Yesterday Google announced a new developer phone, the Nexus S. Over all it’s not nearly as awesome as the first Nexus was (in comparison to other phones on the market at the time vs. other phones on the market now). Really the phone is just a rebranded Samsung Galaxy S running a stock version of Android which in of itself is a great feature (Samsung’s TouchWiz interface is all sorts of crap in my opinion).
The only real changes from the already released Galaxy S that I’ve noticed is the inclusion of a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip (which nobody else has so the feature is limited to Nexus S phones at the moment), a gyroscope, and the removal of the microSD card slot.
The first two features are kind of neat but the last one left a sour taste in my mouth. Almost every Android phone has a microSDHC slot on board which allows you to expand the amount of storage space up to 32GB (the maximum the microSDHC standard allows). The Nexus S has a fixed amount of memory on board which weighs in at only 16GB. If this was simply and included microSD card that wouldn’t be a big deal as you could simply upgrade it but the memory is fixed. I have no idea why this route was chosen when the Galaxy S currently has a microSDHC slot on board.
The phone does have a Super AMOLED screen which I’ve heard is absolutely gorgeous. Along with that the basic specs are still pretty bloody good. Over all it looks like a decent, albeit lackluster, successor to the original Nexus developer phone. It’ll be interesting to see how Android 2.3 handles when this phone is released later this month.