Google and Samsung announced the Galaxy Nexus overnight, the first Ice Cream Sandwich-powered Android smartphone. It came a week late after the companies decided to postpone the event out of respect for Steve Jobs. If you caught a glimpse at the leaked specifications earlier, the announcement brought few surprises. The source cited by BGR totally nailed this one. The Galaxy Nexus comes with the following specifications, as expected:

• 4.65-inch HD Super AMOLED display with a 1280 x 720-pixel resolution
• 8.94mm thin
• TI OMAP 4460 dual-core Cortex A9 processor clocked at 1.2GHz
• 1GB of RAM
• 16GB /32GB on-board storage, expandable by microSD card
• 5-megapixel camera with no shutter lag, full HD 1080p video recording at 30fps
• 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera
• HSPA+ or LTE, depending on carrier
• Near field communication (NFC)
• 1,750 mAh battery

The software powering this nifty smartphone, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, is equally impressive. The next generation of Android offers a refreshing interface and improved usability, as well as a bunch of new features -- such as phone unlocking by face recognition, resizable widgets, Android Beam (Bump-like feature, utilizing NFC) and mobile data tracking (handy if your carrier imposes a data cap). The Galaxy Nexus will be released in November, but developers can already start working on the new Android platform. Learn more about it on the Android Developers Blog. See a related story here. Photo: SamsungTomorrow