Hands-on: Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus

With less than a month left in the year, Samsung’s final phone for 2012 has been made available, the first smartphone in Australia with the next generation of Google’s Android operating system.

The third phone in the Google Nexus lineup – preceded by the Nexus One made by HTC and the Samsung-made Nexus S – the Galaxy Nexus sets the benchmark for Android phones in the new year.

Available before 2012, this handset gives us a preview of what we can look forward to in new Android handsets.

In the hands, you can feel that the Galaxy Nexus is a mishmash of the design seen in the Nexus S and the Galaxy S2. Both were excellent phones, and a design inspired by each manages to work well here. There’s a textured plastic back and a nice curvature to the handset that we like.

The screen is something new: a 4.65 inch 720p HD Super AMOLED display that looks vibrant, sharp, and very pleasing to the eye. While it doesn’t have the same pixel density as Apple’s iPhone 4/4S Retina screen, it’s still excellent and supports a resolution greater than any other currently available phone has.

Under the hood, Samsung has equipped the Galaxy Nexus with a dual-core 1.2GHz processor which it says should be more than enough for running apps, games, web browsing, and multitasking between these activities. The story capacity is limited to 16GB with no microSD storage, though – a fact that’s left us a little disheartened.

Most people won’t be bothered by this, however. For many of us, 16GB is ample storage, with enough room for just the right amount of music, photos, apps, and movies to take with us. If you can do it on an iPhone, you can do it here.

There’s also Near Field Communication built into the Nexus Galaxy, a feature that allows wireless transmission from two devices very easily. We’ve recently seen CommBank’s Ka-Ching use this technology – also known as NFC – to allow iPhones wireless payment of product at cash registers, and it’s also made its way into three other commercially available phones, including the Nexus S, Nokia N9, and the BlackBerry Bold 9900.

Up until this point, however, it’s never been used the way the Galaxy Nexus uses “beam”: if you want to share a photo, app, contact, or webpage, simply put two of the handsets back to back and they’ll beam the file to the other phone wirelessly. It’s that easy.

The technology from the handset is impressive enough, but then there’s Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich, the next generation of Android.