 Hey, this is Joshua Topolsky with The Verge, and we're looking at the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. This is the next flagship Google device designed by Samsung in conjunction with Google. The device itself is really thin. It's about as thin as the iPhone 4s or iPhone 4, which is kind of amazing, but it has a gigantic 4.65 inch 720p display, which sounds big, but because of the thinness, it just seems smaller than it actually is. Inside the device has some pretty hefty specs as well. It's got a TI OMAP dual core CPU clocked at 1.2 gigahertz, has a gig of RAM, and in the US, it will come with LTE on Verizon's network with 32 gigs of storage, and in Europe and other countries, you'll be able to get a 16 gig version with Pentaban HSPA+. The device has a 5 megapixel camera on the back, which can do 1080p video at 30 frames per second, and it has a 1.3 megapixel shooter on the front. The device has an NFC chip on board as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, the usual assortment of light sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, etc., as well as a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and a micro USB port. But the big story here isn't really about the hardware. It's about the software. It's the first device running Ice Cream Sandwich, aka Android 4.0, which is the latest, newest version of Android. It is a continuation of what the company was doing with Honeycomb for tablets, but they've brought a bunch of that stuff to phones, and they've brought the OS to parity for both devices. The operating system is wildly different than any other version of Android that we've seen on phones. It is completely revamped in pretty much every way. There are new apps as well as big changes to existing apps. There's pretty much not anywhere on the phone that hasn't been affected in some way by the changes to the software. Animation seems smoother. Touch response feels faster and more precise. It just is generally a better looking and better performing OS. There aren't any physical buttons on the Galaxy Nexus, unlike every other Android phone that's ever been made, and the software takes advantage of that. You now get on-screen buttons for home, back, and your multitasking menu. All of the core apps in Ice Cream Sandwich have been altered in a pretty major way, and there are a few new apps as well. One of the new ones is the People app, which is basically your address book, but now it plugs into social networking services. So not only do you get a nice looking grid of your contacts, but you can also flip that grid over to see if they've been updating their Google Plus account and presumably Twitter or Facebook if they decide to plug into this. Gmail has been completely altered. It looks a lot more like Gmail on Honeycomb tablets. It works way, way better than previous versions of Gmail. A lot more of the controls are exposed so you can quickly get to the buttons and options that you need without having to hunt around in weird menus. And it's faster. It's smoother. You can flip to new messages by swiping left or right, which is actually a motif that you see all through the OS. Calendar has been altered fairly significantly. You can now pinch to zoom to see more or less of your calendar appointments, which is great if you've got a lot of appointments. Clearly I have cleared my schedule. Google Talk has also been updated. Just like in other apps, you can swipe left or right to see different conversations you're having, which is really convenient. Google's even cleaned up the settings menu, and they've added a few things here like data limiting options where you can set warnings for yourself or set caps for yourself if you're worried about going over your data limits. You're also able to see the data that individual apps are using as well as limit the amount of background data that those apps can use, which is pretty handy if you think something is eating up a lot of your data in the background. The browser has been significantly improved. In fact, it's one of the fastest mobile browsers I've ever used. It loaded up our page, which is fairly heavy, pretty quickly, and scrolling, zooming in was smooth. On other sites, it performed as good, if not better, than any other mobile device I've used, including the iPhone 4S. It's just a really great web browser. Google's also altered how you use tabs. Now you get this nice little tab menu with these squares you can swipe away when you want to get rid of one of the tabs that you're working on. All in all, it's an outstanding mobile browser. The keyboard is massively, massively improved in Ice Cream Sandwich. Not only is prediction better, but it just seems smarter in every way. It gives you better choices when you're typing. You can tap on words for quick replacements. Some of the stuff that I have always wanted it to do, which the iPhone does really well, like know that you typed two words without a space and it asks if you want to separate them. So that's really handy. Google has also brought over the multitasking menu from Honeycomb, but with a little tweak, you can now swipe away applications that you're not using. It's kind of reminiscent of cards and webOS, but I'm sure that the head of user experience at Android, Matthias Duarte, had nothing to do with that, even though he basically created webOS. One of the more significant changes in Ice Cream Sandwich is happening with the camera. The camera software is a million times better than older versions of Android. It's super responsive. You can tap to focus. It does face detection. Getting to your settings is fast and easy, but even better than that, you get a bunch of new stuff like panorama mode where you're able to be guided through shooting a panoramic shot and when you're doing video, you get some really interesting real-time effects that aren't exactly super useful, but they're pretty cool to play around with. You can see here that you're able to turn on some of these goofy effects like big eyes or small mouth or squished head, and they work pretty well. They actually do fairly decent head tracking. They don't have any true utility, but they're fun to play around with, and it shows the power of the device and the software. Additionally, when taking still photos, you now get a bunch of editing options. You can add different filters, which are very Instagram-ish, and you can also do more detailed editing like cropping, red-eye reduction, rotation, and a bunch of other options that are fairly advanced for a mobile phone. One thing about the Galaxy Nexus that's been a little bit of a controversial subject is face unlock. It's a new feature that uses your face to unlock the device. It can be unlocked with a photograph, apparently. We've seen reports on that recently. Google says it's not really a big security feature. I don't think it is either. It's certainly not essential. It's cool to show off to friends, but I wouldn't recommend using it if you're actually concerned about the security of your phone, though it does work most of the time. One cool thing that really is 100% non-essential is that Google has stuck an Easter egg in the operating system. You can see here if you tap repeatedly on the version of the software, you get, I guess what's basically an Android Nyan Cat, and if you hold it down, it does this animation, which is great. Totally useless, but also totally great. In all, the Galaxy Nexus is an awesome phone. The changes that Google's made to Android are really substantial. This is not a small bump. It's not a slight tweak. It is a total revamp of the operating system, and most of the changes, 95% of them are for the better. The device itself is big, but not too big in my opinion. The screen is pretty amazing. A 720p display, even on a screen this large, looks really good to my eyes. I think it's probably the only screen out there right now that can compete with Apple's retina display on the iPhone 4S. It's definitely one of the best smartphones ever made. I would say it could be the best smartphone ever made if the build quality were a little bit higher, maybe if it weren't made out of plastic, but that's a pretty minor knock against it. It's definitely serious competition for something like the iPhone 4S, and surprisingly for me, it's one of the few devices I've ever reviewed that actually lives up to my expectations. If you're thinking about getting an Android phone, especially if you're on Verizon or going to be on Verizon in the US, or you're able to get it on another carrier outside of the US, in my opinion, there's no other choice.