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Review Anandtech de ICS & Galaxy Nexus - Completa (no traducido todo aun)

- - - - - review ics nexus anandtech

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Uan_ar

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    el Diablo sabe por Diablo, pero más sabe por viejo. A leer!

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No sé si conocen o leen seguido la página de Anandtech, en este caso nos trajo una muy buena review que quería compartir con ustedes. Es sobre ICS (comparándolo con Ginger) y el Google Nexus. Traducción propia.


Gracias.

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Google emplea a más de 20,000 personas en todo el mundo y el número de ellas trabajando en Android llega al dígito único en porcentaje [se refiere a que es ente el 1% y el 9% de ese personal]. El negocio de Google son las búsquedas, pero siempre tiene aspiraciones de más. Android no es sólo una oportunidad para capitalizar las búsquedas móviles, es también una oportunidad de tomar el poder en la próxima era de computación personal. Si ustedes creen que los smartphones enventualmente reemplazarán a la computadora principal, quién no querría ser para los Smartphones lo que fue Microsoft para las PC al principio de los 90s?

Versiones anteriores de Android fueron cautos y evolucionados escalones a lo largo del camino para llegar a ser una alternativa más abierta y flexible que iOS. Empezando con Honeycomb (Android 3.0), sin embargo, Google comenzó a salir de la sombra de sus competidores y a realmente empezar a definir a Android como una plataforma para computación móvil. Honeycomb estaba limitado a tablets, pero su sucesor, Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), traerá la unificación de Android a través de las tablets y smartphones.

Hoy veremos a ICS y su vehículo de lanzamiento, el Google's Galaxy Nexus.



El debate de Android vs. iOS


Está muy claro para mí ahora más que nunca que Apple y Google tienen metas completamente diferentes con sus estrategias respecto de los sistemas operativos móviles. Excluyendo la poco clara estrategia detrás de Chrome OS, Android es mucho más el sistema operativo primario de Google. La estrategia unificada tablet/smartphone detrás de Ice Cream Sandwich tiene sentido porque para que pueda Google tener éxito en el negocio de los Sistemas Operativos necesita desplegar Android en todo, desde smartphones a notebooks. Ya hemos visto las fortalezas de tener una plataforma de smartphone con un fuerte ecosistema. Las cosas se vuelven mucho más atractivas si tienes un teléfono, tablet y PC que corran el mismo SO y aplicaciones. En tanto Android es el sistema operativo de Google "un mismo talle para todos" [o de talle único], necesita tener un foco más amplio y un poco más ambicioso que iOS o de otro modo se arriesga a perder la carrera en el largo plazo.

Apple está en diferente posición. Ya tiene un exitoso SO para desktop/notebook que continúa creciendo. Mientras iOS ha sido un éxito fuera de control ("runaway succes") para Apple, la plataforma de Mac OS X es una opción sólida para cualquier usuario que necesita más poder que el que su iPhone o iPad puede darle. Los dos Sistemas Operativos pueden converger o al menos hacerse fuertes préstamos entre ellos, pero en el interin pueden mantenerse independientes. Si usted necesita más una experiencia de computdora, Apple está feliz en venderle una Mac. Si usted necesita experimentar algo más funcional y móvil, Apple tiene toda una serie de configuraciones de iPhone/iPad para ofrecerle.

Imagen enviadaImagen enviada


ICS no es un paso hacia iOS. Si algo prueba es que Google está comprometido con su propia trayectoria. Android es un SO que, aunque mucho más cerrado que lo que unos cuantos querrían, todavía es mucho más flexible que iOS. Puedes cargar aplicaciones no compradas en el Market. El sistema operativo no está completamente escondido de ti. Puedes elegir el nivel de zoom predeterminado que quieras en páginas web. Apple y Google tienen ambos toneladas de tiempo y búsqueda en descubrir la mejor manera de hacer algo. Y, para ser honesto, siento que Apple generalmente hace un mejor trabajo en conseguirlo para el consumidor masivo. En lugar de intentar hacer molde perfecto sin embargo, Google te da una forma que es más flexible
.
He dicho esto antes, pero creo que Apple está tratando de entregar una experiencia en el aparato, mientras que Google está proveyéndote con una forma moderna de experiencia computacional tradicional. Si el aparato es un smartphone, entonces ambos acercamientos son igualmente capaces, sólo es una cuestión de preferencias personales.

Lo que es nuevo realmente en ICS está dentro de estas categorías:
  • Improvements in UI frame rate due to OpenGL ES rendering (non-skia) path
  • UI tweaks
  • New features
Ahora en esta lista hay un cambio fundamental en la forma en que trabaja Android. Siento que es un punto muy importante de entender y la causa de desacuerdos en cuán impresionante es (o no) Ice Cream Sandwich.

ICS es más fluido, más pulido y tiene su propio set de nuevas agregados que lo hacen un paso adelante muy importante para Android. Lo que ICS no es, sin embargo, es un clon de iOS. Si prefieres la experiencia de iOS a la de Android, ICS no va a hacer nada para hacerte cambiar de opinión. Si todo lo que entendías que faltaba a Android era una más pulida Interfaz de Usuario (IU o UI en inglés), entonces su cuarta entrega será casi todo lo que puedas pedir.


OS-Wide OpenGL ES Rendering


Aunque smartphones y tablets todavía estén atrás de la tecnología que tenemos en las PCs modernas por unos cuantos años, su evolución es una versión sumamente acelerada de lo que vimos en la industria de la PC. Llevó décadas ir de las primeras interfaces gráficas a la GPU (unidad de procesamiento gráfico, como el CPU pero dedicado a gráficos) y a las aceleradas interfaces que tenemos hoy en día en el escritorio hoy en día. Android hizo una transición muy similar en tan sólo tres años.

Previo a Honeycomb, la mayoría del dibujo en pantalla en Android se hacía usando bibliotecas
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. Estas bilbiotecas eras casi exclusivamente basadas en CPU y trabajaban muy poco en el GPU. Con el tiempo, Google reescribió elementos clave de Android para usar nuevos caminos con renderización OpenGL ES en lugar de skia para dibujo en pantalla. Vimos la primer mayor trancisión en Gingerbred, donde partes del OS se volvieron acelerados por GPU, pero cosas como el navegador seguían siendo renderizados usando skia. Honeycomb fue un significativo paso hacia el dibujo en pantalla a través de GPU y ICS lo que hace es completar dicha transición. El otro componente es el modelo de graficación, que está completamente actualizado en Android 3.x y superiores.


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From Romain Guy's Android Accelerated Rendering Google I/O 2011
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Las tablets basadas en Honeycomb fueron mucho más fluidas que los dispositivos basados en Gingerbread pero hasta ellas mostraban algunos problemas con el desempeño de la IU dependiendo qué se les pidiera. Más tarde descubrimos que era una limitación de Tegra 2, algo que contribuyó seguramente a que NVIDIA no fuera elegida como el SoC líder socio para ICS.

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Also from Romain Guy's Android Accelerated Rendering Google I/O 2011

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Con Ice Cream Sandwich, el OS, navegador y las apps de primer nivel son acelerados por OpenGL ES. El resultado es absolutamente perceptible. El inicio de las Apps, scrolling y las transiciones de las ventanas son mucho más fluidos. La navegación en internet es increiblemente suave y fácilmente comparable con iOS y los Windows Phone en este punto.

Las apps de terceros tienen que optimizarse para la renderización OpenGL ES, por lo cual requerirán de una actualización para aquellas apps que no lo hayan hecho todavía.. Google también provee la opción manual de forzar todas las apps para usar aceleración por GPU e ignorar el opt-in (hardwareAccelerated="true" from the AndroidManifest.xml file). La desventaja obvia es que no todas las apps de terceros podrán graciosamente trabajar con la aceleración por hard activada, aunque lo hagan ahora. La app de Southwest Airlines, por ejemplo, dejará de funcionar en cuanto trates de ver un vuelo si lo fuerzas a usar aceleración por GPU, y Speedtest.net muestra una mancha o aspecto borroso (blur) en su línea gráfica durante el test. Google ha bosquejado las operaciones de dibujo que no están soportadas por Android 3.x 4.x ya, las que agradecidamente no son muchas.

Imagen enviada

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Mientras sería bueno para Google permitir aceleración GPU en configuración por aplicación, la verdad de la cuestión es que muchas de ellas funcionan simplemente bien. Aquellas que no, están a una simple actualización de subir abordo, de otra manera corren el riesgo de quedar obsoletas en cuanto más plataformas tengan ICS en el futuro.

Si una Interfaz Gráfica perezosa te mantenía alejado de Android en el pasado, ICS casi completamente se hace cargo del asunto. Digo "casi completamente" porque todavía hay cosas menores y un par de problemitas con la respuesta del SO.

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Task Switcher with CPU use overlay (new in ICS) enabled


El mayor problema para mi es la demora cuando se opera cualquiera de los botones de ICS: retroceder, principal y el cambiador de tareas. Mientras que tocando una carpeta en cualquiera de las pantallas principales resulta en una instantánea muestra de su contenido, tocar cualquiera de los tres botones de ICS no tiene la misma respuesta. Hay una demora perceptible entre tocarlo y cuando responde. Es una demora que, al menos en mi opinión, es demasiado larga. Más frustrante es la demora en traer la lista de aplicaciones usadas recientemente. Es menos de dos segundos, pero debería ser de milisengundos.

Yo montiree el uso de CPU mientras mientras llamba al adminstrador de tareas y vi una pequeña variación en el uso de la CPU (~15%) y un incremento asociado en la frecuencia del reloj, pero nada suficientemente significante para hacerme creer que hay problemas con el CPU en este aspecto. Si algo me pregunto es si se trata ed una limitación en el desempeño del GPU similar a lo que pasaba con Tegra 2 y el launcher de Honeycomb. Dada la increíble resolución del display del Galaxy Nexus y el hecho de que aún estamos lidiando con un 307MHz PowerVR SGX 540, es posible que la plataforma sólo necesite un GPU más rápido. Estoy curioso por ver cómo lo hará aquí un Tegra 3.


La UI: Holo Evolucionado


La primera vez que me encontré con Holo, el theme de Google para Honeycomb, no estaba muy convencido de que fuera algo que duraría. Era diferente, lo que hacía ganar puntos a Google, pero no era exactamente confortable. Me sorprendió ver una evolución de Holo usada en ICS, pero el theme ha crecido en mí.

