Google Nexus One vs Google Nexus Prime (Rumours) ~ GoAndroid

We see how the rumours of the Google Nexus Prime compare to its predecessor, the Google Nexus One

We take a look at the new Google Nexus Prime to see how it stacks up against the first Google-branded handet, the Nexus One.

Form and Display:
The Google Nexus One is a smart looking piece of kit. It’s very clean and minimalist with flattering proportions and nicely shaped bodywork.
The screen takes up a decent amount of space and extends quite far to the edge of the device, we always feel this improves the look of phones and tablets.
Touch sensitive buttons and an unobtrusive track-ball control compliment the overall smooth appearance and ‘premium’ feel.
An initial glance at the Google Nexus Prime and you could be forgiven for thinking not much has changed, the overall design appears much the same.
The devil is in the details though, for a start we’re expecting the phone to be a bit larger in its proportions to accommodate a bigger screen, which has been indicated as at least 4-inches, possibly larger, against the Nexus One’s 3.7-inches.
The Nexus One used an Amoled capacitive touchscreen at 480x800 pixels and a pixel density of 252 pixels-per-inch (ppi).
It sports multi-touch input, an accelerometer sensor and a track-ball. The new Nexus Prime upgrades this with a new Super Amoled HD screen and a 720p resolution.
We expect the pixel density to be ramped up too and the phone will feature multi-touch and an accelerometer.
Most notably this will be a button-less device with the screen takes up the whole handset and relying on gesture control for interface navigation.

Processor and Memory:
The Nexus One was well catered for on power and storage, a single core 1 GHz Qualcomm Scorpion processor on the QSD8250 Snapdragon chipset provides plenty of brawn, but it’s also backed up by an Adreno 200 graphics processing unit (GPU), 512MB of RAM and the same again in ROM.
Potent stuff to be sure.
However, the Nexus Prime aims to thrash it soundly with a dual core TI OMAP4460 clocked at 1.5GHz and 1GB of RAM.
No details on the GPU specifics as yet but we expect it to pack considerable punch into an already impressive setup.

Operating System:
Google’s HTC made Nexus One runs on Android 2.4 Gingerbread, while the Nexus Prime will be the first phone to use the brand new version 4.0, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).
First and foremost Google has said with Ice Cream Sandwich it is aiming to put an end to fragmentation across devices, and will from now on be updating directly to handsets rather than via providers or manufacturers.
It should be noted that this could mean the Nexus One will soon be running Ice Cream Sandwich too. With 2.4 Gingerbread there were a number of key changes.
Overall performance was a step up and in addition multi-tasking performance was tweaked to be even better than before, which is saying something as it was pretty good to start with.
On top of this a new app management suite was included, so not only does multi-tasking on Gingerbread work more efficiently but you also have a greater degree of control over what goes on and when with your apps.
The interface was generally polished and demonstrated the usual smooth and intuitive nature of Android systems.
In relation to this the touch keyboard was changed from a gloopy mess to something actually workable, and not far removed from Apple’s iOS touch keyboard experience in terms of responsiveness and fluidity.
Browsing is the only area where we have a problem with Gingerbread, it’s clunkier performance-wise than we would like and functionally it’s missing things like tabbed browsing.
Ice Cream Sandwich improves on Gingerbread by bringing all the enhancements Google lavished on Android tablets with the 3.0 Honeycomb build. Amongst those changes is a much happier browsing experience which is faster, has better Javascript support and features tabs.
OpenGL graphics acceleration and a custom Renderscript 3D graphics engine was added to Honeycomb so there’s a chance this too will be making its way onto ICS.
Multi-tasking was further improved on Honeycomb with the combined applications and notifications bar, which lets you quickly see messages from apps and allows you to switch between active apps rapidly.
Pop-up notificatons and alerts were improved to contain images and more detailed text info. A dual-screen contacts list with fast scrolling was also new in Honeycomb.
As well as combining features from the last two updates there are some known enhancements unique to this build.
Android will now support USB peripherals which should mean much more versatility for devices. You can now, for example, use USB gaming controllers with your phone or tablet.
Honeycomb updated the Android interface with a new look and ICS will be no different with a new app launcher, enhanced multitasking and app switching menus, a holographic user interface and scalable widgets.
Lastly, there’s a lot of interest in Google’s new face recognition and video face tracking capabilities but at the moment exactly how this will work is a little vague.

Camera:
The Nexus Prime’s camera will be a 5-megapixel primary with 1080p HD video capture capability.
Known features include autofocus, digital zoom, video calling and an as yet un-rated secondary camera, but no doubt the list will be more extensive on release.
In the meantime the Nexus One’s camera is also 5-megapixels with LED flash, geo-tagging and autofocus. The resolution is 2560х1920 pixels and video capture is DVD quality.