ICS hath cometh

ICS and the Galaxy Nexus have been unveiled at the Google Samsung Event in HK after oodles of anticipation.

The rundown? ICS has many new features that we're drooling over, including, but not limited to:

- Face Recognition, I'd say this is more a graphical "pretty add-on" than necessary feature at this point. Let's see how keen developers put this to use.

- Android Beam: Touch Android devices together to painlessly share contacts, maps, files, and more

- Panoramic Camera: stitch together pictures to

create a panorama, quick and easy

- Simple Multitasking: hold down on the home button, and open programs pop-up, in an easy to select, graphically appealing way

- Roboto font: Crisp and clear, the new Roboto font is a welcome addition to the ICS family

The Galaxy Nexus is a super-thin large 4.65" Super AMOLED HD (Full 1280x720 Screen). The dual-core 1.2GHz TI OMAP 4 CPU is sure to be plenty fast, though to be honest, I'd rather Google had used Samsung's own Dual-Core Exynos 1.5 GHz chip. The Exynos chip has beenshown to be faster, when comparing an identically clocked TI and Exynos chip. monster that's coming to most US and many international carriers. Talk about mass Android deployment, this is it. The Galaxy Nexus just could be THE game changer for the current smartphone ecosystem, and market.

Google's release of the first Google Phone, Nexus One, was a marketing flop. Given how the Galaxy Nexus is being released to mostly all major US carriers, I'd say they've learned their lesson and then some, and are coming out with all guns blazing. If/when the Galaxy Nexus is released, and if it achieves the desired market penetration, I'm sure Steve Jobs will do fitful somersaults in his grave.

The Galaxy Nexus uses a Pentile Matrix Super AMOLED screen(cheaper version of the AMOLED display); this is a disappointment, but given that it's the first generation of the HD AMOLED screens, I supposed it deserves a bit of leeway. Actually? No, Samsung is a massive company with plenty of budget, I'm guessing they have the technology NOW for making a Super Amoled PLUS (non-pentile) screen, rather Samsung and Google opted to use the pentile so they could lower the end cost to consumers, thus increasing market saturation. That's how things work.

The Galaxy Nexus will be out in November, stay tuned for more launch dates and pricing :)