Ice Cream Sandwich se siente un motón como un encuentro entre Android y Windows Phone. Parte de ello seguramente tiene que ver con la naturaleza contrastante del theme, pero es también la elección de la fuente (Android 4.0 reemplaza Droid Sans con Roboto) y bordes duros a lo largo de la UI. Holo es todavía distintivamente Android en tanto hay múltiples pantallas principales con soporte de widgets, pero también es diferente. Ice Cream Sandwich es Android madurando, es la segunda implementación de Holo permitiéndonos finalmente ver hacia dónde va la trayectoria de Google en el corto plazo. Es diferente, tal como mencionaba antes. Holo y ICS no son iOS y no parece que lo vayan a ser nunca. La UI te hará estar a favor o en contra. A mi me gusta. Es diferente, es claramente un juego en todo el theme de Android; es el tipo de UI que no esperarías de un OS llamado como un robot
.

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Droid Sans v. Roboto (ICS)


Al mismo tiempo, no es más torpe. Elementos del diseño y muchas de las apps de sistema son limpias. Es realmente un ciudadano de primera clase. Diferente tanto de iOS como de Windows Phone, pero con un diseño que es creíble.

El corazón de Android permanece intacto. Tienes múltiples pantallas prinicipales (5 por definición) que puedes poblar de atajos, widgets o carpetas. Los widgets son ajustables en tamaño, tal como ocurría con Honeycomb. Los atajos funcionan de la misma manera que siempre, mientras que las carpetas tuvieron una agradable actualización en ICS. Arrastra cualquier icono sobre otro y creará una carpeta. Las carpetas son rápidas de abrir y fácil de renombrar, sólo toca en el nombre de cualquier carpeta abierta y escribe el nuevo.

El launcher tuvo unos retoques. En lugar de un scroll cúbico sin fin, tienes páginas de apps que puedes navegar. Una vez que llegas al final de las páginas de apps comienzas a navegar entre los widgets. Todo esto es mucho más fluido que nunca antes con Android.
Gingerbread vs. Ice Cream Sandwich Gingerbread Ice Cream Sandwich Lock
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Launcher
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El nuevo botón de menú contextual


Juega un rato con ICS y pronto te encontrarás con un nuevo elemento de la IU que parece inspirado por Windows Phone:

Imagen enviada Imagen enviada


Estas elipsis verticalmente orientadas aparecerán al principio o al final de cualquier app y revelarán un menú adicional de opciones.
En Gingerbread tenías el botón Menú de Android, pero como éste desaparece de ICS debes confiar en estos botones de menú contextuales para traerte acciones adicionales. Estoy honestamente agradecido con el cambio porque muy a menudo me olvidaba si había otras opciones adicionales en Gingerbred con el botón Menú. ICS lo hace muy obvio cuando hay más que puedes hacer.
El cambiador de tareas


La piedra angular de un buen SO es un buen administrador de tareas. Todavía creo que webOS trabaja con el concepto de apps individuales y su intercambio mejor que cualquier otro SO móvil, pero parece que dicha plataforma está casi muerta con pocas chances de lograr acercarse al top tres de los SO móviles
.
Google e iOS no se han enfocado tradicionalmente en la administración de tareas, aunque sí han provisto soporte a ello. En Gingerbread, cambiabas de apps manteniendo apretado el botón principal, que traía una lista de hasta ocho de las más usadas apps.. Ice Cream Sandwich implementa un menú para cambiar al estilo de app borrador, primero introducido en Honeycomb, activado por tocar el botón dedicado:
Gingerbread vs. Ice Cream Sandwich Gingerbread Ice Cream Sandwich Task Switcher Imagen enviada Imagen enviada

El método de Gingerbread de cambiar de apps podías ser más rápido, pero definitivamente no es tan útil como lo que ofrece ICS. Para empezar, con ICS puedes hacer más que cambiar por seis apps. Las más recientes apps están localizadas en la parte baja de la lista, las más viejas en la parte más alta. Puedes eliminarlas corriéndolas a la izquierda o derecha. Haciendo esto, inmediatamente libera memoria que la app estuviera usando, incluso si estaba suspendida.

Scrolling a través de la lista de aplicaciones recientes, como el scrolling en cualquier lado de ICS, es extremadamente fluido. La única queja real que tengo es que el administrador de tareas tarda mucho en iniciarse al principio. Como aludí antes, esto es algo que puede mejorar con un SoC más rápido, particularmente con un más rápido GPU.
La barra de notificaciones


Las notificaciones en ICS siguen siendo manejadas vía la status bar del extremo superior de la pantalla y tirando de ella hacia abajo. La pantalla que se despliega es parcialmentre transparente por definición y, una vez más, muy fluida su animación. La identificación de la operadora está incluida en la parte baja, en lugar de la parte alta de la barra. Se pueden borrar las notificaciones de manera individual o todas con la X.

Imagen enviada


Estoy sorprendido que Google no haya tomado prestado el panel de configuración rápida que sus socios usan en la barra de notificaciones, pero hay un atajo a la configuración general en la parte de arriba.
Screenshots


Android 4.x finalmente traer la opción de tomar capturas de pantalla desde el mismo SO. Ya no hay necesidad de los socios para hacer retoques que lo hagan funcional y con una combinación de teclas, no necesidad de conección USB y disparar ddms, y no más necesidad de ser root e instalar alguna aplicación para hacerlo funcionar. Tradicionalmente, aquellas tres vías eran las únicas para tener capturas de pantalla en Android.

Hacer una captura de pantalla en Android 4.x, es fácil, simplemente mantén apretado bajar volumen y el botón de encendido/bloqueo al mismo tiempo. Se muestra una animación, obtienes una notificación, y la captura de pantalla es guardada (en formato .png) en /pictures/screenshots como se muestra arriba.

No puedo dejar de remarcar lo importante que es la posibilidad de hacer capturas de pantalla para cualquier plataforma en general. Sin ellas, los usuarios sólo pueden compartir lo que ven en su smartphone con otros cuando están en contacto directo con alguien más. La posibilidad de tomar capturas de pantalla sin todos esos procedimientos sin sentido que describí más arriba es parte de la explicación de por qué iOS está tan presente en línea. Naveguen Reddit y cuenten cuántas capturas de pantalla de conversaciones de SMS están hechas con iOS y cuántas con Android. Es claro para mí que Matias Duarte lo entendió, desde que webOS e incluso the Danger Hiptop desde el día 1 tuvieron esta opción de capturas de pantalla. Ahora finalmente Android 4.x se une a la cofradía.

El teclado


El teclado original de Gingerbread fue significativamente un paso adelante, pero el de ICS es realmente bueno. No sé si hay mucho realmente que cambie con el teclado de ICS, pero está en el punto de que -cuando no hay Swype para aquellos usuarios que les importa- me sentiría desilusionado de ver teclados de terceros por parte de HTC, Motorola or Samsung.

La capa principal no ha sido cambiada desde Gingerbread, aunque hay un par de cambios sustanciales. Obtienes el estandar teclado de cuatro filas con modos alternativos (números y símbolos). Donde los teclados de Gingerbread e ICS difieren de los estándar de iOS o Windows Phonees en que tienen una quinta fila de teclas de puntuación por default sobre el resto de los teclados. Esta quinta (o primera, dependiendo de dónde la mires) cambia constantemente en una lista de palabras predichas. La palabra en el centro es la que el motor de autocorrección cree que estás tipeando, mientras que las palabras de la izquierda o de la derecha son las alternativas. Mientras que Gingerbread te permitía navegarlas horizontalmente en la fila, ellas están fijas en ICS. Como consuelo, puedes traer sugerencias adicionales de autocorrección manteniendo apretada la fila de autocorrección. Los caracteres acentuados están disponibles presionando y manteniendo las letras que quieres acentuadas. Los menúes también existen para puntuación y para las caritas.

AL mantener apretada una tecla, es acompañada con el aumento del tamaño de dicha letra. A diferencia de Gingerbread, donde la letra aumentada no tenía una conección con la letra apretada, en ICS sí, lo que hace parece un teclado menos caótico cuando escibes muy rápidamente. En lugar de dar la impresión de una ensalada de letras volando por todos lados, la animación tiene más sentido, dejándote saber qué fue lo que apretaste recién.

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También hay un menú adicional escondido con diferentes themes para aplicar al teclado elegido.
Gingerbread vs. Ice Cream Sandwich - Keyboard & Autocorrect Gingerbread Ice Cream Sandwich Keyboard Imagen enviada Imagen enviada
Quick Punctuation
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Autocorrect
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Autocorrect
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Reconocimiento facial


Android ha ofrecido históricamente múltiples opciones de seguridad para tu teléfono o tablet. ICS continúa con esa tendencia. Puedes elegir un PIN básico con un mínimo de 4 números y un máximo de 17. También hay una opción alfanumérica, simplemente deslizando el dedo y sin seguridad alguna. ICS agrega una nueva a la lista, el reconocimiento facial.

La cuestión es tal y como suena. ICS puede guardar una foto de tu cara y usarla para desbloquear el dispositivo. Mientras que sólo necesitas una sola foto para empezar, Google recomienda que saques múltiples fotos en diferentes condiciones de luz, con y sin anteojos y con una cara limpia y otra sin afeitar (si es el caso). Como resguardo, debes proveer a ICS con un PIN en caso de no reconocimiento de tu cara (tanto por cuestiones de luz o que te hayas caído recientemente de la escalera).

Imagen enviada Imagen enviada

Google advierte que alguien que es parecido a ti puede desbloquear tu dispositivo, haciendo el desbloqueo por reconocimiento facial menos seguro que un PIN largo, dibujo o password. Sin perjuicio de admitir que un ladrón debe adivinar o saber cómo eres para el desbloqueo, pero es un punto válido.

Imagen enviada


Esta función actualmente funciona sorprendentemente bien en la práctica. Con el desbloqueo por reconocimiento facial activado, la pantalla de desbloqueo tiene una ventana en la que debes centrar tu cara. Con excepción de saturaciones de luz (con la luz dando en la cámara) o escenarios realmente malos, el Face Unlock me funcionó casi todo el tiempo. Cuando funciona para el desbloqueo, es extremadamente rápido. En las condiciones adecuadas, he visto a ICS desbloquearse un segundo después de haber visto mi cara en la pantalla. En promedio el proceso es más lento que tipear un PIN o usar otro método de desbloqueo. Para más datos, si lo usas a la noche, especialmente en autos, te conviene ir directamente al desbloquero por PIN/password/dibujo. Finalmente, no trates de usar el Face Unlock para desbloquear tu teléfono mientras manejas, es una mala receta para mal, o peor.

PARTE TRADUCIDA
***********************************************************************************************************************************************
PARTE NO TRADUCIDA AúN...Y FALTA MUCHO MáS DE LA MITAD.


