Gadgetory

what's up everyone John Rhett enger' from TechnoBuffalo here at the full review for you of Google's new flagship handset the Nexus S let's go ahead and see if it lives up to its heritage so the Nexus S is a follow up to one of the best handsets of 2010 the Nexus One so this guy has very big shoes to fill the news here is that it was the first phone shipping with the newest build of Android 2.3 you may have heard that by the Tastee name of Gingerbread so Before we jump into the review let me remind you of the specs of this guy so it's running a 1 gigahertz cortex a8 hummingbird processor same processor that we've seen powering the Galaxy S series of devices and Galaxy Tab is a very capable processor really is quite fast it's got 16 gigs of internal storage curiously there's no microSD storage here so leave your cards at home it's got a 5 megapixel camera on the back with autofocus it's got a 4 inch Super AMOLED screen right here which is measured diagonally with a resolution of 480 by 800 that Super AMOLED is going to give you darker blacks and seen any of you brighter colors and better visibility in direct sunlight and is also going to give you a bit of a bluish tint which we'll talk about when we get to the screen in a few moments and all that is sitting on top of 512 megabytes of RAM so specs and all that aside if this thing's not going to make good phone calls I thought can be of much use to you as a phone so it is an unlocked device which has support for t-mobile's 3G network in a tnt's Edge network it does not have support for t-mobile's HSDPA plus which is what they're calling 4G so I tested this on both t-mobile and AT&T that's the opponent very strong signal strength with both networks certainly 3G with t-mobile and edge with AT&T much like the galaxy guest the radio in here was very strong and I was able to get full bars of service anywhere I went in Southern California it might not be best representative of what serves is going to be in your area but at least where I am was able to plan a pretty strong signal especially compared to other devices and my 20 call test I did 10 on t-mobile and 10 on AT&T I had to drop calls on t-mobile which is relatively atypical and no drop calls on AT&T speakerphone volume was average so if you rely on speakerphone pretty heavily isn't gonna be the loudest speakerphone on the planet but it's going to be decent enough all right so now let's jump into the phone and let's talk about what's new here with the outgoing Nexus One or versus the outgoing Nexus One so what we're gonna see the big difference is the inclusion of gingerbread which is the newest build of Android as I mentioned that brings with it a slew of new features now I did an overview of Gingerbread going over all the things that are new so I'm gonna sort of touch on some of those points if you want a full recap the link to that big is gonna be down below so you're gonna know there's a few graphical changes here with the phone the icons at the bottom now have color they've got that green tint similar to the android logo same thing here for the menu bar the battery indicator has been sort of turned on its side but the big news here is third-party ap is and how 3d graphics are going to be rendered this phone really is very capable of handling a vast amount of 3d graphic and she's gonna give you much better in-game performance so you might not see this performance right now but as developers get access to these new ap is this phone in particular and phones that are going to be running Gingerbread are going to have much much much better graphics able to take advantage of the processor and graphics capabilities of the phone so this is a slate device so it doesn't have any sort of physical keyboard to rely obviously very heavily on an on-screen keyboard so we go ahead and show you this real quickly it's something that's new with Gingerbread this keyboard certainly in my opinion Android had a very nice keyboard before Google has really improved that with this version so it looks a little bit different you've got spaces between the keys which is quite nice the unresponsiveness is fantastic if you like typing on an android keyboard before is it going to be an even better experience and certainly being Android and being open if y'all can to put on a ton of third-party keyboards you also have the voice recognition and the speech-to-text options here so a keyboard input on this device is absolutely fantastic one of the things I found really impressive with the phone and that's really true with most Galaxy S series of devices is the speed of the phone now I think that's really able to be tested in short of the prowess of the phone and a very intensive application like Google Earth so this is quite processor taxing and graphically taxing as well in my Nexus S versus Nexus One I did sort of a versus and I showed Google Earth been used here this is actually one of the smoothest implementations at Google Earth I've seen on a mobile phone I really without any lag or delays so this is not only doing some 3d processing but it's also got a pulling a lot of information that is now connected to Wi-Fi and as you sort of zoom in it's very very very quick and that same thing can sort of translate over to the browser as well certainly if you're an Android user chances are you want to take advantage of the fantastic browser with this of course capable of Flash 10.1 you can turn that off if you don't want to consume the extra battery life but it does work very well here and pitch to zoom obviously it says multi-touch supported works very very nicely on the device you can see some flash content going on here certainly turning that off is also going to increase the speed of the device we also brings to the table here a new YouTube player and a new application store or a new Android Market rather all that stuff is available on older Android devices some of the first times that we've seen it however though are on here on the Nexus S let's go ahead and jump back home and let's talk a bit about this screen and to do so let me go ahead and pull up some pictures to give you an example is what this is gonna look like let's jump into wallpapers for example when we go ahead and check out some