Difference Between Samsung Galaxy S Advance and Galaxy Nexus

Samsung Galaxy S Advance vs Galaxy Nexus | Speed, Performance and Features Reviewed | Full Specs Compared
 

In our childhood, we usually had our own idols that we’d like ourselves to be one day. We imitate their characteristics and try to impress ourselves by comparing how much we resemble the idols. We enjoy their performance and hang on to their words. When they do something new, it becomes a style for us, even if it seemed odd at time. Similarly, in the smartphone world, vendors have some idols in mind when they come up with new products. For instance, Apple iPhone has been an idol in the smartphone world. After the introduction of Google Android OS, Nexus series has been an idol for Android smartphones. This is because Nexus series is Google’s own brain child and the Android OS has been developed having Nexus in mind, and it always gets the first taste of new OS releases. Staying true to that, Samsung Galaxy Nexus stand above others being the first phone to run on Android OS 4.0 IceCreamSandwich.

Now that, we have established that Samsung Galaxy Nexus is indeed an Idol in the Android smartphone world, we chose it to be compared with Samsung’s new Galaxy S Advance smartphone. As usual, Samsung has made sure that Advance lives up to the fame of the Galaxy family. Although, with recent products they have come up with, we no longer have the impact of a high end smartphone when we hear the name Samsung Galaxy. This is because there have been many variations of the family, many high ends, but some handsets addressing the low and mid-range markets. Galaxy S Advance is actually addressed for the mid-range market segment and in a way can be considered as an economical replacement for Samsung Galaxy S, if you find it outdated. After we discuss the individual specifications, we will get down to the conclusion and answer the question about replacing your Galaxy S with Advance.

Samsung Galaxy S Advance

Galaxy S Advance is a smartphone anyone could easily mistake for Galaxy S II because they resemble with such level of similarity. It is only slightly smaller than the Galaxy S II scoring dimensions of 123.2 x 63mm and a thickness of 9.7mm. It has a smaller screen of 4 inches featuring a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels at a pixel density of 233ppi. The Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen panel adds value to the package because it has great color reproduction. It comes with 1GHz Cortex A9 dual core processor, but we have no information about the chipset. We can assume it to be either TI OMAP or Snapdragon S 2. It has 768MB of RAM, which falls somewhat short; nonetheless, it has smooth and seamless operation, so we figured Samsung has done some tweaks. Galaxy S Advance runs on Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread, and we haven’t heard any news on an official upgrade to Android OS v4.0 IceCreamSandwich, but we hope it’ll come out soon.

Although this smartphone may sound like a low end phone, that’s not the case either. We actually have some trouble figuring out whether Samsung meant this phone to be an economical replacement for Samsung Galaxy S. In any case, this falls somewhere in the middle between Samsung Galaxy S and Samsung Galaxy S II. It has 5MP camera with autofocus and LED flash with geo tagging enabled. It can capture 720p videos at 30 frames per second and it also has 1.3MP front facing camera bundled with the Bluetooth v3.0 for conference calling. It has 8GB or 16GB version with the support to expand the memory using a microSD card. It comes with HSDPA connectivity yielding up to 14.4Mbps of speed while having Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity. It can also act as a wi-fi hotspot and build in DLNA connectivity ensures that you can stream rich media content right from your phone. It comes in either Black or White flavors and has the normal sensors like any Android phone. Samsung has ported Advance with 1500mAh battery and we reckon it will comfortably power up your device for more than 6 hours.

Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Google’s own product, Nexus has always been the first to come up with the new versions of Android and who could blame for they are state of the art mobiles. The Galaxy Nexus is the successor for Nexus S and comes with a variety of improvement worthwhile talking about. It comes in Black and has an expensive and gorgeous design to fit right in your palm. It is true that Galaxy Nexus is on the upper quartile on size, but amazingly, it doesn’t feel hefty in your hands. In fact, it only weighs 135g and has dimensions of 135.5 x 67.9mm and comes as a slim phone with 8.9mm of thickness. It accommodates a 4.65 inches Super AMOLED Capacitive touchscreen with 16M colors, which is a state of the art screen going beyond the conventional size boundaries of 4.5 inches. It has true HD resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels with an ultra-high pixel density of 316ppi. For this, we can daresay, the image quality and the crispness of the text would be as good as iPhone 4S retina display.

Nexus is made to be a survivor till it has a successor; which means, it comes with state of the art specifications that won’t feel neither intimidated nor outdated for an extended duration of time. Samsung has included a 1.2GHz dual core Cortex A9 processor on top of TI OMAP 4460 chipset bundled with the PowerVR SGX540 GPU. The system is been backed up by a RAM of 1GB and non-extendable storage of 16 or 32 GB. The software doesn’t fail to meet the expectations, as well. Featuring the world’s first IceCreamSandwich smartphone, it comes with a lot of new features that hasn’t been seen around the block. As for starters, it comes with a new optimized font for HD displays, an improved keyboard, more interactive notifications, resizable widgets and a refined browser that is intended to give a desktop-class experience to the user. It also promises the best Gmail experience to date and a clean new look in the calendar and all these sums up to an enticing and intuitive OS. As if this isn’t enough, Android v4.0 IceCreamSandwich for Galaxy Nexus comes with a facial recognition front end, to unlock the phone called FaceUnlock, and an improved version of Google + with hangouts.

Galaxy Nexus also has a 5MP camera with autofocus, LED flash, touch focus and face detection and Geo-tagging with the support of A-GPS. It can also capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second. The 1.3MP front camera bundled with built-in Bluetooth v3.0 with A2DP enhances the usability of video calling functionality. Samsung has also introduced single motion sweep panorama and the ability to add live effects to the camera which looks really enjoyable. Galaxy Nexus LTE version comes to be connected at all times with the inclusion of high-speed LTE 700 connectivity that can gracefully degrade to HSDPA 21Mbps when it’s not available. It also has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n that enables you to connect to any Wi-Fi hotspot as well as set up a Wi-Fi hotspot of your own just as easily. The DLNA connectivity means that you can wirelessly stream 1080p media content to your HD TV. It also features Near Field Communication support, active noise cancellation, accelerometer sensor, proximity sensor and a 3-axis Gyro meter sensor that can be used to many emerging Augmented Reality applications. It is commendable to emphasize that Samsung has given a 17 hours 40 minutes talk time for Galaxy Nexus with a 1750mAh battery which is beyond incredible.

Conclusion

This is actually not one of those conclusions where I can’t begin to explain the differences because there are too many of them. In today’s case, the differences are fairly simple to explain, yet the purchasing decision will be quite hard to make since there will be a lot of non-materialistic factors to be considered in the equation which I can’t work for you. Let me list down the materialistic variables in the equation and let you solve the rest of it. Galaxy S Advance has a good processor, but Nexus has a better processor clocked at 1.2GHz and a RAM with high capacity. Nexus is good in terms of optics; although both have the 5MP camera, their camcorders are different. The Nexus can capture 1080p HD videos at 30 fps while Advance can only capture 720p videos. There’s another difference that will help you to fixate on a decision. Galaxy Nexus runs on Android OS v4.0 ICS, and the OS is tweaked to work on Nexus perfectly. This gives Nexus an advantage like no other Android smartphone in the market. Of course, this advantage makes you cost dearly, as well. That’s as much as I can simplify the equation because the rest is based on your opinion.