The Browser

The improvements to the Android web browser are some of the most noticeable in Ice Cream Sandwich. Browser performance both in JavaScript rendering and web page scrolling is worlds better than in Gingerbread. We've already explained why scrolling is smoother (full OpenGL ES render path), while the js performance improvements come courtesy of a newer V8 rendering engine in ICS.
The browser in 4.x also includes essentially everything that made the browser in 3.x smooth as well. As opposed to the Android 2.x browser's immediate rendering system - which would redraw the page in its entirety as you zoomed and panned around and seem choppy as a result - Android 3.x/4.x now render tiles into a backing store for webpages. This is the same system that iOS, webOS, and Samsung's custom browsers use, and as a result panning and translating around is now just as smooth as it is in those platforms. To be totally honest, this is probably one of the single largest and most welcome improvements over Android 2.x because of how dramatic the difference is.

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Android 4.0 browser with visual indicator enabled (left), debug settings (right)

In Android 4.0 you can actually go inside the debug settings for the browser (enter about:debug into the address bar, enter, then a new settings pane emerges) and enable or disable OpenGL assisted rendering for the browser. With it off, it feels just like 2.x's choppy stock browser, and with it on, it feels buttery smooth like 3.x. The difference is beyond dramatic. This is actually a feature that was present in Android 3.x as well.

A look at SunSpider and Browsermark performance tells us all we need to know about how the JavaScript V8 engine performance has changed under ICS:

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While companies like Motorola and Samsung backported parts of the Honeycomb browser to their own Gingerbread browsers, the stock Gingerbread browser needed work. ICS modernizes the Android web browser and finally removes the need for third party customizations, at least from a performance standpoint. Gingerbread vs. Ice Cream Sandwich Gingerbread Ice Cream Sandwich Browser Imagen enviada Imagen enviada
The ICS browser is still WebKit based and uses a much newer version of WebKit than what you'll find in Android 2.3.6. Compared to the latest Honeycomb browser however there's not all that much difference in version number. The ICS browser does still use an older version of WebKit than Mobile Safari in iOS 5.0.1: User Agent String Comparison Device OS WebKit Version UA String Apple iPhone 4S iOS 5.0.1 534.46 Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3 Samsung Galaxy Nexus Android 4.0.2 534.30
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.2; en-us; Galaxy Nexus Build/ICL53F) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30 ASUS TF Prime Android 3.2.1 534.13
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 3.2.1; en-us; Transformer Prime TF201 Build HTK75) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/534.13 Google Nexus One Android 2.3.6 533.1 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.6; en-us; Nexus One Build/GRK39F) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1
HTML5 compatibility is fairly similar to Honeycomb, although a significant improvement compared to Gingerbread. If you haven't had any experience with Honeycomb tablets, the ICS browser will feel like like brand new technology. The HTML5 Test Test Apple iPhone 4S Samsung Galaxy Nexus Google Nexus One ASUS Eee Pad Transformer ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime OS iOS 5.0.1 Android 4.0.2 Android 2.3.6 Android 3.2.1 Android 3.2.1 WebKit Version 534.46 534.30 533.1 534.13 534.13 Total Score 305 (and 9 bonus points) 256 (and 3 bonus points) 182 (and 1 bonus point) 222 (and 3 bonus points) 233 (and 3 bonus points) Parsing rules 11 (2 bonus points) 11 (2 bonus points) 1/11 11 (2 bonus points) 11 (2 bonus points) Canvas 20 20 20 20 20 Video 21/31 (4 bonus points) 21/31 21/31 21/31 21/31 Audio 20 (3 bonus points) 20 (1 bonus point) 20 (1 bonus point) 20 (1 bonus point) 20 (1 bonus point) Elements 22/29 23/29 13/29 20/29 20/29 Forms 77/100 57/100 33/100 54/100 54/100 User Interaction 17/36 17/36 0/36
0/36 0/36 History and navigation 5 5 5 0/5 0/5 Microdata 0/15 0/15 0/15 0/15 0/15 Web applications 15/20 15/20 19/20 15/20 15/20 Security 5/10 5/10 5/10 5/10 5/10 Geolocation 15 15 15 15 15 WebGL 9/25 9/25 0/25 0/25 9/25 Communication 32/36 12/36 9/36 10/36 12/36 Files 0/20 10/20 0/20 10/20 10/20 Storage 15/20 15/20 15/20 15/20 15/20 Workers 15 0/15 0/15 0/15 0/15 Local multimedia 0/20 0/20 0/20 0/20 0/20 Notifications 0/10 0/10 0/10 0/10 0/10 Other 6/8 6/8 6/8 6/8 6/8
Performance and compatibility are obvious improvements, however there's much more to the ICS browser. For starters it implements tabbed browsing, a feature that has been available on Honeycomb but not in Gingerbread. Given the small screen size, tabs aren't immediately visible but are instead switched between after hitting the tabs button. The process makes sense and thanks to GPU accelerated drawing, scrolling through tabs is extremely smooth.

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The normal desktop UA switcher (left), More options under developer settings (right)

Google added quick user agent switching to ask for desktop versions of websites vs. mobile by default through a checkbox under settings. Enabling the option changes the browser's UA string from representing itself as a mobile Safari browser to Chrome 11.

There's also a menu inside debug settings to change your user agent (UAString) to look like the desktop, iPhone, iPad, Nexus One with Froyo, or a Xoom with Honeycomb.

User Agent String Comparison Device UA String Default
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.2; en-us; Galaxy Nexus Build/ICL53F) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30 Desktop
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit 534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.696.34 Safari/534.24
Prior to ICS, the browser was a serious limitation of the Android platform on smartphones - it was choppy, and something OEMs continually replaced with their own (sometimes worse, sometimes better) browser. Granted you could always download and replace the browser with one of your own choosing, but for the mainstream user the Gingerbread browser was a problem. In ICS the browser is a blessing to use. It's very fast, smooth and compatible. We've had no problems using the Honeycomb browser and the same can be thankfully said about the evolution of it in ICS.

Este tema ha sido editado por Uan_ar: 28 March 2012 - 16:17


#2
Mister Rojas

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Muy interesante la nota, bien explicado eh y buen trabajo traduciendo :D

#3
Uan_ar

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Muy interesante la nota, bien explicado eh y buen trabajo traduciendo Imagen enviada


Muchas gracias, pero en lo que puse me quedó aún para traducir ;). Y aún quedan como 8 páginas más para postear (no sé cuántos post más)!! Si leíste el original es largo pero muy muy interesante. Yo me estoy yendo unos días, así que no puedo seguir con la traducción hasta la vuelta

#4
Uan_ar

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Sigo agregando y luego traduzco. Además, quedaron muy muy mal los cuadros comparativos porque no son imagen. Ya veo cómo lo arreglo.

Email

The standard Email app in ICS is an evolutionary improvement over what we saw in Gingerbread. The white text on a black background is now inverted to a much more modern looking black text on white background theme:

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The UI and performance improvements give the email app a nice update, but there are some feature enhancements as well.
You can still select several emails at a time for starring, marking, moving or deleting. ICS no longer requires you to hit a menu button to bring up additional options or even to do something as simple as composing an email. All of the most commonly used functions are displayed at the bottom of the screen.
Deleting emails is still not as instantaneous as I'd like it. If you're deleting a small number of emails they'll all go at once after a bit of a delay, otherwise for long lists you'll see the emails slowly disappear.
In message view mode you can quickly reply to any message by tapping the reply arrow key, however to reply to all or forward a message you'll need to first hit the contextual menu button at the top of the screen (this is configurable, you can make reply to all the default action).
Quoted text in a reply is still neatly placed in a separate text box, which keeps your composition text box nice and clean. ICS adds support for quick replies, which are canned responses to emails that you define manually and can quickly insert.

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Server side searching is finally supported, however it's fairly slow (slower than iOS at least). String matching in your search query also seems to be fairly strict so you'll have to make sure that the word(s) you're searching for are not immediately preceded/followed by other characters. You also can't specify where in the email (subject, address field, message text, etc...) you want to search, you just get a general search box.
Gmail

Among the other first-party applications that are new in Android 4.0 is Gmail, which receives an overhaul that closely matches the client from 3.x. The update includes a dramatic makeover that minimizes use of the menu button for interaction. Instead, there’s a row of icons along the bottom for refreshing, composing, searching, and tagging Gmail conversations. If you make selections this row of buttons changes appropriately to mark read/unread and archive/trash items as well. At the very top is a drop down pane for selecting the current label or other inboxes.

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On a smartphone sized device, Gmail now looks and feels a lot like the client from Android 3.x, except with menu and organizing befitting a smartphone. The improvement is dramatic and manages to leave the 2.x client feeling old and unintuitive. The only unfortunate thing is that in the message view, Gmail still lacks pinch to zoom functionality, making looking at emails composed with lots of HTML difficult. This is something that people have been vocal about since the Gmail in Android 2.x which surprisingly still is present.
Minor gripes aside, the Android Gmail application in 4.x yet again sets the bar for the best native Gmail implementation. I can’t go back to the 2.x client, and in comparison the iOS Gmail client seems like a cheap facsimile.

Settings

Android continues to offer configuration options within individual applications as well as centrally located system settings. Once again the lack of a dedicated, system-wide menu button forced Google to rely on a settings icon alone to get you to the system settings panel.
Although most of the configurable options remain unchanged from Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich, Google completely reorganized the Android system settings page. What used to be a convoluted mess of items that weren't always placed logically has now turned into something far more sensible: Gingerbread vs. Ice Cream Sandwich Gingerbread Ice Cream Sandwich Settings
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Location settings are now separate from security and there's now a dedicated backup & erase section. Subtle changes like these seem to make a lot more sense than the organization in Gingerbread. I find myself spending far less time staring blankly at the ICS settings menus than I did in Gingerbread. Let's hope Google's partners don't go in and shift things around too much.

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ICS includes a complete set of cool developer options, above and beyond the ability to enable USB debugging. You can force GPU accelerated drawing system-wide, even in apps that don't explicitly request it. You can overlay CPU usage data on the screen, cause any part of the screen that has been redrawn to flash wildly and even mark up the screen with your last touch events:

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Most of this isn't useful to an end user but for a developer or just someone who's curious, it's fun stuff. More generally applicable however is the ability to turn on a little circle that follows your finger around the touch screen similar to what's always used in touchscreen demo videos.

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There's also official support for adjusting mouse pointer speed, an obvious inclusion for dockable tablets like the Transformer Prime.
Copying via MTP or PTP

With Honeycomb we saw Google treat tablets as Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) devices rather than traditional USB mass storage devices. For Windows users there was no difference as MTP is natively supported in Vista and 7. Mac users have to rely on third party support for MTP, which Google provided via its own free Android File Transfer application.

