About two weeks ago I picked up a GSM variant of the Galaxy Nexus smartphone.  I decided that after almost two years with my Nexus One, it was time for an upgrade.

I've been running the Nexus One with CyanogenMod since mid-2010.  As such, I've gotten used to the built-in BusyBox, enhanced power widget, status bar tweaks, OpenVPN functionality, and general hacker-friendly operation.  I was hesitant to grab the Galaxy Nexus, which ships with Android 4.0 (codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich) until CyanogenMod 9, but I ended up ordering it anyway.  Hopefully CM 9 will be out soon, but I'm not going to ask when!

If you're unfamiliar with the Nexus product line, it's a collection of Android devices (currently just phones) that run vanilla versions of Android.  No carrier modifications or garbage are present, just plain Android.  Unfortunately, a number of other Samsung devices sport names similar to the Galaxy Nexus, but should not be confused with it.  Here's a list of Nexus devices, that are pure vanilla Android:

• Nexus One (released in January, 2010)
• Nexus S (released in December, 2010)
• Galaxy Nexus (released in November, 2011)

Here's a list of the non-Nexus devices that may be confused:

• Galaxy Note
• Galaxy S
• Galaxy S II

Observations

The Galaxy Nexus is a large phone with a 4.6" (diagonal) screen at 720x1280 pixels.  The screen itself is very sharp and clear, although sometimes with a white background some bands are visible.  I can't tell if this is a manufacturing defect or not.

Unlike the Nexus One, the Galaxy Nexus has the sleep button on the side and lacks a ball.  The only way to physically wake the phone is to hit this button, unlike on the Nexus One where it can be configured to wake on both sleep button and ball depress.  I'm slightly worried that the singular sleep button might wear out over time, but perhaps I'm being overly paranoid.

Android 4.0 seems like a nice upgrade from the 2.3.x series.  I've never used an Android tablet with 3.x so I'm not sure how many 4.0 features first appeared in that version.  The user interface is GPU-accelerated and provides smooth transitions through menus, although after a few minutes I disabled all the animations in the hopes of maximizing battery life.  The 4.0.1 version I'm running uses Linux 3.0.1:

root@android:/sdcard # uname -a
Linux localhost 3.0.1-ga052f63 #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Nov 21 16:05:10 PST 2011 armv7l GNU/Linux

The voice recognition is vastly improved over previous Android versions, although I don't use it all that often.  In Android 2.3.x, the voice recognition would require the user to speak a few words and those would be sent to Google and returned in text form at once.  In 4.0, instead of buffering the whole phrase, apparently the audio samples are streamed live to Google, which results in recognized words appearing on the screen almost as they're said.  In other words, there appears to be no limit to the amount of words that can be recognized at once.  Very cool, if you don't mind the extra data being chewed up by such things.

The GN has soft buttons instead of hardware buttons like on the Nexus One.  These are nice because I can finally buy a pair of those touchscreen-friendly gloves and have them work!  The Nexus One's hard buttons wouldn't ever work with those gloves, for some reason.

The photo gallery now automatically synchronizes Picasa albums, which struck me as a little odd when I first opened it.  It's obvious that Google is trying to integrate Google+ more tightly with all aspects of Android.  My contacts initially included all of my Google+ contacts, too, until I disabled that (I typically have no desire to call or e-mail the majority of my Google+ contacts).

The GSM variant of the Galaxy Nexus supports all GSM and UMTS frequencies used throughout the globe.  This means that it can be used with any GSM carrier without the risk of things like HSPA+ not working.  This makes the phone compatible with both AT&T and T-Mobile work out of the box.

The dual-core OMAP processor is interesting.  Interesting as in only one core is active most of the time, with the second core only being used under high load or other situations.  Perhaps this is the norm for dual-core CPUs in mobile devices, as it's an obvious way of extending battery life.  Here's /proc/cpuinfo under normal situations:

root@android:/sdcard # cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor       : ARMv7 Processor rev 10 (v7l)
processor       : 0
BogoMIPS        : 597.12

processor       : 1
BogoMIPS        : 597.12

Features        : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3 
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x2
CPU part        : 0xc09
CPU revision    : 10

Hardware        : Tuna
Revision        : 0009
Serial          : 01298fc30100203f

Under high load the bogoMIPS increases to 2047.  I've seen both cores listed in /proc/cpuinfo in the past, but when writing this I was unable to trigger activation of both cores.  Anyway, we can see this from the kernel log:

root@android:/sdcard # dmesg|grep CPU|tail                                                                                                                    
<6>[111361.896057] Enabling non-boot CPUs ...
<4>[111361.912170] CPU1: Booted secondary processor
<6>[111361.913208] CPU1 is up
<6>[111361.917938] Switched to NOHz mode on CPU #1
<4>[111362.918182] Disabling non-boot CPUs ...
<5>[111362.918823] CPU1: shutdown
<6>[111363.056030] Enabling non-boot CPUs ...
<4>[111363.072174] CPU1: Booted secondary processor
<6>[111363.073211] CPU1 is up
<6>[111363.078124] Switched to NOHz mode on CPU #1

Speaking about CPUs, the developer options offer a nifty CPU utilization overlay graph to see what applications are hogging it:

Since it can be seen here, I'll point out that Zynga's craptacular development of Words With Friends still causes it to chew up 100% of a single core when running.  I suspect this is due to polling things that should be event or interrupt-driven instead.  The game is so addicting, though!

Annoyances

Unfortunately, there are a few things about the Galaxy Nexus that are annoying.

