Just days after the Apple iPhone 4S launch, Google and Samsung have joined forces to announce the Samsung Galaxy Nexus - the actual name for the much-rumoured Google Nexus Prime smartphone. It's the first Android Ice Cream Sandwich smartphone.

Talk of the third Nexus phone following the Nexus One and the Nexus S had grown in recent months, with evidence mounting that the Galaxy Nexus was set for launch before the end of the year. Following the re-scheduled Google and Samsung event, here's what we know about the Android phone with which Samsung will be hoping eclipse the success of T3's Phone of the Year, the Samsung Galaxy S2.

Samsung Galaxy Nexus Specs

Amongst the notable features is a hulking 4.65-inches Super AMOLED HD screen with a resolution of 1280x720 pixels, HD video recording at 1080p, a 5-Megapixel rear-facing camera and a 1.3-Megapixel front-facing camera.

Storage comes in 16 or 32GB flacours, while a dual-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz, with 1GB of RAM, keeps things monstrously fast. NFC technology is stuffed inside, for wireless payments as well as the new Android Beam sharing app.

Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus screen plans were seemingly leaked by the company’s official Romanian Samsung Mobile Twitter feed earlier this year, when a tweet which was hastily deleted, read: “Yes, the next Nexus will be Samsung and it will have Super AMOLED HD.”

Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Android Ice Cream Sandwich OS

Just like the Samsung Nexus S became the first Android phone to sport Android 2.3 Gingerbread, the Galaxy Nexus will be the first device to host Android Ice Cream Sandwich. The OS merges the best of Honeycomb with Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

The first thing many people will encounter is the lock screen, as with Ice Cream Sandwich Google has taken a new approach to unlocking. By using the front-facing camera, ICS's facial-recognition determines if the person using the phone is the owner, and then unlocks it.

Once inside there are the familiar horizontal homescreens which can be swiped across and filled with apps and widgets, however there's the addition of some neat graphics, which have clearly taken cues from Honeycombs 3D-effect UI. This is continued when you try to add apps and widgets, bringing up a similar grid in which you can place them and in some cases resize them using multi-touch.

Elsewhere you'll find new additions such as a completely new browser which offers tabbed browsing, as well as a new Gmail app which allows truly offline use. A integrated task manager has finally been included letting you kill off all those pesky apps that are sucking the precious battery from your beloved device.

Finally, the camera is a completely redesigned application, with built-in image-editing - a feature that was leaked earlier this week.

Samsung Galaxy Nexus Prime pictures and video

Click through our gallery above to see the full range of official snaps. Below is a rather nerd-tastic promor video fo the new phone running Ice Cream Sandwich:

Samsung Galaxy Nexus UK release date

T3 exclusively spoke to Andrew Glass, Sales Director at Samsung UK who told us that the Galaxy Nexus will be "in shops sooner than you think.” To that end, the phone has officially been announced for both Three and O2, but no prices or official date has been set as of yet.

Excited about the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Android Ice Cream Sandwich? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below