Samsung Galaxy Nexus Vs. Apple iPhone 4S – Things You Should Consider

By Cheryl Lindo Jones
22 Oct, 2011 4:20 am

10 Comments

It’s always an awkward situation when a techie is asked, “should I get phone X or phone Y?” Even more than your personal computer, the smartphone you carry is a very personal choice. So if someone tries to tell you that you should unconditionally get phone X or phone Y without knowing anything about you or what your needs are, that someone isn’t doing you a favor.

That being said, the best thing you can do to figure out which phone — the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, or the Apple iPhone 4S —  is for you, is to think about what features are really important to you, and read up on which phone offers the better feature set for your needs. Consider the following as part of your research.

 iPhone 4S and Galaxy Nexus By the Numbers

If you’re just looking for straight numbers, there you go. However, the numbers themselves don’t tell the whole story.

Form Factor

The iPhone 4S hasn’t changed from the build and materials used for the iPhone 4. If you’re a klutz, you may not feel comfortable holding a phone with a glass front and back, even though the front is made of Gorilla Glass. The iPhone 4S also has pretty sharp, right-angle edges all around. While it does feel like high quality hardware and construction, this is not necessarily the most ergonomic design.

The Galaxy Nexus has a curved glass front and a plastic back, which likely feels very good in the hand thanks to the rounded edges and corners. By the numbers, it’s also 5 grams lighter, and ever so slightly thinner at its thinnest point than the iPhone 4S (the top and bottom of the Galaxy Nexus are slightly thicker than the middle). The plastic construction may not feel as dense and solid as the glass and metal construction of the iPhone 4S, but that’s definitely a subjective thing.

The Galaxy Nexus also has a huge screen compared to the iPhone 4S. But because the bezel surrounding the screen is so thin, the phone overall is not too much of a bear to put in your pocket. And with all that screen real estate, if you’re a big gamer or like to watch videos while on the go, it would be pretty nice to use a 4.65″ screen for that. Even just browsing or reading e-books can benefit from larger screens to fit more text per page.

Processor

The processor specs for the two phones would imply that the iPhone 4S is significantly slower than the Galaxy Nexus. But in reality, the iPhone 4S processor has a base clock speed of 1 GHz, which is clocked down to 800 MHz for battery savings. In addition, the iPhone 4S uses a newer and much faster GPU, the PowerVR SGX 543, compared to the PowerVR SGX 540 from 2007 that’s in the Galaxy Nexus. So the combination of hardware in the iPhone 4S will likely make it feel snappier than the Galaxy Nexus in most situations, especially during more graphically intensive tasks like gaming or video playback. But since the Galaxy Nexus isn’t out yet, we’ll have to reserve final judgment on processor performance until after some proper benchmark and real-world tests have been done.

Camera

Similarly, according to the camera specs shown above, you might think that because the iPhone 4S has 8MP vs. the 5MP of the Galaxy Nexus, that it automatically trounces the Galaxy Nexus. Not so fast…megapixels aren’t everything. As seen in the video below, the Galaxy Nexus’s “lowly” 5 MP camera shows off great quality in both detail and color.

Unless you’re doing a lot of cropping or large format printing of your cameraphone shots, the difference in resolution may not be an issue. The shots from an iPhone 4S and the Galaxy Nexus will probably look just as nice for online posts, since people don’t often look at uploaded photos at 100% resolution. Plus Samsung has optimized the camera to have “zero shutter lag”, so that could also be a point in its favor, if it works as well as advertised.

It’s true that iOS has a ton of photo and video editing apps not available on the Android platform that could push the stats towards the iPhone 4S winning this category, but if you aren’t the type of person to do a lot of photo or video editing, just straight uploads to Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook, then this wouldn’t be a factor for you.

Display

As of yet, there aren’t any devices that exceed the pixels per inch, or PPI, of the Retina Display on the iPhone 4/4S. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus comes quite close, boasting 316 PPI on a humungous 4.65″ screen. Samsung’s displays are definitely high quality, and Super AMOLED Plus displays like that on the Galaxy S2 have awesome vivid colors.

But the Galaxy Nexus actually has an HD Super AMOLED screen (no Plus) which uses PenTile display technology. Without getting too technical, this display technology has lower pixel density because sub-pixels are shared.

Super AMOLED Plus vs. Super AMOLED (PenTile display)

This results in text and sharp edges becoming fuzzier as you look closer. Feel free to read more about this here or here.

