On the front of the phone there are three simple controls the android menu button, home button and the back button. It has a 4 inch display which is bigger than the iPhone on most other torchscreen handsets available.

It’s also come with a 3.5mm headphone jack which is great to see that Sony Ericsson are not using any of the proprietary headsets anymore and are starting to standardize across the board.

Quick Spec

Operating System: Android
Screen Resolution: 800 x 480 pixels (WVGA)
Keyboard Type: On-screen
Communications: Bluetooth, GPRS, GSM, EDGE, HSDPA, Wi-Fi
Camera Resolution: 8.1 megapixels
GPS: Yes

Read more spec’s here

The Nexus S has been designed by Google as a follow-up to the Nexus One. The new handset is different in terms of design to the older model and this time around is made by Samsung, the older Nexus One was made by HTC.

There are a lot of improvements and it now includes 16 GB of internal storage. It comes with a 4 inch touchscreen and a five megapixel camera. The processor is a 1 GHz hummingbird processor.

Here are some of the specs in detail

• CPU — Hummingbird Cortex A8, ARM v7 (rev2) clocked on a sliding scale between 100.0 MHz and 1000.0 MHz
• GPU — Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX 540, with full support for OpenGL ES 2.0
• RAM — 512 MB, with 346 MB available at boot
• Internal storage — 1007.89 MB available for applications, 13.31 GB available from the 16 GB SanDisk NAND flash memory
• Five axis gyroscopic sensor, accelerometer, and digital compass
• Wireless b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, GPS and A-GPS
• Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)
• Quad-band (850, 900, 1800, 1900) GSM, and Tri-band HSPA (900, 2100, 1700) radios
• 3.7 volt 1500 mAh battery, in a new small form factor
• 5 MP rear camera with LED flash, and 640×480 front facing camera, sharing the same daughterboard and connector

Operating system

The phone is the first android phone to come with the gingerbread operating system. There are some added features compared to previous android operating systems but it’s not a major overall but there are some welcome changes that many people are really appreciating.

Improvements in being able to access the apps manager from the home screen, network icons change color to let you know your status, the wifi, signal bar icons are green when connected to Google and when you’re not connected to your gray. There we just small changes but they really do add to the user experience which is important.

The Camera

It actually takes good photos even if you are in difficult lighting situations. You can see some sample photographs taken with the phone here just to give you an idea of the quality.

Video quality is really good in lighting conditions that are bright, and there are however some reports of it not performing as well in dim lighting conditions. But, I suppose this is the same as many phones.

Gaming

The graphics are quite impressive as you can see from the video below

Click here to view the embedded video.

Conclusion

Overall the Nexus S is a fantastic android phone. There are many improvements in terms of Adobe flash support on the new keyboard improves overall performance.

You can read more about phone over at Vodafone website you can also look at the various pricing options that are available.

Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 is an android smartphone now available on the Vodafone network as a pay-as-you-go phone for €110, it is of course available in the other options for upgrade you’ll need to check the Vodafone website for pricing.

Some of the features on this phone are quite impressive as Sony Ericsson are bringing an excellent smartphone into the marketplace at a very reasonable price. Without getting too much into the technical detail it comes with HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS.

It’s quite a compacted phone and measures 99mm x 54mm. The screen (menu) is quite big and easy to navigate around and as it is 3 inches and has a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels. It has a micro-USB port for charging and syncing and a standard 3.5mm jack.

With a 3.2 megapixel camera it should be perfect for taken photographs on the move or for uploading to social media network sites if required. It also has a micro-SD memory card slot for expansion.

As this is based on Google’s android operating system there are ample applications already installed to get you going. This includes Google mail, maps, YouTube, Facebook and more. You also have easy access to the android marketplace where many more applications, games, utilities etc. can be downloaded.

Navigation around the menu system is very easy with Sony Ericsson’s custom interface which gives you on-screen shortcuts at the corners of the screen and access to their Timescape software which makes it easy to integrate with social media networks.

Check out more over at the Vodafone website