If there’s one thing Samsung knows how to do, it’s building feature-packed smartphones. The Nexus S has impressive tech specs: 4-inch Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and, most important, a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, PowerVR SGX540 GPU, Hummingbird chipset. The external build of the phone isn’t your typical slab of a smartphone. If you look closely at the unit, you’ll see that it has a slight upward curve to it, probably so the unit will fit better when you make and take phone calls. Aside from the volume rocker on the left side and the power/unlock key on the right, there’s a noticeable dearth of hard keys. Right on the bottom of the bezel of the screen lies the four touch-sensitive buttons present in most Android builds.

The real star of the device, of course, is the software and in this case it’s the Honeycomb build of Android. There aren’t a lot of changes on the UI as most of the tweaks are actually done behind the scenes. The device feels tighter somehow and consumes a lot less juice than its Froyo-equipped brethren. One of the major UI changes probably lies in how the device handles the QWERTY keyboard, which now sports better functionality for word suggestions, copy and paste. Additionally, users are able to quickly select a word by pressing and holding it, then copying it to the clipboard. Pressing on a word allows you to drag anchors up to the text you want to copy or edit.

As mentioned earlier, the Nexus S has NFC (near field communication) capability via a chip embedded on the back plastic cover. NFC is basically a set of short-range wireless technologies, typically requiring a distance of 4 cm or less, that allows devices to interact with NFC tags like posters, menus and the like. Ideally, you’ll be able to tap or wave your NFC-equipped device over a poster equipped with an NFC tag, which then gives you information about the product being featured in that particular poster. It’s all very new, and unfortunately there weren’t any NFC tags near us that I could use the Nexus S with.

As I mentioned before, the Nexus S is much more power-efficient than its Froyo-toting brethren. Other Android-equipped smartphones in the Nexus S class are barely able to go through a day before needing to be charged. The Nexus S is able to keep up with a day’s worth of use with moderate texting, browsing and video with enough juice left over for an additional half day of use. It’s also noticeably fast, and is able to tackle most of the games and apps in the Android Marketplace without issue.

Specifications:

Display: 4.0" WVGA (480x800) Super AMOLED Capacitive touch sensor

Dimensions: 63x123.9x10.88 mm

Weight: 129g

Processor: 1GHz Cortex A8 (Hummingbird) processor

Memory: 16GB iNAND flash memory

Camera: 5 megapixels (2560x1920)

Battery: Talk time up to 6.7 hours on 3G (14 hours on 2G); Standby time up to 17.8 days on 3G (29.7 days on 2G)

Software: Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)

What’s Hot:

Super AMOLED screen

Extremely fast and responsive

Great battery life

What’s Not:

Not much NFC content to interact with

Bottom line:

One part Samsung and one part Google, the Nexus S delivers on almost every front, from UI to performance to battery life.