Samsung Galaxy Nexus vs Motorola Photon 4G: How Do They Stack up?

As more and more Android smartphones are coming to the market with advanced specifications, it is quite difficult to make a decision on which one to buy.

The launch of Galaxy Nexus by Samsung via Verizon makes the choice much more difficult as it runs the much-anticipated Google's latest Android operating system - Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Ice Cream Sandwich has some cool features that include widgets in a new tab, a customizable launcher, Gmail with offline search with a two-line preview and new action bar at the bottom. It also has better voice integration, improved copy and paste and a new tabbed Web browser that allows up to 16 tabs.

Apart from Samsung, Motorola is another OEM that makes huge number of Android handsets. The Motorola's smartphones such as Droid Razr and Photon 4G could compete with Galaxy Nexus.

Motorola's Photon 4G was launched July 31 on Sprint and priced at $199 with a two-year contract.

Following is a comparison of Samsung Galaxy Nexus with Motorola Photon 4G:

Display: Galaxy Nexus comes with a 4.65-inch high-definition Super AMOLED display providing a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels with about 316 pixels per inch (ppi) density. Photon 4G has 4.3-inch qHD display with 960 x 540 pixels resolution with 256 ppi pixel density.

Size: Galaxy Nexus will come in 135.5 x 67.94 x 8.9 mm dimension and weighs 135 grams while Photon 4G has a dimension of 126.9 x 66.9 x 12.2 mm and weighs 158 grams.

Operating System: Galaxy Nexus runs on the latest version of Google's smartphone operating system - Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich while Photon 4G runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

Processor: Galaxy Nexus is powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU, TI OMAP 4460 chipset with 1GB RAM. On the other hand, Photon 4G comes with 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 AP20H dual Core processor with 1GB RAM and 2GB ROM.

Camera: Galaxy Nexus features a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus, flash and has 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. Photon 4G has an 8-megapixel camera with autofocus, dual-LED flash and a secondary VGA camera.

Connectivity: Galaxy Nexus has HSDPA 21 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps and 4G LTE support. The Photon 4G has Rev.A up to 3.1 Mbps, HSDPA, HSUPA, along with 4G LTE support.

WLAN/Bluetooth/USB: Galaxy Nexus supports Bluetooth 3.0 version with A2DP along with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, dual-band, DLNA and Wi-Fi hotspot. On the other hand, Photon 4G supports Bluetooth version 2.1 with A2DP with EDR support along with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot and WiMAX 802.16 e. Both smartphones come with support for microUSB version 2.0.

Storage: Galaxy Nexus comes with a fixed 16/32GB internal storage while Photon 4G has a fixed 16GB memory which can be expandable up to 32GB with a microSD card.

Battery: Galaxy Nexus comes with a standard 1750 mAh battery offering talk time of more than 8 hours and standby time of 270 hours in 3G. The Photon 4G will have Li-Po 1700 mAh battery giving up to 9 hours of talk time and over 300 hours of standy time in 3G.

Pricing: Galaxy Nexus is available from Verizon for $299.99 with 2-year contract from Verizon whereas Sprint offer Photon 4G for $199.99 with 2-year contract.