All of this aside, the whole PenTile thing is slightly controversial because some people do not perceive the slight flaws in edge and text sharpness on PenTile displays. And with all of the screen real estate that the Galaxy Nexus has, you may just appreciate having more area to work with while gaming or watching videos, that absolute sharpness is trumped by screen size.

Data Speeds

This category is a little more cut and dried than the others. The iPhone 4S is not a 4G phone, no matter what AT&T wants to call its HSPA+ network. Even though the 4S is also available on Sprint and Verizon, both of which have true 4G networks, the iPhone 4S doesn’t support their 4G networks. The Galaxy Nexus, however, will do either LTE or HSPA+ depending on the region and/or carrier. But again, if you’re not in an area where 4G LTE coverage is significant, the Galaxy Nexus’ leg up in that area may not concern you.

Internal Storage

This is another pretty simple category to determine. It seems that the Galaxy Nexus does not have a micro-SD slot for memory expansion, so you’re stuck with either 16 or 32 GB of internal storage. If you need more storage than that, say if you have a huge music or video collection that you want to store locally, not on a cloud service, then the iPhone 4S has a 64 GB option. Of course, you’ll pay a higher price for the privilege.

OS

This is the most subjective category of all. Both OSes have their strengths and weaknesses. This is really something that you as a user would have to figure out on your own, ultimately. Both are the latest versions of Apple and Google’s mobile OSes. iOS 5 is not hugely different from iOS 4.x, so if you are comfortable with iOS 4, you may lean towards iOS 5.

Definitely, the addition of a notification tray at the top similar to Android’s notification window is a welcome addition to iOS 5. No more irritating notifications that pop-up in your face and prevent you from doing anything else until you dismiss them (unless you want to keep it that way; it’s configurable). The availability of the camera from the lockscreen is another very convenient feature that’s finally built-in to the OS (if only the camera button were configurable to open a different camera app!). And of course, Siri is the new hotness that people are talking about, but the jury is still out on whether or not it will have a big adoption rate and actually be useful beyond the first few days of novelty.

But with Ice Cream Sandwich, since it is a merging of phone and tablet OSes on the Android side, it’s a little bit of a wild card. If you’re familiar with Honeycomb, a lot of features in Ice Cream Sandwich like the virtual home, back, and multitasking buttons and the new style of app and widget drawers will not surprise you. But then there are features like the Face Unlock, or the updated People App, or the updates to all of the core apps like Gmail and Google Calendar that will look totally fresh and new compared to either Gingerbread or Honeycomb.

Google has put a lot of work into making the UI look a lot prettier with magazine-style layouts (some screens looked a lot like Windows Phone 7 and its square tiles) and a nicer, less sterile system font called Roboto. They’ve also made gestures more consistent across the board, by standardizing left and right swipes for app navigation. There are even some webOS-like swipes available when in the multitasking menu or the stock browser tab list to “flick” away apps or tabs to close them.

Some features that were available in custom hacked ROMs or 3rd-party launchers have been incorporated directly into the UI, like access to the camera from the lock screen, or resizable widgets. And finally, there’s a native way to save screenshots without rooting the phone! If you want to read a ton more about the major changes in Ice Cream Sandwich, you can do so here.

So as I mentioned, it really depends on your personal preference, which mobile OS will work best for you. Apple’s iOS 5 is very simple (but still powerful under the hood), and has a very smooth user experience. But there’s little to no customization in terms of glanceable information via widgets or live wallpapers.

If you’re reliant on Google services like Gmail, Google Voice, and Google Calendar, it is obvious that you would do well to pick up an Android phone because you’ll get tight integration of those services with the OS, even more so in Ice Cream Sandwich. And if you like to tweak and customize the look and operation of your phone A LOT, Android is the OS for you.

So good luck with your decision! Both the iPhone 4S and Galaxy Nexus are great devices. It would be hard to go completely wrong choosing one or the other if you are new to the smartphone world. With the Ice Cream Sandwich updates, I think Google has made great strides in making the overall user experience smoother, more elegant, and more consistent to match or get really close to iOS’s reputation for a smooth, elegant user experience.

The key thing to getting the best device for you is to check each one out in the store and do your due diligence to make sure the device you pick fits your individual needs. We hope we’ve helped in that regard.

Sources: Netbooknews.de, Pocket-Lint, Slashgear