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Given that Android exposes much of the file system to the end user, MTP is a safer bet for protecting against corruption from both Android and the connected Mac/PC modifying data on the NAND at the same time.
Business is as usual for Windows users as ICS based devices just appear as a drive letter thanks to native MTP support. If you want to access an ICS device as you would a camera (perhaps for a specific application), Google allows you to toggle between MTP and PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol).


The Galaxy Nexus - Hardware and Aesthetics

The evolution of Google’s Nexus line is an interesting one. Each year, Google choses both a silicon partner and an OEM to make a unique hardware archetype which it caters a specific build of Android to. We’ve now seen three Nexus handset designs from two OEMs and three silicon vendors - the Nexus One (HTC and Qualcomm’s QSD8x50), Nexus S (Samsung and Samsung’s S5PC110 ‘Hummingbird’), and today the Galaxy Nexus (Samsung and TI’s OMAP4460).

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Looking at the hardware of those three handsets gives a great survey of the course the Android ecosystem has taken over the last couple of years. The Nexus One started things out with a 3.7” LCD, capacitive buttons, and hardware trackball. Nexus S then removed the trackball, added a curved 4.0” display, and ditched the microSD card slot. The Galaxy Nexus continues in that direction, increasing display size to 4.65” and resolution to 1280x720, and finally removing the capacitive buttons all together. Instead, the Galaxy Nexus uses a 96 x 720 region at the bottom of the display to visualize the navigational buttons, a move that has the consequence of also keeping the display interaction area aspect ratio close to that of WVGA.

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It’s interesting to see how many of the design motifs set by the original Nexus One still have been thoughtfully preserved on the Galaxy Nexus. The notched chrome ring around the camera aperture has continued as a thread for three generations, as has the overall lightly rounded shape. The Galaxy Nexus also retains the chin from Nexus S backside where the speakerphone port and primary cellular antennas are located. In addition, the volume rocker, power/lock button, headphone jack, and primary microphone position from the Nexus S is unchanged.

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The Galaxy Nexus’ backside is no longer the extremely slippery and scratch prone plastic that the Nexus S (and original Galaxy S) adorned, instead it’s a textured, lightly soft touch material. I’m always surprised by how much of a difference changing the backside texture makes on the overall in-hand feel impressions I come away with, and in this case it’s a major positive change. It’s clear that this is an evolution of Nexus more than a huge departure from what’s come before - if anything the Galaxy Nexus is like a larger, thinner, more refined Nexus S.

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We’ve taken a look at both the CDMA/LTE (codename mysid/toro) and the GSM/UMTS (codename yakju/maguro) Galaxy Nexus variants.

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The two differ beyond just the air interfaces they support slightly in the physical department as well, though the two share all the same other features (SoC, display, camera, etc.). The CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus is ever so slightly thicker than the GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus, though the difference is enough to be perceptible.

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In addition, the two have the same exterior “titanium silver” color, no doubt the differences we saw earlier can be attributed to the difference between renders and the real deal. The other small detail is that the two use very different, non-interchangeable batteries - the GSM/UMTS variant uses a 6.48 Whr battery, the CDMA/LTE version gets a slightly larger 6.85 Whr battery. Both of these include the NFC antenna patterned the outside surface of the battery, just under the sticker.
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Other than those subtle differences, Samsung has done a good job masking the challenges which underlie having two superficially similar phones with different cellular architectures. The two variants do feel different in the hand, but the difference isn't dramatic.

Physical Comparison Apple iPhone 4S Samsung Galaxy S 2 Samsung Galaxy Nexus (CDMA/LTE) Samsung Galaxy Nexus (GSM/UMTS) Height 115.2 mm (4.5") 125.3 mm (4.93") 135.5 mm (5.33") 135.5 mm (5.33") Width 58.6 mm (2.31") 66.1 mm (2.60") 67.94 mm (2.67) 67.94 mm (2.67) Depth 9.3 mm ( 0.37") 8.49 mm (0.33") 9.47 mm (0.37") 8.94 mm (0.35") Weight 140 g (4.9 oz) 115 g (4.06 oz) 150 g (5.3 oz) 135 g (4.8 oz) CPU Apple A5 @ ~800MHz Dual Core Cortex A9 1.2 GHz Exynos 4210 Dual Core Cortex A9 1.2 GHz Dual Core Cortex-A9 OMAP 4460 1.2 GHz Dual Core Cortex-A9 OMAP 4460 GPU PowerVR SGX 543MP2 ARM Mali-400 PowerVR SGX 540 PowerVR SGX 540 RAM 512MB LPDDR2-800 1 GB LPDDR2 1 GB LPDDR2 1 GB LPDDR2 NAND 16GB, 32GB or 64GB integrated 16 GB NAND with up to 32 GB microSD 32 GB NAND 16/32 GB NAND Camera 8 MP with LED Flash + Front Facing Camera 8 MP AF/LED flash, 2 MP front facing 5 MP with AF/LED Flash, 1080p30 video recording, 1.3 MP front facing 5 MP with AF/LED Flash, 1080p30 video recording, 1.3 MP front facing Screen 3.5" 640 x 960 LED backlit LCD 4.27" 800 x 480 SAMOLED+ 4.65" 1280x720 SAMOLED HD 4.65" 1280x720 SAMOLED HD Battery Internal 5.3 Whr Removable 6.11 Whr Removable 6.85 Whr Removable 6.48 Whr



The SoC: TI's OMAP 4460

The launch platform for Ice Cream Sandwich was TI's OMAP 4460. Unlike previous Android releases however, it seems that other SoCs will see their ICS ports done in a much quicker manner. It took a very long time for Honeycomb to be ported to other SoCs, whereas a number of companies have already demonstrated ICS running on their hardware (e.g. Intel, NVIDIA). If this is the case going forward, the launch vehicle for a new Android version may not mean what it used to.
The OMAP 4460 is a fairly standard, yet full featured dual-core ARM Cortex A9 SoC. You get two A9 cores complete with MPE (NEON support), behind a shared 1MB L2 cache. The SoC features two 32-bit LPDDR2 memory channels as well. The GPU is provided by Imagination Technologies in the form of a PowerVR SGX 540.

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Max clocks for the OMAP 4460 are 1.5GHz for the CPUs and 384MHz for the GPU. As with all SoCs, all final clocks are OEM customizable to hit their desired point on the performance/battery life curve. Google and Samsung settled on 1.2GHz for the cores and 307MHz for the GPU, both exactly 80% of the OMAP 4460's max frequencies. Sprint recently announced its Galaxy Nexus would run at 1.5GHz. It's quite possible that we'll see a jump in GPU clocks there as well since the two may run in lockstep.
From a CPU standpoint the 4460 is competitive with pretty much everything else on the market (A5, Exynos, Tegra 2, Snapdragon S3). The 4460 does have more memory bandwidth than Tegra 2, Tegra 3 and Snapdragon, but it's comparable to Apple's A5 and Samsung's Exynos 4210. It's the GPU that's a bit dated at this point; the PowerVR SGX 540 typically delivers Tegra 2-class performance. A quick look at GLBenchmark and Basemark results echoes our findings:

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At 720p, which happens to be the GN's native resolution, the OMAP 4460 is much faster than Tegra 2. It's also important to note just how much faster Tegra 3's GPU is by comparison.
I understand why Google didn't wait for a Krait based SoC, however I don't believe the OMAP 4460 was the best bet given the launch timeframe of the Galaxy Nexus. Based on performance alone, Google should have picked Tegra 3 as the launch platform for ICS. GPU performance is much better than the SGX 540 and there's comparable CPU performance. It's possible that Google needed the memory bandwidth offered by OMAP 4, but we'll find out for sure soon enough as the first
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device (
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) is slated to get ICS this week.
I'm also less concerned about power consumption being an issue since NVIDIA added full power gating to all of the cores in Tegra 3. With a conservative enough power profile Google could have guaranteed battery life similar to OMAP 4460 out of Tegra 3.
I get the feeling that Google wasn't very pleased with NVIDIA after Honeycomb and chose to work with TI this time around for reasons other than absolute performance. If it weren't for the fact that Tegra 3 and other SoCs appear to be getting ICS in fairly short form I'd be more upset over this decision. To be honest, the choice of SoC simply hurts the Galaxy Nexus as a phone. If I were you, I'd wait for a Krait based device.

#5
Uan_ar

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Parte III:


Camera - Stills and Video

For whatever reason, the Nexus line has never been synonymous with good camera quality. The Nexus One, Nexus S, and now Galaxy Nexus have shipped with 5 MP rear facing cameras, and though quality has increased with each generation, optical quality has never really been cutting edge. The Galaxy Nexus again sports a 1.3 MP front facing camera and 5 MP rear facing camera with an LED flash.

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When I learned that TI had been selected as the silicon partner for Android 4.x, one of the first things that struck me was that it was highly likely they’d turn around the stigma that Nexus doesn’t care about camera quality. TI has traditionally had great ISP in their SoCs, and we’ve seen good things out of OMAP4 in the past. The fruits of that collaboration manifest themselves in a few places on the Galaxy Nexus, but the most obvious is the device’s instantaneous capture functionality.
The feature is simple - tap the camera button and you capture a full size 5 MP image of the 960x720 preview frame being displayed. No doubt, ISP is simply capturing a buffer of images constantly, and when you tap on the capture button you grab the current one. It works extremely well in practice, you can mash the button pretty fast. I recorded and measured a capture speed of ~2.7 FPS, which is pretty darn impressive for a smartphone.

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by
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There’s no preview after capture, though you can now tap the small thumbnail and get a full screen preview of the last captured image without leaving the camera app.

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There are also options to quickly send the image off to some social services based on their own intents.

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It’s worth talking about the sweeping positive changes that have been made to the entire Android camera UI as well. If you played the audio sample above, you’ll notice that the guillotine-sounding capture sound from Android 2.x has now been replaced with a much better tone. The rest of the UI now looks and feels accordingly less hokey. Iconography rotates immediately based on orientation, and all the menus feel fluid.

