Nexus S and Android 2.3 Review: Gingerbread for the Holidays
by Brian Klug on December 14, 2010 4:08 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Nexus S
- Gingerbread
- Android 2.3
- Mobile
Contour Display
I’ve already touched on a lot of what there is to be said about the Nexus S display. It’s an unbroken piece of gently curved glass, and underneath is the same 4” Super AMOLED display we saw on the Galaxy S line of phones. Pentile is still here, love it or hate it - best I can tell it literally is the same thing as in Galaxy S devices. Brightness is a little better on the Nexus S, but you still get perfect blacks that look awesome on the new black-heavy Gingerbread UI.
The Nexus S display is indeed excellent. We’ve got full viewing angles galleries and uniformity shots. Notably, there were no color or luminance uniformity issues we could pick out on our Nexus S - it appears flawless. Again the banding in our RGB gradient image is due to the gallery application color depth, which remains unchanged sadly.
The Nexus S also gets an oleophobic coating, something the iPhone 3GS got a lot of press with. I found that after a few months and wipings, the 3GS lost its amazing ability to repel oils. So far the Nexus S has withstood copious amounts of finger and face grease, coming clean with a quick brush on the shirt or lens cloth.
The curved surface is more of an aesthetic extra than an ergonomic feature, but it still is impressive that this is possible. The nice thing about having the front face in compression (from the concave shape) is that scratches probably don’t affect the glass’ structural integrity nearly as much as they would in tension. Glass is just stronger in compression rather than tension - the reason is primarily because cracks don’t propagate as well on surfaces in compression as they do in tension. Viewing angles on the Nexus S are very good, again the curvature is small enough that it doesn’t adversely impact vertical viewing angles.
Capacitive touch was always a major problem for me on the Nexus One. Anand noted it in his Nexus One review, and I experienced it firsthand with mine. I exchanged it and got one some months later with much better response and far fewer false touches, but compared to other flagship devices something always just felt wrong. Luckily the Nexus S has no such issues - touch is flawless, multitouch is excellent as well.
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metafor - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
That's a bit misleading. There are a few versions of the "lagfix" around and not all of them simply change the filesystem. A bunch actually turn on memory caching, which essentially uses DRAM to cache disk IO.This is what causes the gigantic jump in Quadrant scores you see. In reality, while the fileIO portion of quadrant does artificially lower the Galaxy S's end-score, it's nowhere near by the amount many who apply the patch sees.
daveloft - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
I'm running 2.2 which boosted my score from 800 - 1100.I also use a lagfix to change my file system to EXT4 which boosted my score from 1100 - 1600.
It's by no means misleading. I know there's lots of other lagfixes and optimizations and custom kernels. It doesn't take away from my point that Quadrant is heavily influenced by file system and as a result of running a different file system on my Galaxy S I a significantly boost in my score.
daveloft - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
The people touting their 2000 plus scores on their Galaxy S are the ones likely doing what you said. But again that comes back to my point that modifying your phone for better IO performance will make your Quadrant score significantly better and any device with really fast storage will benefit from a high Quadrant score. This will lead people to say that the Snapdagron chip is better.metafor - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
A lot of people make a lot of claims without isolating the chip. I remember the "A4 vs Snapdragon" and all the wild conjecture that went into that.As for the original comment, I think at least the 45nm Snapdragons are comparable, almost indistinguishable from the current gen Hummingbirds. With the exception of perhaps the FP/SIMD performance -- which no programs today use anyway.
One thing I would like to see is someone try to test these chips for power usage in isolation. A Hall-style current monitor and an integrating voltage monitor should be sufficient to know just how much power these chips use. Of course that means taking the device apart and still have it operating.
zorxd - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 - link
Works just fine here with android 2.2. WPA2+PEAP+MSchapv2Brian Klug - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 - link
So I think the story with the Nexus One was that it was working in 2.2, but disappeared in 2.2.1. I know that for some months now I've been unable to authenticate with that same network with the Nexus One.Some of the other devices have better WPA supplicants too I guess.
-Brian
Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 - link
If you phone is laying on a book, the camera lens is about 3 mm away from the page and the viewing angle is about 3 of those letters. Not to mention there is no light getting under there. So how can the screen be showing all those characters?Brian Klug - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 - link
Oh so when I took that photo, I was worried someone would be misled, apologies, didn't mean to confuse. I just took a photo a few inches from the page, then set it as the wallpaper, then snapped the picture.What's being shown isn't camera input. ;)
-Brian
sabrewulf - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 - link
"Things like scrollback and sending cursor commands in connectbot (arguably Android’s best SSH application) simply require having some directional controls - there’s no virtual keyboard with arrow keys. "Using the Swype keyboard, if you swype from the swype button to the sym button and release, you are given a virtual keyboard with arrow keys, pgup/dn, home/end, and a few other functions.
Brian Klug - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 - link
Oh wow, I totally missed that in Swype. Awesome tip!-Brian