On another note, I feel a mixed sense of relief and disappointment with the Galaxy Nexus. Disappointment because I was expecting to be blown away – yes I know ICS is the main attraction and that hardware is not everything – and relief because my S2 has not been rendered obsolete nor blown away. I only bought my phone in July and I don’t feel any buyer’s remorse at this point. Here is why.

1. ICS sounds great but I will want to read reviews on performance and battery life before I get to excited. Furthermore, even though samsung will take ages to get an update, if I truly wanted to, it should be to difficult to update on my own once people put it out there.
2. Screen: People are raving about the resolution, I was quite excited to until we all noted the conspicuously absent “plus” from the HD AMOLED. If the screen size were 4.3 I’d be a little more excited but at 4.65 inches its a bit hefty for me. Furthermore, I will be very curious to see what the batterly life is like before getting too enthusiastic.
3. Lack of removable storage. At a max of 32 gb internal storage with no expandable memory the storage options appear woefully inadequate against its other android counterparts. This is especially true now that we know many other droids will be able to support sandisc’s new 64gb micro SD.

Anyway, that’s my take on it. I can’t wait to see the reviews on the nexus galaxy though. 

Both have great features going for them, when GS2 is updated to ICS, id still pick the GS2.

Now the Moto/Droid RAZR i think this is the phone to beat!

1.  the super fast camera shutter!  +1
2. The ability to readily see all active processes, jump from one to another, and killing them by just flicking them off the screen.  +1+1+1
3. and most importantly, the ability to take accurate, real time dictation.

Deep integration with all things google is the biggest selling point for me.  My biggest concern is that as the software continues to evolve and improve, that once again the hardware will fail to perform adequately and bog down a year or two don the line.  This is the main reason I’m buying a Nexus, as opposed to some other (possible higher specd) OEM phone.  I don’t want unnecessary overlays and crapware to burden the hardware and ruin the android experience.

Do you know something the rest of us don’t know?  Perhaps other phones will use them, but I would not hold my breath on Google upgrading this particular Nexus phone to a different hardware architecture.  Maybe the next nexus pone, but not this one.

Unlike Android, though, Apple REALLY emphasized Siri as a selling point, whereas, Android merely glossed over Face Lock as one of the many new improvements.  That’s the difference b/t the two.  Google lets you decide if something is useful to you and lets you make improvements if you feel the stock experience isn’t good enough.  Apple tells you want you’re supposed to think is good and if you don’t, then tough luck because that’s all you’re getting.

If the CPU was running at its standard 1.5GHz and it had a better GPU, more tech-savvy people would be all over it.  Looks like we are waiting a few months for those or the Exynos processors.

1. It’s slow [although, interestingly G claims they 'intentionally' made it slow]
2. It’s even less secure then a PIN or even a zig-zag-pattern unlock

This feature has been brought mainstream by software (albeit /different/ software) integrated even on discount laptops years ago. More often than it should, the implementations I’ve used fail to recognize people very well due to poor illumination of the face it’s trying to study; and the Galaxy Nexus doesn’t have a flash on its face to avoid this (the Galaxy Nexus implementation didn’t work in the surely rehearsed official demonstration before the press, even).

It’s just a gimmick. To their credit though, it’s a gimmick that isn’t getting called out by any reporters I’ve read from yet. Don’t get me wrong. The phone and OS look promising (I’m considering swapping networks for it), but Face Lock is the least of the reasons this package should appeal to anybody.

Think about how higher resolution doesn’t mean better picture quality when choosing cameras, which also happens to address your last concern about the 5mp camera on the Galaxy Nexus. It might have a better sensor and lens that takes better pictures than one with 8mp.

Anyway if you want a better screen, the Galaxy S2 is the better choice instead of the Amaze.