of the wallpapers here now maybe hard to translate on camera but looking at some images looks like at a very green image and this is sort of going to be representative review of a Super AMOLED screen as a whole go ahead and go to a new screen pictures look beautiful colors really pop the resolution may not be the highest at 480 by 800 but it's very very very sharp images and very readable text the one not that I've had Super AMOLED screens versus regular screens regular mbola technology over it might be is that they do give a little bit of a bluish kind of gray cast when you look at white backgrounds so if we jump back to this website which is TechnoBuffalo you'll see in the text go ahead and try and hit that the text does look at least the background which is supposed to be white it does have a little bit of a tint to it now it's nothing that's gonna detract from the experience and you really don't notice unless you have two phones next to each other so that's gonna be a trade off but not you can deal with that little bit of a tint for the very very sharp picture quality you're going to get and the really nice texture you're gonna get as well if i zoom in right there on text you can see how crisp and how sharp it is which is really important at least for me if you've read a lot of websites you do a lot of reading on your phone you want the text to be nice and sharp so the tint doesn't always bother me sometimes I do notice it but I do test a lot of phones and I see them next to each other so that may be just a matter of personal preference but something to keep in mind one of the knocks I had on the previous Nexus device the Nexus One our the capacitive buttons at the bottom I went on and on and on about how unresponsive those capacitive buttons were on the Nexus One on the Nexus S that has definitely been remedied these are very responsive two capacitive buttons they might as well just be physical buttons here at the bottom they work very well and they work as advertised so one of the concerns people have been having with the Nexus S is build quality Samsung has whether it's justified or not a reputation for maybe not the most industrial build quality of phones so the Nexus S the back of it is plastic and is a fingerprint magnet of plastic but it does have a nice build quality to it it's got the sort of reverse chin the reverse hump and the phone does feel very nice in the hand the 4-inch screen I think really is a sweet spot if you're worried about build quality and certainly what you're comparing that to is probably going to be a more industrial feeling device here like the Nexus One which has a lot of metals to it you're not going to get that in the Nexus S this is a mostly plastic device which does take away a bit from the premium of the phone and this really is a very fast very capable phone perhaps one of the fastest most capable phones on the market depending what your OS preference is going to be camera wise looks just like it expects from a 5 megapixel camera it's nothing outstanding it's not nothing that's gonna replace your point-and-shoot or your DSLR that I can be taking Ansel Adams's like pictures on this thing and blowing them up to fill up a wall or anything but if you want to snap pictures of your friends out party this is definitely gonna be a fine camera the flash washes images out but it's nothing terribly bad or even terribly good for that matter the big news here again sort of recapping this whole thing is Android 2.3 it does adds a lot of different niceties some of the other features that it adds very quickly and I'll wrap this up you now have a full application management from inside the operating system so if I hit menu you can now manage apps right from there if I go ahead and jump into settings for example or any list you're gonna get some nice graphical cues here so at the top you see that little sort of yellow bar that comes loose you know you're at the end of a list just very nice and you'll see Android 2.3 which brings a lot of these features start to trickle down to older Android handsets we've already seen unofficial build for a lot of phones and presumably we'll start seeing official builds for a lot of phones so if you want to taste the gingerbread you're currently rocking some Froyo or even an earlier build of Android stay tuned because hopefully you will get your taste of the dessert so in conclusion on a one to five scale the Nexus S is a really really capable phone a one that I could see definitely using as a daily driver it's got a gorgeous screen it's very fast really capable and is probably one of the best Android phones out on the market and it's unadulterated Android there isn't any skin on top of this so whether you like it or don't like that doesn't that touch worth it doesn't have HTC Sense uh it's just soft Android as Google built it so maybe you're getting some speed increases by not having a skin on top who knows in my vs. video I ran a quadrant speed test which is a sort of an arbitrary way I guess to evaluate the performance of a phone and well actually got the top of all the Android phones that had been tested so this thing really is capable it does a very nice job it's unlocked so bring your own SIM card not going to type into a contract well you can get it on contract through t-mobile turn 18 chief customer just remember that you're gonna be limited to only edge speeds there guys so on a one to five scale I give this and I haven't given many five-star reviews this one definitely gets a five-star if you're an Android fan are looking to get into the open-source operating system and you don't currently have a phone this is going to be a great choice for you I wouldn't necessarily run to upgrade from a Nexus One or a Galaxy S type phone but if you're using an older Android phone or a flip phone you want to get into the smartphone market this is going to be a fantastic choice for you guys I'm John reticent TechnoBuffalo this was a full review for you of the Nexus S the Google phone built by Samsung for all your tech news shouldn't check out TechnoBuffalo and for exclusive tech content check me out at twitter twitter.com slash jon for lakers all those links are down below john retina and see you next video buh-bye you