Galaxy Nexus
I've owned every Google developer phone from the first Google G1 to the Nexus One to last year's Nexus S. On the day the Nexus Prime went on sale, I bought one, and this is what I think about it.
I've been exclusively using Android developer reference hardware for a while, and it's great. It's contract-free so you can pay a cheaper price month to month. (GiffGaff will give you a SIM with unlimited text, internet, and 250 minutes on a monthly £10 contract. The savings pays for your phone in 18 months - less if you sell it for £250 on eBay when you upgrade to a new one.) The SIM slot is unlocked so you can swap networks or SIMs if you travel or switch providers. This winter I used SIMs and data in Hong Kong, Vietnam, and mainland China with zero hassle. Just buy a chip from a street vendor and go. Most importantly, Nexus hardware runs the latest release of the stock Android distribution. No extra bulky crapware from third party vendors, no spyware added by the carriers, always up to date. When the hardware finally gets too old to run the latest release, the Cyanogen guys will still keep the hardware running something good.
There were huge changes between the G1 and N1, but not much changed between the N1 and NS. The screen was a bit larger and nicer, there was no scroll wheel, but that's about it. There are a lot of differences between the NS and the new NP, much of which goes against the muscle memory habits I've developed, which makes it hard to determine whether the changes are "better" or just "different".
Hardware
The Prime is just 9.3% taller and 7.8% wider than the Nexus S, but for some reason it feels enormous. It's also 17% thinner, and feels fragile. It feels like a graham cracker - so thin and light that you could snap it in half if you sat on it. "Thin and light" is nice, but I'd love a Nexus that weighs twice as much with a battery that lasts for 72 hours. It's got a beautiful screen with a wider (or taller) 1280x720 316 ppi. MP4/avc HD video looks very impressive, and if you install MX Player it'll play damn near anything. There's a 5 band chipset that speaks 21 Mbps HSDPA on the 850/900/1700/1900/2100 Mhz spectrums. This is a very big deal if, for example, you'd like full 3G+ speed from a 1900/2100 Vodafone chip in Europe and an 1800/1900 AT&T chip in America. (The Galaxy SII is similar in many ways but its HSPA is only quad band, it's got a lower-res 480x800 217ppi screen, a slightly smaller battery, and it doesn't run ICS yet because it's not Google developer reference hardware.)
I've always envied iPhone owners for their phones' fast charge times. The USB specs say that one USB 2.0 socket delivers 100ma by default, but can negotiate up to 500mA. This means an iPhone's 1400 mAh battery ought to charge in 2.8 and 14 hours. But it only takes 2 hours because the iPhone does a special handshake to pull more power from the charging station. The ETA0U70XBE charger that came with the Nexus Prime also charges the 1750 mAh battery in just under 2 hours, while my PC's USB port charges half as fast. The Prime seems to negotiate 500mA current from the PC's USB plug, but pulls 1000mA from the wall charger. Keep this in mind if you've only got 15 minutes to top up your phone before you leave the house.
Battery life is a funny thing to judge. Especially in the first few days when you're playing with your New Shiny Thing all the time, and you don't know all the settings that drain your battery. New iPhone 4S owners complained about battery life partly for this reason - my friends who updated to iOS 5 say that they got their old battery life back once they disabled some things like location services, notifications, and icloud stuff. The Nexus also gets crappy battery life out of the box, and also becomes quite acceptable once you turn off all the sync and update services. I've heard that iOS gets better battery life because it makes better use of the iPhone's GPU. With Android 4.0 including iOS-like GPU rendering, and iOS including Android-like processes that drain battery, it seems like both phones are converging on the battery capacity, feature set, and power burn rate that customers are comfortable with.
The Prime that I purchased on opening day had a major problem - it didn't seem to have an antenna. Signal strength was great if I was outside my office on the balcony looking at the BT Tower, but I got 0 bars just inside my office. I took it back to the store, showed the problem to the folks at Phones4U, and got a replacement with vertical yellow lines on the screen. I took that back and the third one has behaved, more or less. It had the erratic volume bug which was fixed by an OTA patch.
Software
The Prime obviously ships with Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich". Here's what's different.
The Nexus One eliminated the keyboard. Nexus S eliminated the trackball. The Nexus Prime eliminates all modal buttons. "Home", "menu", "call", and "back" are gone. The bottom part of the taller screen now presents virtual buttons that often but do not always depict the same thing. The soft-button bar often displays buttons that make sense. But nonmodal buttons are good for partial attention devices like phones. New buttons are sometimes in very different places - you now access device Settings by pulling down the top menu "windowshade" and tapping the icon in the middle. If you've developed years of well-practiced muscle memory, the new layout can be very annoying.
