded them. This is a LOT cleaner, organised and feels more polished.– I’m not familiar with Honeycomb, so I don’t know really what it pulled from there. I’m guessing quite a bit because visually it’s quite different to current Android phones. I always thought that Android phone manufacturers made great phones, but the Android software lacked polish and user-friendlyness I was told the glassy look is from honeycomb and there are a lot more blues and purples on the phone rather than green. The icons look different, more shiny. The marketplace app is the same as the current one. Not sure if a new one is being worked on.– The Gmail app is a lot better looking than the current one. If you flip the phone to the side, it has the preview pane, like how Outlook works, with the emails on on the left and the message on the right. It looks really nice. Vertically, it works similar to the current Gmail app, but looks a lot cleaner and on an email the reply button says “reply” rather than having that arrow. There’s a down arrow next to the reply button which has “reply all”, “save as draft” etc etc. The threads are smaller (could be due to the higher resolution screen) and around 10-12 threads can fit on the screen. Other than visual tweaks, it’s the same thing you know.– Calendar app is revised, a lot less cluttered, glassy bluish look. A new calendar widget available.– The internet browser is leaps and bounds better than what you currently get. It has a completely revamped interface and the icon is no longer the blue earth icon. The icon is now an Android behind the earth which is green and blue. Name is still “internet”. But it’s really easy to use. I personally hated the stock browser for Android but I’d actually consider using this. It has its tabs at the bottom of the screen now, similar to Opera Browser mobile. The pinch to zoom is better than before, the rendering is excellent, no checkerboards. Zoomed out the text is pristine. Really liking the browser app.
Also over the weekend on Twitter a newcomer to the Panda Nation, Tom & The Mobile Panda tweeted poems that embedded key information on the Nexus Prime. Info like its release date which they have pegged for November 3rd and the Prime being a 4G LTE device as well. They also mention that the Prime will make iPhone 5 owners jealous in their smartphone choice. Looks like Google just found out what we already know, Samsung makes the best Android devices as they look to be the new Nexus manufacturer. We’ll see in October how everything pans out as it looks to be yet another exciting month in smartphones.
