Verizon's Galaxy Nexus To Launch Tomorrow

zacharye writes "Verizon Wireless on Wednesday finally announced the upcoming launch of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The world's first Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone with 4G LTE support will become available beginning tomorrow for $299.99 with a new two-year service agreement. "

Comments

Re:$299 with a contract? Really?

[AuMatar]

Buy a no-contract cell phone or a used one on ebay, and just don't sign up for any carrier. The reason no one sells it is the market for such a device is tiny and shrinking.

Re:Tether detector can see your DNS requests

[Anonymous Coward]

VPN. At least if you have an IPSEC vpn instead of openvpn, phones support it directly.

Pros and Cons

[Daetrin]

The pros and cons, at least as far as i've heard.

Pros:
It's got ICS, ahead of everything else.
It's a Nexus device, which means it won't have any carrier skins or pre-installed crap (including CarrierIQ) and it will be updated in a timely manner with each new release of Android that it's capable of running.
It's got a high end chip with a dual core, putting it in a small class of mobile phones.
It's got a very large screen.

Cons:
It's got a very large screen. I'm not sure if the phone will actually fit in my pocket.
It's got ICS, which is great overall but i'm unsure about the lack of a global Menu button.
It's made out of plastic rather than a nice metal case like my Nexus One has. Some people have reported it feels kind of flimsy because of that.
It has no expandable memory, you're stuck with the 16/32 GB you start with.
It doesn't have Google Wallet (in the US.) I'm not sure if i want to use Google Wallet to pay for my groceries or whatever, but i'm not sure that i _won't_ want to do that in the future either.

Unknowns:
It is (so far) exclusive to Verizon in the US. I'm currently on T-Mobile and don't want to switch... unless the T-Mobile/AT&T deal goes through that is...
I'm not sure if it's possible to get an unlocked version, unless you're willing to import it from Europe. Which might let me use it on T-Mobile depending on the frequencies but certainly doesn't help with the price.
It only has a 5 MP camera. I don't actually care about the MP per se (it's already greater than the resolution of an HD screen after all) but they don't really give you any other specs to go by so i don't know how else to judge it.

Of course the biggest pro in my personal book is that my Nexus One is getting a little long in the tooth (in particular it has no space left for new apps) and i'm not sure how long i'm willing to wait for the next Nexus device. It's either that or get another high end phone that i can root and install Cyanogen on.