In the market for a new phone?

Google is poised to launch the Samsung designed Galaxy Nexus in the next few days. If you consider the specs, it is well ahead of any other handset on the market… it’s slimmer, lighter, faster, got a bigger screen, and generally lines up better on paper vs. its competitors. The table below gives a good breakdown of the internals.

Who cares about specs?

Hardware is approaching a point now where specs don’t really matter. Sure the Nexus can probably take pictures faster than other phones by a few nanoseconds, but did I really feel like my old phone was too slow at taking happy snaps? They all do roughly the same thing at roughly the same speed, so over the next few years we will start to see fragmentation in hardware based on niche interests just like we did in the pre-smart phone era (eg. some phones are better at playing games, some better at video, some better at photos, some have more social media integration, etc.)

More important than the Gigahertz is the experience itself – the technology is just a means to an end.

For now, it’s a two horse race

But for now, if you’re looking to buy a new phone, you really only have two choices: either a Nexus or an iPhone 4S (sorry WP7, you still need a killer handset and a real community to cross the threshold into the mainstream… and let’s not even mention RIM).

The choice is simple

Love iOS and couldn’t imagine using anything else? Wait for the iPhone 5.

Anyone else… buy the Nexus – the future is now.