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Under settings for still capture are options for flash mode, white balance, manual exposure, some shooting modes, and inside the expanded menu picture size (5MP, 3MP, 2MP, 1.3MP, VGA, QVGA) and an option for whether or not to store geolocation information. On the front facing camera you get auto white balance, exposure, scenes, and shooting sizes of 1.3 MP, VGA, and QVGA.
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The capture preview also fully implements tap to focus and expose, and tracks faces around if in the scene. I noted a small change between 4.0.1 (no doubt the result of what was noted in some other reviews) - pressing and holding the capture button no longer toggles an AF/AE run, instead still image capture runs continuous auto focus just like video. To actually verify focus, your only option is tapping to focus. I feel like this does make some sense if you interpret instant capture liberally - obviously you still need to focus - but it does break the capture button paradigm that’s been established for a super long time. Just make sure you’re focused before tapping the capture button.

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The other cool new feature is a panorama mode, which is now directly incorporated into the Android camera UI. Switch into this mode, and the preview window becomes smaller, but now enables you to shoot panoramas. Hit capture, and you can pan to create an image up to 3936 pixels wide by about 700 pixels tall. I created two and
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in our miscellaneous gallery. In this shooting mode there aren’t any options at all, but the functionality produces some pretty impressive looking results.

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OMAP4's two ARM Cortex M3s

I mentioned that TI clearly worked with Google on developing both the instant capture and other ISP related features, and after a bit of poking figured out how. We’ve talked about OMAP4 before, and its dual Cortex-M3 subsystem. In OMAP4, these Cortex M3s are used for ISP related functionality (TI calls this its Imaging SubSystem - ISS), and by default both run a realtime operating system of their own that works together for still image compensation, ISP, and display subsystem control. Inside /system/vendor/firmware is a 4.5 MB file named “ducati-m3.bin” which contains many camera related references, including the names and types of what I believe are the two Samsung CMOS sensors used in the Galaxy Nexus. Regardless, this file no doubt contains the realtime OS which runs on both Cortex M3s.


core0: 1.00.09.44
xdctools_3_22_01_21
ipc_1_23_01_26
bios_6_32_01_38
TI_CGT_TMS470_4.9.0
core1: TI-MM-DUCATI_RLS.02.00.00.00-818-ga636360
xdctools_3_22_01_21
codec_engine_3_21_00_13_eng
ipc_1_23_01_26
osal_1_21_00_05_eng
bios_6_32_01_38
TI_CGT_TMS470_4.9.0
xdais_7_21_00_01_eng
framework_components_3_21_00_17_eng

And much later on, we have endless references to what can only be the two CMOS sensors used in the Galaxy Nexus - the rear facing 5 MP Samsung
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and front facing 1.3 MP
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. The rear facing S5K4E1G is a 1/4” front side illuminated sensor with 1.4µm pixels and a capture size of 2608 x 1960, and the front facing S5K6A1G is a 1/6” front side illuminated sensor with 1.75µm pixels and a capture size of 1280x1024. I’m pretty certain that the rear camera also is a 4P (4 plastic elements) system with a focal length of 3.37 mm, F/# of 2.8, and a diagonal field of view of 68 degrees.
Update:
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has put the Galaxy Nexus CMOS under their x-ray machine and seen
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markings, which is the equivalent (same specs) backside-illuminated counterpart to the S5K4E1 I outlined above. Our findings were from decompiling 'ducati-m3.bin' which contains references to S5K4E1 and no references to S5K4E5, however. Given the similarities it's possible the two share the same driver platform, and hence we see this behavior inside the ISS code.
Unfortunately with specs like those it’s very apparent that having a high-end sensor and optical system wasn’t the highest of priorities. That said, the Galaxy Nexus does have some great ISP and camera features, it’s just curious that there isn’t a better 8 MP module or at least a BSI 5 MP module in the current one’s place.
So what does still image quality end up looking like? To evaluate the Galaxy Nexus’ camera, we turned to our lightbox tests with the lights on and off, outdoor testing at our test locations, and the new semi-revamped camera tests with the ISO12233, distortion, and color checker charts.
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In the lightbox tests with the lights on the Galaxy Nexus honestly surprised me with very sharp high frequency features, good dynamic range, and decent white balance/saturation. There’s some sensor noise even in this well lit scene, but nothing too crazy. Though the 5 MP sensor is FSI, it does include all the CMOS features (like correlated double sampling) that are a huge part of reducing noise. For a 5 MP shooter the Galaxy Neuxs looks shockingly good in our lightbox test with the lights on.
With the lights off the Galaxy Nexus (and Android 4.0’s camera application) correctly preflash and illuminate the scene for autofocus. We get a nicely focused and exposed image in the complete dark here, though noise reduction is clearly turned all the way up and there’s some obvious blurring from noise-mitigation, but overall again not bad at all. I’m also impressed with how even the illumination is - Samsung put a nice diffuser/fresnel lens on their single LED flash.
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In the more controlled testing, I think we get a sense for how good the ISP is. The
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card looks pretty decent, and in the
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we see minimal distortion (though that’s really nothing special for an F/2.8 system). In the
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chart I can see up to the 13 line in the tangential and saggital direction, and find that thankfully Google/TI didn’t subject themselves to the sharpening kernel that Samsung usually implements. On 8 MP shooters, we can obviously recover more spatial frequencies (up to the 17 line) but the Galaxy Nexus doesn’t do all that bad here.
Next up are our outdoor smartphone camera test locations, of which 3-7 remain available and refreshed each time we get a new device. Note that although I spend a lot of time trying to make sure lighting is roughly the same, seasons do change and there’s going to be some variance in here purely due to it being outside.
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Performance in locations 3, 6, and 7 looks very good. In 4 and 5 I can’t shake the feeling that the Galaxy Nexus produced very undersaturated and lifeless looking images, however. There aren’t any problems with sharpness at all in any of the images, though we’re talking about a shooting environment with ample daylight lighting the scene.
I also took many miscellaneous photos with the Galaxy Nexus (both variants) and tossed them into a gallery below. In real world shooting I encountered many more poorly lit indoor environments where you can really see the noise (and noise mitigation features) kick into overdrive. The burger photo
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and
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flash is particularly telling, as I took this in the same position with flash on and off.
Gallery:
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The Galaxy Nexus’ camera is definitely not the best around, but if you do a lot of outdoor shooting in good lighting environments, the Galaxy Nexus is competent enough to get the job done. It’s really only in low light scenarios indoors or at night where its CMOS sensor really shows its age and can struggle, especially if you shoot without flash. It is very confusing why the Galaxy Nexus includes such a lower-end CMOS sensor considering the device's positioning as a super high end smartphone.
That said, what is awesome are the improvements that Google has made to the AOSP camera application, which show a phenomenal amount of polish and careful thought. The new UI is a huge jump forward from the camera application in 2.x, which never felt quite right. New features like instant capture and a much better organized UI really help the shooting experience feel awesome on the Galaxy Nexus, even if it isn’t driven by the most expensive sensor in the world.
Video

How the Galaxy Nexus captures video is the next important thing, and there are a few more awesome features here that are part of ICS.

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First off, the Galaxy Nexus captures H.264 video in 1080p24 at 9.6 Mbps baseline with 1 reference frame. 720p video is captured at 30 FPS H.264 at 8 Mbps baseline. Audio is single channel AAC at 96 kbps and 48 kHz. It’s a bit odd and disappointing to see video being captured at just 24 FPS, baseline, and such a comparatively low bitrate to boot (other devices are shipping with 15-18 Mbps High Profile or 24 Mbps baseline). To date I haven’t seen any smartphone cameras capture at anything but 30 FPS, as well.

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MediaInfo 1080p24 (Left), 720p30 (Right)

What’s puzzling is that OMAP4460’s encoder is capable of much more than these settings. I feel like yet again we have a Nexus that isn’t quite at parity with the video encoder quality of other devices, though this time around the device does shoot 1080p at the very least.
To gauge quality we took videos at our smartphone bench video location and shot some videos. I originally shot all my bench videos on the GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus running 4.0.1, and noticed some interesting behavior in the resulting
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. Those are all still live, though I shot another video to highlight exactly what this behavior is and have seen some other end users note it and question what’s going on. It appears to be some overly aggressive electronic image stabilization or perhaps a rolling shutter correction firmware bug, but either way this behavior has been fixed in Android 4.0.2 and above. The videos below have been re-shot running Android 4.0.2 accordingly.
1080p24 Video Sample

720p30 Video Sample

720p30 Front Facing Video Sample

In addition, the videos have been uploaded in their original form in a
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(136 MB) if you want to watch without YouTube’s transcode.
The 1080p video quality is decent, though you can see some encode artifacts from the lower bitrate, and honestly 24 FPS looks pretty jittery. Sharpness is decent, but the 720p sample at 30 FPS just looks better to me, and is probably the preset I’d use with the Galaxy Nexus most often as a result.
The other neat feature in video mode is of course the ability to shoot time lapse videos right in the camera UI. This is under video, not stills because the photos get merged together into a video. You can specify intervals of anywhere between 1 and 10 seconds in a few steps. In conjunction with a mount of some kind and a scene with some temporal variance, the results are actually pretty awesome.

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I set up the Galaxy Nexus in a smartphone tripod mount and shot two time lapse videos - one on 10 second interval (for a sunset) and another on 1.5 second interval.



The rest of the video shooting UI is pretty similar to the one for still photography - flash settings, auto white balance, some shooting effects, video quality, and the location geotagging toggle.
I'm glad that Google fixed the annoying rolling shutter / image stabilization settings for video captured on the rear camera with 4.0.2 and above. That said, the Galaxy Nexus is still not quite up to the level of other devices with the video it's shooting on the rear side. OMAP4460 can encode 1080p video with much better efficiency and higher profile H.264 features than what it's set for right now, and I'm very puzzled why Google hasn't enabled these encode parameters which would help bump up quality.


Display

Another huge axis of improvement lately has been the mobile display category. It’s an ironic turn of events which has led to the mobile side being where all the improvement is taking place for displays in general. On one side of the industry we have the PC display market, which is currently locked in a dramatic race to the bottom (1080p 27" displays, decline of the 16:10 aspect ratio, etc.), and on the other side we have mobile displays where OEMs are rushing to outdo each other every major product cycle. In fact, 2012 might go down as the year when mobile display resolution eclipses the desktop.

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Back on topic however is the Galaxy Nexus display - it’s a 4.65" diagonal, Super AMOLED HD 1280x720 affair. If you’ve followed Samsung’s AMOLED naming scheme, you can pretty much tell everything that there is to superficially know about the display just from the name. Super connotes an optical bonding (read: no air gaps or their pesky 4% Fresnel reflections) of the display and the entire stack above it, consisting of capacitive layer and top glass.

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HD connotes, well, 720p HD, and finally the absence of Plus connotes the presence of PenTile RGBG. On that last note, we made a prediction that PenTile would be very hard to see on the Galaxy Nexus based on some pixel pitch calculations, and this turns out to be the case.

