First, there was the Nexus One, manufactured by HTC, which set the bar for Android powered phones. Then, the Nexus S, which barely moved the bar at all, and everyone ignored in terms of innovation (which is to say the only new features in the Nexus S were all but neglected by other manufacturers, nobody implimented them); now, there's the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. They're not even HIDING the fact that samsung made this version, and it is raising the bar again.

Allow me to elaborate. The Google Nexus One, was all but unknown to be manufactured by HTC, you actually have to look it up to find the information. of course, the phone was only so popular, considering you could pretty much only buy it, unlocked, from google (a smart move, if I do say so myself). At the time at which the Nexus One hit the market, Android was primarily running Donut (v.1.6) on phones like the HTC Hero. a 500Mhz BEAST with a WHOPPING 256MB of RAM... The Nexus One raised the bar and said no more to these pathetic clock speeds and measly amounts of RAM... THIS is what Android should run on! A 1Ghz Snapdragon processor with 512MB of RAM! Twice as powerful as almost everything else on the market at the time, the flagship Google phone paved the way (and the specifications) for a multitude of variants, including the Samsung Galaxy S, HTC Desire, and Motorola's Droid 2. There were also new sensors introduced and a whole pile of great stuff that really defined a new standard, that almost all manufacturers followed from thre on out, until recently.

The Galaxy S brought nothing new to the tabe. Well, that's unnecessarily harsh, it had NFC. The Galaxy S is the first major Android phone to include NFC. Despite this, the majority of the Galaxy S's hardware was nearly identical to the Samsung Galaxy S, from where it borrowed a portion of its name; with the obvious technical exception of NFC, which the Galaxy S was missing. They were both manufactured by Samsung, so the phones are practically identical. What's hilarious to me is that the Nexus One defined the standard by which the Galaxy S was based on, and the Nexus S was based on that. So you end up with a phone that's identical in almost every way.

To be fair, probably the biggest consumer-oriented change with the Nexus S was the move to internal NAND style memory, as opposed to the SDHC, External style found in the Nexus One. This memory is faster and more efficient than using an external SDHC card, with the obvious downside of not being able to be upgraded, and if something goes horribly wrong, anything saved on your phone, while that data may still be intact, is impossible to retrieve without special hardware.

The Galaxy Nexus has the same level of innovation that it is bringing to the market, as the Nexus One did. The Galaxy Nexus stands as a new standard for Android; it's a dual-core, 1.2Ghz System with 1GB of RAM. The phone also has all the usual sensors, aGPS, Gyro, Compass, light sensors, capactive multitouch, etc. and the same communication functions as the previous Nexus: NFC, Bluetooth, Wifi and Cellular. Though, it's notable that the Galaxy Nexus has an upgraded Wireless chip, capable of 802.11a/b/g/n - this indicates a dual-band chip (both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, also a feature yet unseen in cellphone technologies). This has already spurred a whole line of new phones from every major manufacturer; from HTC: Sensation, Evo 3D, Amaze, etc. from Samsung: Galaxy S II and S II X. from Motorola: Atrix, Droid Razr, Droid 3, etc.

To put it briefly, I am not, and have never been a huge fan of the Nexus S. It was more popular than the Nexus One based on two merits: it was more widely available, many carriers actually sell the Nexus S in-store on contacts, making it faster and easier to get ahold of one than ever; the Nexus One, 9 times out of 10, you had to buy at full cost, no contract, from Google directly. Secondly, the Nexus S came out much later into Android's development, as a much more mature ( and much more popular ) platform, it was easy for the Nexus S to become as popular as it has become; despite not bringing much new to the table.

Another post about Android

I was reading an Android Spin Article about Why Android will win the mobile wars and I got the thinking of so many things as to why or why not this could be true.

They have an excellent point in regard to devices. While there's only one iPhone (only one current model), there's around 15-20 Android devices on the market at any given time. Though iPhone is more user-oriented rather than developer-oriented, and Android vice-versa, I believe, in the end, it will be Android's developer-oriented approach that will cause developers to CREATE a more user-friendly approach.

Though there are a lot of Android devices around sporting similar technical specs (3.7-4 inch screen, 1Ghz chip, 512 or so of RAM, MicroSD expansion, Android 2.1), aka the Nexus One oriented model, there are phones out there with varying features, more than just the size of the screen, the look of the buttons, and the resolution of the camera. Some have hardware keyboards, like the Motorola Milestone (my device) or the backflip.

As we slowly prepare for the next-gen of android operating systems and associated hardware (rumors of a dual-core 1.5Ghz snapdragon chip in the mix), we're quickly approaching cellphones that are more powerful than some people's home computers. Of course the two are not directly comparible, since desktops use the CISC x86 instruction set and cellphones use a RISC, ARM archetecture (mostly).

These so-called "cellphone wars" are heating up, and the iPhone, while a powerful device, since it is only ONE device against so many, is looking at a very tough battle to stay relevant, as time goes on. Blackberry has their niche business market, and Windows Mobile... well, I'm pretty sure that most Winmo users have been looking for something *not apple* and *not blackberry* to move to for a while, and that may account for some of this Android love. I know that's what pushed me to it.