Nexus S 4G

The Nexus S 4G brings hope to the world of hardcore users - perhaps the hunted animals have a future after all? This smartphone will at least offer them a safe harbor for now, and Sprint guarantees that it'll be one of the first smartphones to receive future Android software upgrades first. The Nexus S 4G will debut with Android 2.3 in a few short weeks (it recently received FCC approval), and is expected to be upgraded to Android 3.1 faster than fast later this year.

Sprint's Nexus S 4G looks exactly like the T-Mobile Nexus S ($199, 4 stars) we reviewed back in December, and it's a very handsome phone. A slim, smooth black slab, the 4.6-ounce Nexus measures 4.9 by 2.5 by .44 inches (HWD), with no visible buttons on its face and a rich 4-inch, 800-by-480 Super AMOLED screen. The display looks terrific, with pure blacks and deep colors, but Samsung's current top-of-the-line phones such as the unlocked Samsung Galaxy S II ($799, 4 stars) come with Super AMOLED Plus screens, with even better colors.

Press the Power button on the side, and the standard four Android action buttons light up near the bottom of the handset. The phone has a very slight "chin" at the bottom that curves up towards your face, and the back is smooth, black plastic. It's quality plastic, though, and the build feels very solid all around.

The Nexus S 4G is a surprisingly poor voice phone. The Nexus S 4G runs Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" on a 1GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor, the same CPU used in the Samsung Epic 4G. That's cutting-edge, for last year. The current state of the art is moving to dual-core phones such as Sprint's upcoming HTC EVO 3D. Gingerbread didn't seem to offer much of a performance boost over the Froyo OS on the Epic, but that's fine; the phone feels sprightly. As a Nexus phone, this handset should get updates from Google more quickly than other Android devices. That remains to be seen, of course; Sprint still has to approve the updates, but at least they don't have to go through a phone manufacturer. The Nexus runs more than 150,000 Android apps, and it's refreshingly totally free of bloatware, even from Sprint.

The Nexus S 4G has no memory card slot, instead relying on about 14GB of on-board storage. The video player lacks XVID and DIVX support, and won't play HD videos even in supported MPEG4 and AAC file formats.