Early ICS reports said that it would no longer have a user-accessible filesystem. It still does, but it uses MTP to transfer files instead of letting you mount the filesystem directly. That's almost certainly a good thing, since this eliminates the risk of a corrupt filesystem if you unplug without unmounting. I also see this as a major advantage over iOS. In the last month I've had several people hand me their iDevice so that I can give them copies of movies or photos, which won't work since their device isn't paired with my iTunes. If you don't want someone to read your filesystem, Android has let you encrypt your phone since 3.0.
iOS has always seemed "snappier" than Android in part because iOS is derived from OSX, including Quartz Compositor. iPhones use their tiny GPUs to display buttons and panels and windows, which makes animated transitions smooth and frees up the CPU to do something other than rendering. Android 4.0 has finally caught up; ICS is very "snappy" partly because it's offloading more rendering to the GPU, and partly because the GPU is dual-core now. If you're interested in details Andrew Munn's post about iOS/Android differences is fairly misinformed, but corrections by Bob Lee and Dianne Hackborn will give you more information than you require.
Android now seems just as responsive as any iPhone I've used. It runs 3D games quite well too - I've bought a bunch of £0.10 games for the 10 billion download special and all of them look as impressive and run smoothly, just as good as anything I've seen on the iPhone. Copy/paste is easier to use with pop-up "what do you want to do with your selection" buttons.
The biggest flaw - not just in the UI design but in the entire device - is the new "menu" button. Previous Nexii had a nonmodal 'menu' button physically present either on the phone, or physically printed onto the bottom edge of the touchscreen. The new "menu" button is an icon of three vertical dots that's sometimes at the top, sometimes at the bottom, sometimes light-on-dark, sometimes dark-on-light, sometimes colored, and sometimes just not there. It seems a serious UI design failure to take such an important button and let its appearance and location change.
Conclusion:
I'm very glad I got this new phone. It's pricey, but it's not a big expense given how often I use a smart phone these days and how often I intend to use it. I'm also very glad to be avoiding contract shenanians and buying unlocked hardware from independent sellers rather than locked hardware from carriers. I pay the cheapest rates at home, use local SIMs from any airport in the world.
For more info, ArsTechnica is always good.
I've been exclusively using Android developer reference hardware for a while, and it's great. It's contract-free so you can pay a cheaper price month to month. (GiffGaff will give you a SIM with unlimited text, internet, and 250 minutes on a monthly £10 contract. The savings pays for your phone in 18 months - less if you sell it for £250 on eBay when you upgrade to a new one.) The SIM slot is unlocked so you can swap networks or SIMs if you travel or switch providers. This winter I used SIMs and data in Hong Kong, Vietnam, and mainland China with zero hassle. Just buy a chip from a street vendor and go. Most importantly, Nexus hardware runs the latest release of the stock Android distribution. No extra bulky crapware from third party vendors, no spyware added by the carriers, always up to date. When the hardware finally gets too old to run the latest release, the Cyanogen guys will still keep the hardware running something good.
There were huge changes between the G1 and N1, but not much changed between the N1 and NS. The screen was a bit larger and nicer, there was no scroll wheel, but that's about it. There are a lot of differences between the NS and the new NP, much of which goes against the muscle memory habits I've developed, which makes it hard to determine whether the changes are "better" or just "different".
Hardware
The Prime is just 9.3% taller and 7.8% wider than the Nexus S, but for some reason it feels enormous. It's also 17% thinner, and feels fragile. It feels like a graham cracker - so thin and light that you could snap it in half if you sat on it. "Thin and light" is nice, but I'd love a Nexus that weighs twice as much with a battery that lasts for 72 hours. It's got a beautiful screen with a wider (or taller) 1280x720 316 ppi. MP4/avc HD video looks very impressive, and if you install MX Player it'll play damn near anything. There's a 5 band chipset that speaks 21 Mbps HSDPA on the 850/900/1700/1900/2100 Mhz spectrums. This is a very big deal if, for example, you'd like full 3G+ speed from a 1900/2100 Vodafone chip in Europe and an 1800/1900 AT&T chip in America. (The Galaxy SII is similar in many ways but its HSPA is only quad band, it's got a lower-res 480x800 217ppi screen, a slightly smaller battery, and it doesn't run ICS yet because it's not Google developer reference hardware.)
