0Samsung Galaxy Nexus Prime v Apple Iphone 4S

With the recent release of the Sam­sung Galaxy Nex­us Prime and the Apple Iphone 4S, I thought I’d do a quick com­par­is­on of the 2 devices. I’ve also included data and specs for 2 oth­er high-end recent smart­phones, the HTC Sen­sa­tion XE and the Motorola Atrix 2.

Final Score: Galaxy Nex­us 33 — 4 Iphone 4S. 9 draws.

Some of the con­tests were really too close to mat­ter in which case I’ve scored a draw (e.g. pixel dens­ity). The spec com­par­is­ons are largely mean­ing­less of course as it’s the respons­ive­ness of the phone that mat­ters, not the clock speed of its CPU.  How­ever it’s not easy to quanti­fy “respons­ive­ness”, and any con­clu­sion is bound to be called biased by fan­boi, so I’ve included the specs. The Galaxy won stand­ard SIM card sup­port because the Iphone only sup­ports mini sim cards, and altho a nor­mal sim card can be cut to fit most users will shy away from doing this (and it pre­vents you put­ting the SIM back into a nor­mal phone).  The HDR pho­tos was a draw because although the Iphone includes it, apps for android can do the job for a neg­li­gible impact on the over­all cost com­par­is­on. Voice sup­port was a draw for 3 reas­ons: 1 — although I con­cede Siri is a bit slick­er than cur­rent Android offer­ings, voice sup­port isn’t actu­ally very widely used, 2 — android will very soon have a super­i­or equi­val­ent to Siri which ties all the exist­ing google voice func­tions togeth­er with google’s huge wealth of mined data, and 3 — voice sup­port before Siri was always super­i­or on android but no-one ever bothered to give any cred­it for it then and I don’t believe fea­tures should only be giv­en cred­it after Apple have included them. Obvi­ously some things are more import­ant than oth­ers, but over­all, it isn’t dif­fi­cult to con­clude that the Galaxy is tech­nic­ally super­i­or, is likely to receive bet­ter sup­port, has longer bat­tery life, has a much lower SAR, and is a bit cheap­er. Unless your house is already full of Apple-only hard­ware the Galaxy Nex­us is going to “talk” to more of your exist­ing hard­ware without fuss too (e.g. Video Calls to Win­dows PCs, Cheap­er Video out­put to your HD TV, join­ing Wireless‑A net­works, Send­ing files from your old phone via Bluetooth, or stream­ing media via DLNA).  The Iphone takes bet­ter qual­ity pho­tos, is a bet­ter (if more costly) plat­form for gam­ing, and will sat­is­fy those people who people who need to have “the” most fash­ion­able item — for everything else the Galaxy Nex­us is the com­pre­hens­ive winner.

Updated 17-Dec-2011.

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