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Decently close to the Galaxy Nexus display with a macro lens - hard to make out any subpixels

For me at least, the Galaxy Nexus display exceeds my visual acuity - I cannot pick out subpixels at all on the Galaxy Nexus. Quite literally, the RGBG subpixel stripe is now small enough that it is beyond visual acuity at standard viewing distance (1 foot).

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Extreme macro shot of the Galaxy Nexus' display for illustrative purposes showing PenTile RGBG

If 2011 was the year where OEMs countered the iPhone’s retina display with qHD panels, 2012 is the year where they finally start to exceed that 330 ppi number. It seems as though 1280x720 WXGA will be the new WVGA or qHD for 2012, and already there are a bunch of 720p devices arriving on the market - phones like the HTC Rezound, LG Nitro HD, Galaxy Note.
Last time we compared pixels and subpixels per inch in the diagonal on a few phones. Many people pointed out alternative ways to compute everything, but in the end the aim was to set expectations for how visible PenTile would be, and the conclusion was: not very. This time, I think it makes sense to compare the actual angular subtense of the subpixels so we can appreciate whether they’re visible or not, rather than deal with another back and forth about whether measuring along the diagonal is valid or not anymore. It's easy to be lazy and just do things entirely wrong, but the actual angular subtense of a subpixel should be the canonical measure we use to determine whether you can see pixels or not, since that's the annoyance after all. Visual acuity for the average human eye is 1 arcminute (something drilled into my head from endless optical engineering classes), and perfect human vision is just below that at around 0.7 arcminutes. I have 20/15 which puts me around 0.75 arcminutes, and I can't see subpixels on the Galaxy Nexus unless I really, really try.
It’s actually a challenging thing to codify whether or not you’ll be able to see PenTile, since color (wavelength) makes a huge difference. Further, visual acuity is itself a hard thing to qualify - for example, consider how much resolution is enough to identify versus detect something, and then how human vernier acuity (aligning something) is very good, and all of this is a function of the light's wavelength. For example, the on-off pattern when looking at solid green is just about the worst case possible - it’s a square wave (100% modulation) in the green right where the eye is most sensitive. In the past, it struck me that other members of the tech press were perhaps unconsciously taking photos of the green battery indicator to show the presence of PenTile or not since that's where subpixels are most visible. As an aside, most of the UI is now blue in 4.x (including battery indicator) which the eye does not have very good sensitivity to - just try focusing on something entirely blue - is this a coincidence or conscious decision to mask bad displays? For comparison, when displaying white obviously subpixels largely disappear into a sea of light. If you look at a green solid region now, you’d be hard pressed to make out the individual subpixels, and the table explains why:

Display Subpixel Angular Subtense lower is better, human eye ~1 arcmin) Phone X subpixel angular subtense at 12" Y pixel angular subtense at 12" HTC Rezound 0.280 0.839 iPhone 4/4S 0.290 0.869 LG Nitro HD 0.293 0.878 Motorola Droid 0.361 1.082 Motorola Atrix 2 0.373 1.118 Galaxy S II 0.440 1.320 Galaxy Nexus 0.454 0.907 Infuse 4G 0.461 1.382 Droid 3 0.520 1.040 Droid RAZR 0.559 1.118 Droid Incredible 0.568 1.136 Nexus One 0.568 1.136 Galaxy S / Nexus S 0.614 1.228

The interesting thing about the table is that it very much backs up my subjective impressions of just how visible subpixels were on previous phones. The Nexus S / Galaxy S had comparatively gigantic subpixels, and I can't stand looking at those displays to this day. Move up the line and you get increasingly better (I've sorted by x/horizontal angular subtense), with the HTC Rezound exceeding the iPhone 4S. Note that you have to consider the adjacent unlit subpixels as well to really arive at a conclusion for how visible things are going to be - on the PenTile RGBG displays, that means one adjacent unlit subpixel, and on RGB stripe, two unlit subpixels (assuming we're talking worst case 100% Green, 0% Blue, 0% Red).

While Samsung has been able thus far to increase its AMOLED pixel pitch considerably, it has come with one unintended effect. That effect is a bit of pixel inhomogeneity which results in a somewhat grainy look to the display under certain circumstances. While neither device we tested had it, others have reported lines or splotches. There’s a word for these inhomogeneities in display luminance, and it’s “mura.” The variance is no doubt very minor, but the eye is great at picking out these small changes, and it’s particular visible in certain contexts, like the grey loading screen on the Android Market. So far getting a good photo of this effect has eluded me, however, it looks like a light film grain. Stated another way, it's like a fixed pattern noise that exists at all times on the display, which seems particularly visible at some brightness levels. To be honest, it doesn’t annoy me any more than IPS display “grain” annoys me - you just get used to it after a while.

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Photographing the mura on the Galaxy Nexus' display has proven a challenge

These inhomogeneities also sometimes manifest themselves as visible strips of different luminance. I haven't seen any on either of the Galaxy Nexi we have, but if you do get hardware with annoying inhomogeneities, I recommend just swapping. Again, getting photographs of the grain has proven challenging.

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The display’s surface is curved, though the radius of curvature is nowhere near as curved as some of the early teaser photos would’ve had you believe. Total sag ends up being around 1.5 mm, giving a radius of curvature around 1.5 m - needless to say, it’s a very gentle curve. The other noteworthy thing about the Galaxy Nexus is Samsung’s choice of glass. Lots of people have noted that the Galaxy Nexus isn’t adorned with Corning’s popular Gorilla Glass, though it’s still a kind of fortified (and no doubt alkali-aluminosilicate) glass. It’s impossible to tell exactly what kind of glass is on the Galaxy Nexus without destructive testing on either Samsung’s or Google’s review unit. That said, if anyone breaks a display, send me the broken top glass and I’ll be able to do some compositional analysis. As an aside, compositional analysis of the top glass from different phones is something I’ve wanted to do for a while now, but requires sourcing broken glass.
We’ve also done all the usual measurements on the Galaxy Nexus - luminance and color temperature at different brightnesses selected in settings, and a run through HCFR using Francois’ excellent
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app.
First off are the display charts taken at a number of different brightness settings by dragging the slider around in settings. Traditionally AMOLED has struggled to keep a flat white point. Here the Galaxy Nexus isn't bad at all, hovering just below 6500K.
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The Galaxy Nexus manages to stay reasonably close to 6500K even as brightness changes across its full range. The brightness curve is also nice and linear, though it tops out at just over 200 nits at maximum brightness.

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The HCFR plot and
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tell an even more interesting story. The
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chart shows how AMOLED continues to have a gamut much larger than sRGB (which is the inner triangle). It’s awesome to have more spectrum, but bad when mapping sRGB to this color space without more management, and leads to AMOLED’s oversaturation stigma.
There are more interesting things inside, too.
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at 100% brightness and displaying different shades of Gray stays pretty close to 6500K as well.
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ends up almost all over the place, unfortunately.
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The nice thing about ICS on the Galaxy Nexus is also increased color depth in many places. Previously Android’s gallery many times appeared in RGB 565, leading to visible banding. This is now almost entirely gone as well.
Viewing angles on the Galaxy Nexus, like other AMOLED devices, is superb as well. There’s practically no shift in either horizontal or vertical angles. Outdoor viewing has gotten better on AMOLED with a bunch of improvements - better AR coatings, no more air gaps, and other coatings. Out in the brightest of sunlight it can still be hard to read, however.



Cellular

From a cellular perspective there really are two entirely different Galaxy Nexii, as noted before. The GSM/UMTS (maguro) version which is slightly thinner, and the CDMA/LTE (toro) version which is on sale on Verizon at present and no doubt also Sprint later on when their LTE network is fired up. To accommodate those different combinations of air interfaces, Samsung made two very different phones.
GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus

Galaxy Nexus (GSM/UMTS) - Network Support GSM/EDGE Support 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz WCDMA Support 850 / 900 / 1700 / 1900 / 2100 MHz HSPA Speeds HSDPA 21.1 (Cat.14) / HSUPA 5.76 (Cat.6) Baseband Hardware Intel/Infineon X-Gold 626 w/I5712 transciever and RFMD RF6260 PA

Cellular connectivity on the GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus is courtesy of an
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(XMM6260). This is the same baseband as what shipped in the GT-I9100 SGS2, which isn’t much of a surprise at all. That means HSPA+ with HSDPA 21.1 (64QAM) and HSUPA 5.76. From a cellular perspective, the Galaxy Nexus is actually virtually identical to the GT-I9100 SGS2, and includes the exact same Infineon Smarti UE2 RF transceiver marked 5712, and the RFMD RF6260 quad-band multi mode (GSM/EDGE and WCDMA) power amp which works between 1710 and 1980 MHz, and 824–915 MHz, supplanting the need for individual power amps for each band. Of course, the 2100 MHz band has its own power amp elsewhere. The GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus also takes a regular size Mini SIM (not microSIM). In addition, though XMM6260 supports it, the Galaxy Nexus doesn’t include Rx diversity, and instead just locates its single cellular antenna at the very bottom of the device in one module, and the WLAN antenna off to the side.

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Intel X-Gold 626 circled in black above - Image courtesy
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When the Nexus One (and later Nexus S) originally came out, I was puzzled by why Google hadn’t asked its OEM to include pentaband WCDMA support. Back in the Nexus One days, Google was making its big push to try and reshape the way smartphone shoppers buy phones in the US (and make things more like how the rest of the world does it). At the same time however, the hardware launched effectively only with the WCDMA band support for T-Mobile in the US. Third time is a charm, and the GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus is now both the first Nexus phone with pentaband WCDMA support, and, moreover, the only Android phone with pentaband WCDMA. The result is a new level of freedom - fully carrier-unlocked and hardware-unlocked hardware that is finally completely carrier agnostic (at least in GSM/UMTS land).
We tested the GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network and burned through the 2 GB of data on Google’s SIM before burning through another couple of GBs on our own T-Mobile SIM. All in all we ran over 200 tests and generated the histograms that normally grace our smartphone reviews.


T-Mobile HSPA+
Downstream Stats (Mbps) Avg: 3.522; Max: 8.689; Min: 0.029, StDev: 2.022
Upstream Stats (Mbps) Avg: 1.192; Max: 3.259; Min: 0.025, StDev: 0.814
Latency Stats (ms) Avg: 196.93; Max: 500; Min: 105, StDev: 57.122
Number of Tests Run: 244

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T-Mobile can be fast when it wants to, hitting 8 Mbps down at one point, and 3.2 Mbps up at another. Obviously the Galaxy Nexus is where it should be considering its HSPA+ category. I also tested the GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus on AT&T but didn’t run enough tests to generate the most meaningful histograms. I couldn’t get the Galaxy Nexus to go quite as fast as I’d expect it to on AT&T HSPA+ for some reason, even using the “phone” APN.