Let's start with the hardware: the phone is just too large.  Or, maybe my hands are just too small!  While holding the phone, I have trouble reaching my thumb up to the top left portion of the screen.  At first this was just an annoyance, however after using the phone for 15-20 minutes my arm started hurting from the strain.  The large size combined with its thin and somewhat slippery frame makes it easy to drop.  I've had a few close calls already while using the phone outside with one hand.

The sleep button should be on the top of the phone, not on the side.  I don't use a case or belt clip for the phone and usually put it in my pants pocket.  Unfortunately I find myself accidentally hitting the sleep button when putting it into my pocket, which results in a few incorrectly dialed emergency numbers or screen unlock attempts.

The GN wouldn't connect to my 5 GHz SSID at home.  I've got my Cisco 1142 WAP configured for 802.11a and 802.11n, but the GN wouldn't see it at all, whether the SSID was broadcast or not!  More research is needed, but this was a let down.

The screenshot feature that's built into Android 4.0 is a little weird.  Why didn't they just add it to the power menu (hold sleep) like CyanogenMod 7.x did?  It's annoying to have to hold volume down and sleep.

A huge annoyance with Android 4.0 was that it automatically signed me into Google Talk without notifying me (I never use Google Talk).  I only figured this out because I saw myself online from my other XMPP account.  It was easy to disable, but this should not by on by default.

The SMS emoticon icons are really ugly:

In general, things crash frequently.  I don't think I have bad hardware (RAM, etc.) because I've heard similar reports from other GN (LTE variants) users.  Applications crash and the phone has hard locked twice.  It's annoying that there's no watchdog that automatically reboots or some way to trigger a hard reboot via the sleep button.  So, in the case of a hard lock, removing the back case and battery is required.  Also, the back case seems flimsy and cheap.  I feel like I'm going to break it half the time.

The AT&T Debacle

I've had AT&T as my wireless carrier since sometime in 2007.  I've moved the same SIM card between over half a dozen different phones without any issue and mostly kept the same plan.  Since the Galaxy Nexus supports all five UMTS frequencies, I figured I wouldn't have a problem using HSPA+ on AT&T and getting some extra speed over my Nexus One.  Unfortunately, this didn't work out.

After using the phone for the first week, I didn't notice any increased speeds.  The Ookla mobile speed test application returned plain old congested HSPA speeds (1.7 Mbps downstream, and < 1 Mbps upstream), although latency seemed to be improved (39 ms RTT).  I was puzzled since the network type indicated HSPA+:

root@android:/sdcard # getprop gsm.network.type
HSPA:11

After searching around I came upon this article that basically convinced me to leave AT&T.  Essentially, AT&T won't grant customers access to the enhanced backhaul that traditionally accompanies the HSPA+ connection unless they're equipped with a 4G data plan (no price difference).  Unfortunately, the only way to get a 4G data plan is to have an AT&T-supported device (ie, device sold by them).  Obviously, an unlocked GSM Galaxy Nexus wasn't one of these devices and lying about this to customer service wasn't going to do any good because the IMEI won't be accepted.

Some folks claim they've gotten the AT&T employees to temporarily associate an IMEI from one of the in-store phones with their account to activate the 4G data plan, then switch it right back.  I didn't go down this road not because I didn't think I couldn't finagle myself a 4G plan but because I don't agree with such a policy in the first place.  I decided to switch to T-Mobile, and it was the best decision I've made in awhile.

The very next day I strolled into the local T-Mobile store and picked up a SIM card with the $60/month unlimited everything plan.  After 2 GiB T-Mobile will cap me to EDGE speeds, but that's fine.  I ported my number from AT&T and haven't looked back.  The HSPA+ speed is blazing at night and not too bad during the day.  The best I've gotten so far is 8 Mbps downstream and 1.7 Mbps upstream.  Coverage at my condo is excellent and at work it's decent, too.  Overall, it's slightly worse than AT&T but that hasn't bothered me, yet.  What's a little strange is T-Mobile's internal IPv4 addressing scheme: they use pieces of 22/8 and 25/8 for mobile clients!  I guess they don't have much public space to speak of and RFC 1918 can only go so far.

I also signed up for the T-Mobile IPv6 trial, which seems to work great.  I think it'll work with any phone that sports an IPv6-enabled pppd, which aren't many, so far.  The IPv6 trial is a separate APN that provides a single IPv6 address and DNS server (fd00:976a::9; it's whitelisted by Google over IPv6).  IPv4 connectivity is provided by a NAT64 gateway alongside DNS64.  The NAT64 prefix appears to be fd00:976a:c004:8fb1::/96 and the last 32 bits of this prefix directly map to an IPv4 address.  Yes, these fd00 addresses are ULA, which makes sense so T-Mobile doesn't have to worry about their NAT64 gateway becoming accidentally public.  I consistently get addresses out of the 2607:fb90:400::/40 prefix, and SSH seems to be allowed inbound!  This makes copying files from my phone much easier when not on Wi-Fi.  I have a feeling it won't last, though.  Also, it's easy to switch back to the IPv4 APN with three taps, in case things go wrong.  Two things that do not work on the IPv6 APN are MMS and applications that utilize ICMP.

Conclusions

The Galaxy Nexus is a great, albeit buggy, phone.. if you've got big hands and have T-Mobile.  Otherwise, get the LTE version from Verizon Wireless and stay in the country.  Android 4.0 has promise, if they can fix the bugs.  Overall, I think everything software-related will be better when CyanogenMod 9.x is released!

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