How much does Android 4.0 mean to you? How much do you need to have it right now? Because that's the dilemma with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone ($299-$649). Overall it's not quite as good a phone as the Motorola Droid RAZR ($299, 4.5 stars). But right now, it's the only phone running Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), and that's the future.

In many ways, this is the ultimate early adopter phone. The phone itself isn't perfect; typically, Nexus phones aren't the best hardware on the market. But the software takes a major leap forward, with everything from a better Gmail experience to a faster browser and the ability to put folders on your home screens. Do you need that right now? Then yes, you need the Nexus.

Physical Design
The Galaxy Nexus is a well-built but not extraordinary Samsung phone—which is to say, it's a giant piece of relatively well-engineered plastic. There's none of the metal and glass accents you see on top-of-the-line Motorola or Apple phones.

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It's huge, though. This is physically the biggest phone I've seen recently, measuring 5.3 by 2.7 by 0.4 with a sprawling 4.65-inch, 1,280-by-720 Super AMOLED screen. The display is too big for people with smaller thumbs to use one-handed, but the Droid RAZR—which is almost the same size—has the same problem. Folks with smaller hands should consider the iPhone 4S or, to stick with Android, the Motorola Droid Bionic ($199, 4.5 stars). It isn't that heavy at 5.13 ounces, but I felt like my thumb got a major workout dragging down the notification pane even compared with my own HTC Sensation ($199, 4.5 stars), which is a pretty big phone.

There's a 1-megapixel camera on the front, a 5-megapixel camera on the back, Power and Volume buttons on the sides, and a standard 3.5mm headset jack on the bottom panel. The Galaxy Nexus has a removable battery, but there's no memory card slot to add to the 28.13GB of internal memory. More importantly, especially for Mac users, no memory card means no Mass Storage mode, which means having to use an awkward separate file transfer app to upload and download files on Macs. (Windows PCs have no such problems.)

Voice and Battery Performance
The Galaxy Nexus isn't a great voice phone, and our unit had some bizarre problems reporting reception. Using the dBm signal strength numbers in the Android settings panel, the Nexus would generally show weaker reception than a Droid RAZR sitting right next to it. The phone also had serious trouble recovering from a dropped 4G signal; after falling to 3G, sometimes it would need a reboot to find 4G again. But in any condition with a decent 4G signal, I got faster speeds on Speedtest.net on the Nexus than on the RAZR. Clearly, there are some firmware issues to be worked out here.

Voice calls were disappointing: tinny, thready, and scratchy, with volume wobble in the earpiece and an extremely harsh tone on the other end. Just to check, I compared calls with a Droid RAZR in the same location, and the RAZR came through clearer and warmer. The speakerphone delivers moderate volume, and the phone does a good job cancelling background noise. The Nexus worked very well with our Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset ($99, 4 stars)  as well as with our Altec Lansing BackBeat stereo Bluetooth headphones ($99, 3.5 stars). Voice dialing was spot on.

The Galaxy Nexus connects to Verizon's 3G CDMA EVDO Rev A and 4G LTE networks, as well as to Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. I got excellent speeds on the 4G LTE network, consistently better than the Droid RAZR: Downloads ranged from 5.2Mbps up to a stunning 20.7Mbps, and uploads ranged from 4Mbps to 9.5Mbps. You can share your connection with up to 10 devices as a Wi-Fi hotspot, so it's great that ICS now includes an easy-to-read settings pane showing your moment-by-moment and app-by-app data usage.

The phone also supports NFC, but Verizon has declined to allow Google Wallet, so the functionality is pretty much useless for now. 

The Nexus has decent but not excellent battery life, with 5 hours and 58 minutes of talk time in our tests. While that's fine, and the phone will probably last a day in normal use, the Droid RAZR lasted much longer with 8 hours and 42 minutes.

Performance and Apps
The Nexus is built around a dual-core TI OMAP4460 processor running at 1.2GHz. Performance on the overall Antutu system benchmark put the Galaxy Nexus safely in the top range of Android smartphones, although it's bested by the Droid RAZR on Verizon and Samsung's Galaxy S II Skyrocket ($299, 4.5 stars) on AT&T. Where the ICS advantage shows up is in browsing: The Galaxy Nexus killed every Gingerbread phone other than the Droid RAZR on the Browsermark browsing benchmark. That's because ICS incorporates dramatic browser improvements which began in Android 3.0, Honeycomb. 

And, oh, what a better browser it is! I go into more detail in my Ice Cream Sandwich review, but the ICS browser is a major improvement from the Gingerbread browser. My favorite new options are the ability to easily disable mobile Web sites and switch to desktop versions, and the "read offline" button. Web pages look super-sharp on the 1,280-by-720 screen. Adobe Flash 11 plays smoothly, as well.