AT&T HSPA+
Downstream Stats (Mbps) Avg: 2.114; Max: 4.396; Min: 0.083, StDev: 0.979
Upstream Stats (Mbps) Avg: 1.201; Max: 1.681; Min: 0.043, StDev: 0.449
Latency Stats (ms) Avg: 280.479; Max: 951; Min: 107, StDev: 281.045
Number of Tests Run: 71

Oh, and needless to say, the Galaxy Nexus doesn’t suffer from any deathgrip or related signal propagation issues that I can identify.
CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus

When I caught wind of the fact that Verizon had also been selected as a launch carrier for the Galaxy Nexus, I speculated that Samsung would reuse the same cellular architecture it used in the Droid Charge. In that
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, I talked about how the device used a combination of Samsung CMC220 for LTE, and VIA Telecom’s CBP 7.1 platform for CDMA2000 1x/EVDO. It’s a rather unique combination that also shipped in the Samsung Stratosphere.

Galaxy Nexus (CDMA/LTE) - Network Support CDMA2000 1x/EVDO Support EVDO Rev.A (800 / 1900 MHz) CDMA Baseband Hardware VIA Telecom CBP7.1 with FCI FC7780 LTE-FDD Support UE Category 3 - 700 MHz Band 13 LTE Baseband Hardware Samsung CMC221 with FCI FC7851

It makes sense for Samsung to reuse what work it has invested in making both Android’s Radio Interface Layer (RIL) and hardware work together for the Galaxy Nexus, and this turned out to be a pretty good educated guess. It turned out mostly correct - the CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus is based on a combination of Samsung CMC221 and VIA Telecom
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.

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Samsung CMC221 and VIA Telecom CBP7.1 - Courtesy
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So what’s different between CMC220 and CMC221? No doubt, CMC221 simply is a revision of CMC220 which improves connection stability and handover performance, as one of my few complaints with CMC220 were the prevalence of paused connections in some environments.

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Beyond that, it’s hard to know exactly what’s changed, but suffice it to say CMC221 shares the properties with CMC220 that we care most about. It’s a UE Category 3 part - which is the current maximum for devices right now - it’s no doubt 3GPP Rel.8, and it supports 2x2 MIMO on the downlink. The CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus right now only operates on Verizon’s 10 MHz FDD LTE network, though Sprint is slated to get a CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus of their very own that will undoubtably be tailored to the 1900 MHz PCS block it deploys in. For now however, we’re just talking about the variant on Verizon 4G LTE.

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I ran a bunch of tests on the CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus on Verizon 4G LTE and 3G EVDO networks. I tested 4G LTE in my Tucson, AZ market and honestly found using a UE Category 3 device quite refreshing after a long wave of UE Category 2 Motorola Wrigley. There is absolutely a difference in the kind of speeds you can see between devices, and I definitely consider the LTE Galaxy Nexus’s performance above average. I saw a maximum of 58 Mbps on the LTE Galaxy Nexus, though I didn't grab a screenshot. I did of one at 56 Mbps down, however.

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Verizon Wireless 4G LTE
Downstream Stats (Mbps) Avg: 19.715; Max: 58.294; Min: 0.089, StDev: 11.744
Upstream Stats (Mbps) Avg: 7.437; Max: 19.711; Min: 0.242, StDev: 3.699
Latency Stats (ms) Avg: 87.312; Max: 188; Min: 63, StDev: 21.285
Number of Tests Run: 342

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Again, I consider the 4G LTE performance of the Galaxy Nexus quite good, and I saw speeds in my market that I haven’t been able to achieve with other devices. The 58 Mbps test is pretty good, although I know a
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have been able to hit over 71 Mbps on the Galaxy Nexus, and likewise consider its RF performance above average on LTE.
We also talked about the perceived
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with the Galaxy Nexus at some length. Without revisiting the whole thing, the issue is with the way Android 4.0.2 paints signal bars as a function of signal strength. The Galaxy Nexus as of 4.0.2 does this in a way that isn’t in line with the other Verizon 4G LTE devices, and coupled with the fact that getting to LTE signal strength (and not 1x or EVDO RSSI) is difficult, misled many into thinking there was an issue when there really wasn’t one. I’ve continued comparing LTE RSRP (Reference Signal Received Power) between the Galaxy Nexus and other phones that report it, and have yet to see a significant difference. In addition, other LTE devices reported RSSI instead of RSRP - again it’s good that people are using numerics instead of bars (which are not standardized), however caution must be taken to compare the same parameters properly.
Of course, that’s really not all there is to talk about - what about 1x and EVDO performance on the VIA CBP7.1? My initial investigation only looked at 4G LTE, and since then I’ve had countless people email or otherwise notify me that EVDO also needs a good looking at.
I believe I’ve nailed down why there’s a perception that something is wrong with the Galaxy Nexus’ EVDO connectivity. Interestingly enough, the reason is again a nuance in the way that the device reports signal, but on EVDO. In particular, I noticed something in common with the Droid Charge that is no doubt unique to CBP 7.1. Namely, the baseband reports signal level in a quantized fashion at a few different levels in dBm. Ordinarily I see signal level quantized to just integer values, however on the CBP 7.1 based devices I’ve seen (like the Droid Charge and CDMA Galaxy Nexus) that quantization takes it to a few different levels. That means the values below are the only ones shown when connected to EVDO. You could be in an area with -51 dBm EVDO RSRP, but the maximum you’ll ever see reported is -75. There’s some hysteresis as well and the device doesn’t switch between levels that often.

-75
-83
-93
-100
-113
-120 (0 signal)

I have a sneaking suspicion that these values originally were designed to correspond to some decent cutoffs for signal bars (eg a 5 bar system with -120 being 0 bars), though I’m not entirely certain. The result of this quantization again is that you can be misled into thinking signal is worse or better than it really is depending on conditions, and I wager that this is what leads many to report that things are different than shown on other devices. I also compared EVDO signal strength between the CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus and a Droid Bionic, and quantization issues notwithstanding I saw very similar measures.
The caveat is that no doubt CBP 7.1 + FC7780 has different performance than the MDM6600 that has been ubiquitous for CDMA connectivity, so the fact that phones might perform differently in the same location doesn’t surprise me. That said, I’ve yet to see anything dramatic at all.
Nevertheless, I ran a ton of tests on EVDO (eHRPD is EVDO anchored through the PDN-Gateway) to test performance.


Verizon Wireless 3G EVDO Rev.A
Downstream Stats (Mbps) Avg: 0.891; Max: 2.525; Min: 0.07, StDev: 0.560
Upstream Stats (Mbps) Avg: 0.851; Max: 1.534; Min: 0.149, StDev: 0.254
Latency Stats (ms) Avg: 145.036; Max: 800; Min: 103, StDev: 97.1341
Number of Tests Run: 139

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Honestly I can find nothing wrong with EVDO performance on the Galaxy Nexus. In fact, if you go back to the
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, you’ll see that the Galaxy Nexus numbers are slightly higher in the upstream department and pretty similar (though differently grouped) on downstream.
Call Quality

I don’t usually include call quality measures in this section, but it also bears talking about since we’re dealing with some reports of things varying from what they’ve seen before on the CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus. Call quality on the GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus on T-Mobile is pretty par for T-Mobile 3G voice (AMR).

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CDMA voice on the Galaxy Nexus does sound a bit different from other devices, however. Compare to the RAZR below which is again based on MDM6600 and its own vocoder.

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It isn’t a huge difference, but enough to account for why many people have reported that voice sounds different on the CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus. Again, there are bound to be subtle differences between implementations, and I wager Qualcomm’s CDMA market domination in the US accounts for why the difference is something so many have talked about. It’s interesting to me that none of these nuances attracted as much attention with the Droid Charge, but then again I doubt as many people made a switch at that point.
That said, I’ve been using the CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus for almost all my calls, and did encounter one circumstance where voice continually cut in and out inexplicably. I haven’t experienced that behavior since.
When it comes to ambient noise suppression, both the CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus and GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus have a second microphone for common mode noise rejection. The microphone is right near where the battery cover makes contact with the top, slightly offset to the right. It’s a small port but easy enough to pick out.

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I don’t know what solution is at play inside the Galaxy Nexus, but it honestly does a mediocre job suppressing noise, we’ve seen other phones definitely do better.

#6
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Uan_ar

    el Diablo sabe por Diablo, pero más sabe por viejo. A leer!

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Parte IV Y FINAL

WiFi

The Galaxy Nexus uses Broadcom’s
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, which is starting to pick up steam and become just as ubiquitous as the BCM4329 it replaced. The Galaxy Nexus’ BCM4330 includes both 2.4 and 5 GHz WLAN connectivity, just like the SGS2 in fact. What’s particularly notable is that Android 4.0.x now includes the proper prioritization for each WiFi band, and also includes the ability to set preference for one band for the other. By default, when faced with the same SSID on both 2.4 and 5 GHz, the Galaxy Nexus correctly chooses the 5 GHz AP if the signal is favorable, then falls over to 2.4 GHz when its link quality on that band would be better. Other than this notable change, the remainder of the WiFi settings panes are unchanged. The WiFi sleep preferences and the main scan and connect page does get a minor facelift and change, however.

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The Galaxy Nexus latched onto my 802.11n APs on both 2.4 and 5 GHz and used 20 MHz long guard interval rates at 65 Mbps the same as other BCM4330 based devices. Throughput is unsurprisingly very good on the Galaxy Nexus in our WiFi test, which consists of downloading a 100 MB PDF hosted locally over WiFi. Of course, since we can now control and choose which band the device uses, I tested on both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, both with a negotiated link rate of 65 Mbps.

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WiFi range on the Galaxy Nexus is good as well, I can make it to the same place before hopping off my network as other devices. I have gotten a few emails and read reports about power-save mode incompatibility with some APs that causes it to drop off when on standby mode. Since we've seen BCM4330 work just fine on other devices, I have no doubt this is a software issue which will be fixed soon.
Speakerphone

As usual I also measured speakerphone volume on both variants of the Galaxy Nexus using a sound datalogger. There is apparently a difference between the two models, possibly from different acoustical chambers in the vibration unit and antenna. Also there’s possibly still a difference as a result of the different voice coders in use, and the different dynamic range.

