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There are Samsung Nexus S rumors flying all over the place, but this one’s a doozy. Supposedly the reason the Nexus S wasn’t launched this week is that Samsung decided the smartphone with stock Android ought to compete against the upcoming Tegra 2 dual-core phones to be announced in January at CES.
Furthermore, even though dual-core versions of the Nexus S were made available to testers before the scheduled release date, Samsung killed the launch. Why? Because Android OS 2.3 (Gingerbread) isn’t optimized for dual-core CPUs.
Remember, Best Buy was going to launch this phone yesterday (November 11th), and the rumored date came from Best Buy’s internal materials. But when the phone was scrapped (due to the problems with the dual-core device running Gingerbread), all that leaked inside information was no longer accurate.
Then came PixelGate, where Engadget released some photos of the Nexus S, then Android and Me claimed the Google branding looked photoshopped. That’s because the handsets given out for testing didn’t have any branding on them yet (see photo at left, which shows the Nexus One test units with no branding). The theory is that Samsung leaked the photos on the old launch day, to keep the buzz going, and it was their digital addition of the Google and Samsung logos on the unbranded devices.
So why did Samsung pull the Nexus S so close to launch? Supposedly that was made at a fairly high up level, when the testers had problems with unit performance and the specs weren’t that impressive. That was when the unit was a single-core but overclocked Galaxy S variant. So Samsung tried again with a dual-core CPU, and that’s when they came up against the limits of Gingerbread.
Which dual-core CPU is in the Nexus S? Is it the NVIDIA Tegra 2, which is pretty much ready? Or did Samsung get their Orion CPU out tothe testers? The Orion was announced as ready in “fourth quarter,” so it could be.
Now, why doesn’t Samsung just release the phone with Android OS 3.0 (Honeycomb), the OS that is optimized for dual-core devices? Because those devices are all tablets, so the 3.0 release isn’t going to do the Nexus S much good. Either they release the phone running single-core until Gingerbread gets a later release to dual-core compatibility, or they wait until Google updates Gingerbread to support the dual-core Nexus S. And that would explain why Gingerbread, which also was rumored to have a November 11th launch date, hasn’t been seen yet.
And there you have it. Samsung is waiting on the Google Gingerbread team, Google is waiting on Samsung’s launch decision, and that’s why there’s no more launch information for this phone. Plus, with a delayed launch, any of the rumored specs for the Nexus S could change.
Stay tuned!
Source: Android and Me