I've always envied iPhone owners for their phones' fast charge times. The USB specs say that one USB 2.0 socket delivers 100ma by default, but can negotiate up to 500mA. This means an iPhone's 1400 mAh battery ought to charge in 2.8 and 14 hours. But it only takes 2 hours because the iPhone does a special handshake to pull more power from the charging station. The ETA0U70XBE charger that came with the Nexus Prime also charges the 1750 mAh battery in just under 2 hours, while my PC's USB port charges half as fast. The Prime seems to negotiate 500mA current from the PC's USB plug, but pulls 1000mA from the wall charger. Keep this in mind if you've only got 15 minutes to top up your phone before you leave the house.
Battery life is a funny thing to judge. Especially in the first few days when you're playing with your New Shiny Thing all the time, and you don't know all the settings that drain your battery. New iPhone 4S owners complained about battery life partly for this reason - my friends who updated to iOS 5 say that they got their old battery life back once they disabled some things like location services, notifications, and icloud stuff. The Nexus also gets crappy battery life out of the box, and also becomes quite acceptable once you turn off all the sync and update services. I've heard that iOS gets better battery life because it makes better use of the iPhone's GPU. With Android 4.0 including iOS-like GPU rendering, and iOS including Android-like processes that drain battery, it seems like both phones are converging on the battery capacity, feature set, and power burn rate that customers are comfortable with.
The Prime that I purchased on opening day had a major problem - it didn't seem to have an antenna. Signal strength was great if I was outside my office on the balcony looking at the BT Tower, but I got 0 bars just inside my office. I took it back to the store, showed the problem to the folks at Phones4U, and got a replacement with vertical yellow lines on the screen. I took that back and the third one has behaved, more or less. It had the erratic volume bug which was fixed by an OTA patch.
Software
The Prime obviously ships with Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich". Here's what's different.
The Nexus One eliminated the keyboard. Nexus S eliminated the trackball. The Nexus Prime eliminates all modal buttons. "Home", "menu", "call", and "back" are gone. The bottom part of the taller screen now presents virtual buttons that often but do not always depict the same thing. The soft-button bar often displays buttons that make sense. But nonmodal buttons are good for partial attention devices like phones. New buttons are sometimes in very different places - you now access device Settings by pulling down the top menu "windowshade" and tapping the icon in the middle. If you've developed years of well-practiced muscle memory, the new layout can be very annoying.
Early ICS reports said that it would no longer have a user-accessible filesystem. It still does, but it uses MTP to transfer files instead of letting you mount the filesystem directly. That's almost certainly a good thing, since this eliminates the risk of a corrupt filesystem if you unplug without unmounting. I also see this as a major advantage over iOS. In the last month I've had several people hand me their iDevice so that I can give them copies of movies or photos, which won't work since their device isn't paired with my iTunes. If you don't want someone to read your filesystem, Android has let you encrypt your phone since 3.0.
iOS has always seemed "snappier" than Android in part because iOS is derived from OSX, including Quartz Compositor. iPhones use their tiny GPUs to display buttons and panels and windows, which makes animated transitions smooth and frees up the CPU to do something other than rendering. Android 4.0 has finally caught up; ICS is very "snappy" partly because it's offloading more rendering to the GPU, and partly because the GPU is dual-core now. If you're interested in details Andrew Munn's post about iOS/Android differences is fairly misinformed, but corrections by Bob Lee and Dianne Hackborn will give you more information than you require.
Android now seems just as responsive as any iPhone I've used. It runs 3D games quite well too - I've bought a bunch of £0.10 games for the 10 billion download special and all of them look as impressive and run smoothly, just as good as anything I've seen on the iPhone. Copy/paste is easier to use with pop-up "what do you want to do with your selection" buttons.
The biggest flaw - not just in the UI design but in the entire device - is the new "menu" button. Previous Nexii had a nonmodal 'menu' button physically present either on the phone, or physically printed onto the bottom edge of the touchscreen. The new "menu" button is an icon of three vertical dots that's sometimes at the top, sometimes at the bottom, sometimes light-on-dark, sometimes dark-on-light, sometimes colored, and sometimes just not there. It seems a serious UI design failure to take such an important button and let its appearance and location change.
Conclusion:
I'm very glad I got this new phone. It's pricey, but it's not a big expense given how often I use a smart phone these days and how often I intend to use it. I'm also very glad to be avoiding contract shenanians and buying unlocked hardware from independent sellers rather than locked hardware from carriers. I pay the cheapest rates at home, use local SIMs from any airport in the world.
For more info, ArsTechnica is always good.