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Either way, the two test differently, and subjectively my experience backs those measurements up. I found the GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus a bit too quiet while using Google Navigation, and the CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus on the quieter side but totally useable for Navigation.
GPS

Just like the SGS2, the Galaxy Nexus uses a SiRFStarIV
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for GPS. Subjectively the Galaxy Nexus GPS doesn’t lock quite as fast as some of the other GNSS solutions that are integrated into the cellular basebands in phones, but it does get the job done pretty fast. I see a time to first fix of between 4-7 seconds depending on visible sky swath presented to the handset.

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I did receive a few emails from readers with reports of some Galaxy Nexuses shipping with GPS issues or taking too long to lock. One of my friends with a CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus also reported that he couldn’t get a GPS lock at all for Google Navigation. I’m not entirely sure what the deal is here since I never was able to encounter this behavior, although manually downloading the A-GPS data (ephemeris) using a tool like
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seems to in general helps mitigate those problems when they do happen. This just manually re-downloads the xtra.bin file from
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as configured in gps.conf. I have to admit that I didn’t encounter any GPS issues in my time with the Google Nexus (CDMA/LTE or GSM/UMTS version) so far.
Audio

We’re going to do a more in-depth audio analysis with the Galaxy Nexus when we have our testing suite more fleshed out, and possibly bring you Francois Simond’s thoughts once more. For now however, we have some
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I talked about a while ago in another review, and my own impressions with Galaxy Nexus sound after using the device for a while now as my primary music player with some Shure SE535s.

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First off, the Galaxy Nexus out of the box is pretty decent subjectively. The Galaxy Nexus uses TI’s
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low power audio codec for its DAC and other audio responsibilities, alongside the vibrator actuator. We’ve seen some other TI audio codecs (like
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in the HTC Sensation) but this our first time seeing TWL6040. Almost immediately I noticed that there isn’t any constant high frequency whine present like I’ve heard on so many phones lately (Bionic, SGS2, others), and it’s hard to hear any noise when the DAC turns on and off after music stops playing. Even plugged into USB power, the device also doesn’t pick up any more noise or change at all. There’s also almost no CPU noise, though if you listen very carefully you can indeed hear some state changes, but it’s very minimal and very difficult to pick out.
Though the frequency response isn’t entirely flat as shown, the Galaxy Nexus doesn’t sound bad subjectively. Our testing here is just a RMAA run from line out on the devices to line in on an ASUS Xonar Xense sound card. In addition, testing is done at 44100/16 bit on the devices - Android will downsample anything more than this.

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From 20 Hz to 20 kHz: +0.10, -0.62 (dB)

Noise on the Galaxy Nexus also isn’t bad, definitely better than the RAZR we tested earlier.

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Noise Level: -96.2 (dB, A weight)

Dynamic range shows the difference in level between the maximum output and minimum output on the smartphone. This is limited by voltage swing and system noise. Galaxy Nexus again here looks pretty good, minus a few spikes.

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Dynamic range: 96.0 (dB, A weight)

The two total harmonic distortion charts are next, which are the summation of integer multiples of the test frequency and expressed as a ratio of the input signal (in this case at 1 kHz). THD+Noise gives all frequencies except the input signal. The Galaxy Nexus is pretty good here, but still has some spikes at a few noteworthy integer multiples, plus some odd spikes at high frequencies.

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THD %: 0.0088

Intermodulation distortion is similar to total harmonic distortion, however it applies two input signals and then measures the signal at all frequencies except the two inputs. In this case, the two signals are on opposite sides of the spectrum. Galaxy Nexus ends up not looking too bad here although there are disconcerting spikes above 1 kHz that I can’t explain.

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IMD + Noise %: 0.013

Finally stereo crosstalk is pretty flat on the Galaxy Nexus.

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Stereo Crosstalk: -87.4 dB

Again, this isn’t meant to be a totally comprehensive analysis of the Galaxy Nexus’ sound characteristics, just some educated impressions. Subjectively the Galaxy Nexus sounds nice and clean, and is absent of the annoyingly audible background noise and whine that’s present on some of the other noteworthy phones we’ve tried as of late. Francois (supercurio) has expressed a few times that the Galaxy Nexus has good audio potential, and that alone should tell you something.


BATTERY LIFE

Battery life remains the other big axis on which smartphones are judged, and here we've turned to our regular 2011 suite of battery life tests to see how the Galaxy Nexus shakes out. Our battery life testing consists of a page loading suite which loads through a few dozen pages endlessly on both WiFi and cellular data until the phone dies, with the display set at 200 nits. For the cellular tests, we're always careful to test in cellular environments with decent signal (at least -75 dBm or higher) as well, since that's a factor. Next is a simple call test where we play music at both ends of a call until the device under test dies, and our final test is a WiFi hotspot workload which consists of four page loading tabs and a 128 kbps streaming MP3 station that runs until the phone dies.
First up are the web browsing tests over cellular 3G; this means EVDO Rev.A for the CDMA/LTE version, and WCDMA T-Mobile for the GSM/UMTS device.

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The Galaxy Nexii both do surprisingly well. I'm actually very impressed with how long the devices lasted subjectively on 3G and this definitely backs that up. Of course, both devices include beefy batteries, but Samsung has done a nice job thus far including big batteries without making devices bulky or heavy.

Next up is the same test, but on 4G LTE for the CDMA/LTE variant.

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The Galaxy Nexus doesn't post numbers very far in front, but manages to come in the top of the pack on 4G LTE at just under 4 hours. This is a pretty impressive result, honestly, considering that CMC221 is likely made on the same 45nm manufacturing process as CMC220. Again, I'm impressed with the Galaxy Nexus' longevity even on 4G LTE.

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Surprisingly, the Galaxy Nexus can't break past that 6 hour mark even on WiFi, however, which does lead me to think we might be constrained by driving that display.

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If you ever wanted to see how much difference having a different cellular architecture makes, see above. The GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus lasts impressively long on a voice call, at over 11 hours, yet its CDMA/LTE brother lasts just over half that.

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WiFi hotspot on 3G tells the same story - I'm not sure what Via Telecom's CBP7.1 draws in its active state for EVDO or 1x voice, but it seems to eat up more power than the XMM 6260 (X-Gold 626) in the GSM/UMTS Galaxy Nexus.

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As a 4G LTE WiFi hotspot, the Galaxy Nexus loses its edge over the Revolution, but does come in just ahead of the rest of the 4G LTE herd.

The story of battery life on the Galaxy Nexus unsurprisingly depends on which variant you're talking about. For a phone with a 4.65" display, I'd say I'm impressed with the battery life on both devices - remember that the area that needs to get lit up goes as r^2 - increasing that and not killing the battery is a big feat. In addition, I'd wager that using the OpenGL ES renderpath (and accelerated browser in 4.0) definitely helped both Galaxy Nexus devices post impressive scores. As for the two variants, the GSM/UMTS device has impressively long battery life pretty much across the board. Playing with that phone, I was rarely wanting for more on my regular use schedule (I charge at night on my nightstand). We've seen XMM6260 before in numerous devices where it seems to be a pretty good citizen.

The CDMA/LTE variant, on the other hand, depends strongly on what air interface you end up using most - on 4G LTE the device comes in at the front of the pack usually, and its 3G web browsing test is above average. However, if you make a lot of voice calls, the phone might not cut it. Unsurprisingly the CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus does nothing to dramatically change 4G LTE battery life - for that we're still waiting for upcoming 28nm LTE basebands.


CONCLUSIONS AND FINAL THOUGHTS


For Google, one of the major points of Nexus has always been to provide a stable piece of reference hardware for it to cater a major OS release to. Each device has married a major revision of the Android platform to the latest stable hardware. That isn't to say that the hardware choices are always bleeding edge, but rather modern and logical next steps for the platform. I often read that Android as a platform is plagued by rapid hardware releases and product cycles that leave endless variants of the same hardware for each carrier, and that preloads and skins fragment the experience. While there's some truth to this, it isn't necessarily Google's fault - the software is open source after all. In the case of Android 4.0, this release is about consolidating the tablet and smartphone form factors under one version of Android and negating some talk of the platform's fragmentation.
For Google, each Nexus launch is analogous to Apple's iPhone launch - it's the one time that Google gets to dictate exactly what hardware is coming out, and exactly what software makes it onto that hardware. It is no less significant for Google's platform, either. Thus far there's been one Nexus device released per year, and that hardware gets updates from Google directly - at least until the hardware precludes support.

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While the Verizon CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus is a bit unique, there's no indication thus far about how long carrier approval will take. The Galaxy Nexus line itself is very interesting - on one side, we have the GSM/UMTS device with pentaband WCDMA support that finally fully detaches the hardware from needing carrier specific versions for each region or carrier on GSM/UMTS networks. This is a dramatic step toward reducing carrier power, turning the networks into dumb pipes, and changing the way US customers shop for devices - exactly what the point was when Google launched the Nexus One. On the other, we have the Verizon CDMA/LTE version which thus far marks the furthest carrier incursion into otherwise untouched Nexus-land.

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At this point, the Galaxy Nexus is awesome because of its marriage of Android 4.0 and a number of unique hardware features. I'd go so far to say that the Galaxy Nexus is without question the current best Android device, and with the improvements made in Android 4.0, first party applications and browser are now nearly as smooth as their counterparts in iOS. If OS smoothness was the thing holding you back from Android, 4.0 does a lot to change that. The Galaxy Nexus display is excellent, pentaband WCDMA on the GSM/UMTS model is exclusive only to that device, battery life isn't half bad, instant capture works well, and it has Samsung's newest LTE modem. The downsides are pretty much obvious - the camera is far from awesome, the GSM/UMTS variant has a quiet speakerphone, Samsung is using OMAP4460 at 80% of its maximum clocks, and some Galaxy Nexus displays have more more inhomogeneities than others. There's also the matter of newer 32 and 28nm SoCs that are just over the horizon.

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The Galaxy Nexus is so important again because it's the only time Google gets to dictate everything - the hardware, the software, and update timing. There's also the element of freedom, with unlockable hardware out of the box. I find myself wishing that Google had begun its adventure sticking it to the carriers with pentaband WCDMA support like this phone finally has, as that would've been much more successful than the practice of releasing a few different Nexus variants with different bands.
As far as Ice Cream Sandwich is concerned, it really is Android perfected. Everything is smoother, faster and nearly all of our issues with the OS have been addressed. ICS brings Android into 2012 and gives Google a great platform to begin to introduce new features going forward. Android is now very close to UI performance parity with iOS, which eliminates a major tradeoff you had to make in the past. If you were hoping for ICS to be iOS with a Google logo on it, you'll be sorely disappointed. However if you're a fan of Android and just wished it were smoother and more polished, Ice Cream Sandwich is what you've been waiting for.