Google, Samsung Reveal Ice Cream Sandwich-Powered 4.65-inch Galaxy Nexus (VIDEO)

Samsung and Google unveiled the latest Ice Cream Sandwich-running Galaxy Nexus smartphone in Hong Kong Wednesday. Ice Cream Sandwich or Android 4.0 is the newest version of Android.

Andy Rubin, senior vice president of mobile at Google, during the launch, said the device and the OS were developed together by engineers from both companies under the same roof.

The phone, as per report, will process on high speed LTE and HSPA+ networks. This, however, will depend on the market demand of the device. The Galaxy Nexus will hit the store shelves in November in the U.S., Europe and Asia, including China and Japan.

The 4.65-inch Galaxy Nexus, as part of its user interface, only uses buttons that appear on the screen. It has also arrived with a new swipe feature that will let users drag applications or items off the screen in order to stop or delete them. Google has developed a new font, Roboto, for Android.

The OS has made various additions to the device’s camera with zero shutter lag, which means that it will take the photo as soon as the user presses the capture button. A new panorama feature will also let users take panorama shots by panning the camera across a scene.

The operating system, although it has been fitted in with facial recognition technology, failed to recognize Matias Duarte, senior director of Android user experience, who showed off the new operating system during the event.

The built-in browser now lets users save pages for offline reading and will let users view the full Web site instead of the mobile version by clicking on a drop down menu item, according to a Computerworld report.

Ice Cream Sandwich, officially announced during the 2011 Google I/O, is a combination of Gingerbread and Honeycomb, into one single unit. Android Head of Engineering Mike Claren called it the company’s “most ambitious release to date.”

Other new features include widgets in a new tab which is listed in a similar list to apps, a customizable launcher, Gmail with offline search with a two-line preview and new action bar at the bottom, better voice integration, improved copy and paste and a new tabbed Web browser that allows up to 16 tabs.

The device itself comes with a super AMOLED, 720 x 1280 pixels, capacitive touchscreen. A 5 MP, 2592x1936 pixels, autofocus, LED flash rear camera and a 1.3 MP front-facing camera.

The device is powered by a dual-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A9 CPU, TI OMAP 4460 chipset, and additional features like NFC support, Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk, Picasa integration and Adobe Flash support.