Stefan Mileschin

Back at Google I/O, the search giant announced the Samsung Galaxy S 4 with Nexus User Experience, a device which combined Samsung's SGS4 hardware and the stock Android experience atop it. Later on, HTC made an announcement of its own about an upcoming HTC device with the same exact promise – unadulterated HTC One hardware running unadulterated Android. Both devices originally didn't have formal names, they're now the Samsung Galaxy S 4 Google Play edition and HTC One Google Play edition, respectively (henceforth SGS4 GPe or HTC One GPe).

Google I/O went on to be a not so subtle breakdown of Google's strategy to de-couple more of the platform from the primary point releases of Android to get more consistent user experiences and APIs across the ecosystem. While many expected new hardware and a new version of Android, although both were teased, the real big news was primarily Google solidifying more of the experience consistency for developers and users alike. If you look at that theme from a higher level, you can see how Google also clearly wants to extend this to hardware through an ambitious new Google Play edition initiative which starts with the HTC One and Galaxy S 4 Google Play editions. The hardware is already a known entity – we've reviewed both the HTC One and the Snapdragon 600-based Galaxy S 4 – the question is how that experience works with stock Android. Read on for the full review.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7107/h...w-nearly-nexus