There are a large quantity of operating systems on the market, but personally I think Google's Android platform is the closest competitor to iOS and one Android phone in particular has caught my eye
The Google Nexus S - The best android phone ever?
There are several reasons that I think this phone is great, but unfortunately the price is not one of them. Retailing at £539 at the time of writing on Expansys makes this phone one of few phones on the market to be more expensive than a base 16gb iPhone 4. Bad start admittedly.
This phone goes with one of the major features of most current flagship Android handsets, a large superAMOLED display. These screens are great and tend to look more impressive than the display found on an iPhone 4. Unfortunately the resolution cannot match the iPhone 4 but it is not bad at 960*640 pixels.
An important thing to consider when buying an Android handset is that because there are so many different phones available, some may get updates faster than others. Fortunately the Nexus S ships with Android 2.3 installed and as Google's flagship device, I would expect it to receive updates before almost all the other Android phones. A great positive.
The camera is on a par with the competition with a 5 megapixel sensor, standard fare in modern smartphones and can also record 720p high definition video, which is also pretty standard. It is good to see the back of the days when awful cameras were fitted to smartphones such as the original and 3g iPhones.
The phone has 16gb of built in storage (a nice and slightly unusual feature for an Android phone) and 512mb of RAM which should help with multitasking. The battery is also huge at 1500mah.
It is great to see Google putting their name on a phone in a similar way to how Apple creates the software and hardware for its devices. The fact is, as Google's top handset this phone should enjoy excellent support until a new "Googlephone" is released at least. The huge number of handsets available with Android makes it hard for any phone to stand out inside the Android ecosystem and I think Google may be onto a winning formula by providing their own product with no ties to a handset manufacturer (however it should be noted that this particular phone is based on the Samsung Galaxy S).
In short, if you are looking for a new smartphone, but for some reason do't wish to buy an iPhone, or are looking for a phone with a large screen I would suggest giving the Nexus S a try, especially if you are particularly interested in an Android handset.
If you believe I have missed something out, or wish to share your experiences with this phone, please leave a comment below!
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