Difference Between Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Motorola Droid 4

Google emerged as a simple search engine back in 1999, and today, it isn’t just a search engine anymore. They have roots leading to many areas of technology, and Mobile is one of the most anticipated markets of all. Google Android OS is the only sustainable opponent for Apple iOS and thus, is constantly praised for its features. In a time like this comes the Galaxy Nexus, featuring the newest Android v4.0 IcreCreamSandwich. While quite a lot of new handsets promise an upgrade to v4.0, Galaxy Nexus would go to records as the first phone with IceCreamSandwich. Verizon is to launch the much anticipated handset by the 8th of December. While Samsung is working on that perspective, another rival of the same Android environment is said to release a successor for one of their much reputed handsets, Droid 3, reported to be called as Droid 4. Motorola hasn’t officially listed the dates as such, but the signs seem to be imminent, so it is good to compare these two handsets.

Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Google’s own product, Nexus has always been the first to come up with the new versions of Android and who could blame for they are state of the art mobiles. The Galaxy Nexus is the successor for Nexus S and comes with a variety of improvement worthwhile talking about. It comes in Black and has an expensive and gorgeous design to fit right in your palm. It is true that Galaxy Nexus is on the upper quartile on size, but amazingly, it doesn’t feel hefty in your hands. In fact, it only weighs 135g and has dimensions of 135.5 x 67.9mm and comes as a slim phone with 8.9mm of thickness. It accommodates a 4.65 inches HD Super AMOLED Capacitive touchscreen with 16M colors. The state of the art screen is going beyond the conventional size boundaries of 4.5 inches. It has true HD resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels with an ultra-high pixel density of 316ppi. For this, we can daresay, the image quality and the crispness of the text would be as good as iPhone 4S retina display.

Nexus is made to be a survivor till it has a successor, which means, it comes with state of the art specifications that won’t feel neither intimidated nor outdated for an extended duration of time. Samsung has included a 1.2GHz dual core Cortex A9 processor on top of TI OMAP 4460 chipset bundled with the PowerVR SGX540 GPU. The system is been backed up by a RAM of 1GB and non-extendable storage of 16 or 32 GB. The software doesn’t fail to meet the expectations, as well. Featuring the world’s first IceCreamSandwich smartphone, it comes with a lot of new features that hasn’t been seen around the block. As for starters, it comes with a new optimized font for HD displays, an improved keyboard, more interactive notifications, resizable widgets, and a refined browser that is intended to give a desktop-class experience to the user. It also promises the best gmail experience to date and a clean, new look in the calendar, and all these sums up to an enticing and intuitive OS. As if this isn’t enough, Android v4.0 IceCreamSandwich for Galaxy Nexus comes with a facial recognition front end to unlock the phone called FaceUnlock and an improved version of Google + with hangouts.

Galaxy Nexus also has a 5MP camera with autofocus, LED flash, touch focus and face detection and Geo-tagging with the support of A-GPS. It can also capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second. The 1.3MP front camera bundled with built-in Bluetooth v3.0 with A2DP enhances the usability of video calling functionality. Samsung has also introduced a single motion sweep panorama and the ability to add live effects to the camera, which looks really enjoyable. It comes to be connected at all times with the inclusion of high-speed LTE 700 connectivity, which can gracefully degrade to HSDPA 21Mbps when LTE is not available. It also has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n that enables you to connect to any wi-fi hotspot, as well as, set up a wi-fi hotspot of your own easily. The DLNA connectivity means that you can wirelessly stream 1080p media content to your HD TV. It also features Near Field Communication support, active noise cancellation, accelerometer sensor, proximity sensor and a 3-axis Gyro meter sensor that can be used to many emerging Augmented Reality applications. It is commendable to emphasize that Samsung has given a 17-hours 40 mins talk-time for Galaxy Nexus with a 1750mAh battery, which is beyond incredible.

Motorola Droid 4

Droid 4 is essentially Droid Razr with a QWERTY keyboard and somewhat smaller screen size. Let us look into the specifications available as of yet and speculate the phone. It is said to have a 4 inches LED Capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 960 x 540 pixels. We can expect a pixel density around 256ppi though it may differ. It has a thickness of 12.7mm which is acceptable with the QWERTY keypad. It is somewhat into the hefty side of the spectrum though with a weight of 179g.

Droid 4 is said to have a 1.2GHz Dual core processor, presumably the same Cortex-A9 in Droid Razr. It will have a PowerVR SGX540 GPU on top of TI OMAP 4430 chipset. The RAM is expected to be 1GB, and it would have internal storage of 16GB that can be expanded using a microSD card. The operating System would be Android v2.3.5 Gingerbread, and generically we assume that Motorola would promise for an upgrade to IceCreamSandwich when it comes. Verizon Wireless indicated that Droid 4 would utilize their LTE infrastructure to deliver astonishing connection speeds, and it may be released for CDMA networks, as well. Droid 4 would come with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with the ability to stay connected as well as create connections using the hotspot availability. The built in DLNA means that you can stream content from your phone to your TV wirelessly.

Motorola has given Droid 4 an 8MP camera with autofocus and LED flash, Geo-tagging with assisted GPS and the capability to capture 1080p HD videos with image stabilization. It would also feature a front facing HD camera bundled with Bluetooth v4.0 with LE and EDR to the delight of the video callers. Besides the usual suspects, Droid 4 is said to come with a mini HDMI port and Splash resistivity. We were able to gather that Droid 4 won’t have a removable battery, but that is vague and we won’t bet that’d be the case. However, it would come with a 1785mAh battery that promises a talk time of 12.5 hours which does justice to the handset.

Conclusion

Both of these handsets come to the same stage to appear in the same costumes of elegance in terms of performance. The differentiating factor would be Google’s active involvement in Galaxy Nexus. Been the brainchild of Google, it is bound to get the latest updates first, and comes with IceCreamSandwich out of the box while Droid 4 still needs time to come up with the upgrade to IceCreamSandwich. Galaxy Nexus has also paralleled with the retina display featured in iPhone with its ultra-high resolution and pixel density. In any case, Galaxy Nexus is also prone to feature a higher price tag than Droid 4, even though we can’t promise that. So it all comes down to one thing, if you want to have Google’s own child in your palms, Galaxy Nexus is your phone. The Motorola Droid 4 would be ideal for those business personnel who enjoys the sense of a key been pressed in the QWERTY keyboard, and finds it a definitive feature on a smartphone.