Samsung Galaxy Nexus & Ice Cream Sandwich Review
by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on January 18, 2012 1:34 PM ESTThe 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:
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.
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.
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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
185 Comments
View All Comments
zorxd - Friday, January 20, 2012 - link
They can have some differences (cache size, memory bandwidth, neon instructions) but the A9 is not an ISA. ARMv7 is.Given that it has the same configuration, an Apple A5 behave the same as a TI OMAP4 or a Samsung Exynos of the same clock speed. I beleive nVidia tegra2 lacks the neon instructions so can be slower in some cases. There is an article on Anandtech about this.
Given that the iPhone 4S is only 800 MHz it is the slowest A9 CPU by far.
pSupaNova - Friday, January 20, 2012 - link
The GPU's on the IPhone uses Tiling so in most GPU rendering tasks it will be a lot faster, However spit lots of Triangles at it and then see how fast it really it is.StormyParis - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
It's not all about performance, at least if you don't do FPS games. The screen on the Nexus is much bigger than on the 4S for example. For me, it's not about performance at all. I went for the GN for its even bigger screen, and that criteria alone was 95% of my decision, the remain 5% being "... and the rest don't suck", and "has xda-dev support'.humancyborg - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
Once you start accelerating the entire interface, performance becomes much more significant than just FPS games. There's a reason Apple uses such a gigantic and powerful GPU in their devices, and it's definitely not only for FPS gamers.Agree with you on the rest, there are other good reasons to buy this phone, just a shame that they skimped here. I have the 4S, GN and Lumia 800 currently and constantly switch around between them.
metafor - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
It doesn't really take a whole lot of resources to render a 2D interface. Just about any ol' GPU with OpenGL ES 2.0 support will do it.About the only thing where the GPU is the limiting factor is rendering 3D games. And even then, most if not the vast majority of games on the market will continue to be written for this level of hardware for at least the coming year.
Honestly, people take benchmarks way too seriously.
doobydoo - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
Actually, you're absolutely wrong.In fact, the GPU slowness is cited in this very article for causing slowdowns in situations where no 3D gaming is being done.
Remember, the operating system as a whole is hardware accelerated, so every thing you do - animations, transitions, task switching, etc are carried out by the GPU. With the higher screen, the speed of the GPU becomes even more relevant.
The combination of a high resolution screen and a low powered GPU is a bad combination and materially affects the performance of everything you do on the phone.
zorxd - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
Do you remember the iPhone 4? Who complained that the GPU was slow? It was much slower than the SGX540 in the Galaxy S.metafor - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
Speculation in an article isn't exactly proof of concept.Alpha blending, panning, compositing are very light tasks for a GPU pipeline; it's only a problem when a GPU is TMU-limited. And if it's TMU-limited, it would be obvious all the time.
I don't think you quite grasp exactly what parts of UI rendering are handled -- or could be -- by the GPU and just how trivial it is compared to rendering a 3D game.
trob6969 - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 - link
What i don't understand is why would samsung give the gn 1gig of ddr2 ram then give it an inferior GPU? But to be fair, Apple is no better. Why give iphone 4s a powerful GPU then give it only 512 mb of ram?! My old-ass og moto droid from over 2yrs. ago had that much!doobydoo - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
As alluded to by numerous posters, including one in this comments section, iOS handles memory usage more efficiently than Android so it doesn't suffer any performance penalty as a result of having less RAM.