Google announces Nexus S with Gingerbread, out 16 December

After much rumour and several leaks, Google has officially announced its two worst-kept secrets – the Nexus S phone and the next edition of Android OS, Gingerbread (or version 2.3 if you don’t have a particularly sweet tooth).

The Samsung-manufactured Nexus S features everything we’ve reported on before, including a front-facing camera, Near Field Communication technology (which can be used for mobile payments) and a convex screen.

Called the Contour Display (someone's got Retina envy), this four-inch piece of glass gently curves, making the phone fit “comfortably in the palm of your hand and along the side of your face.”

It’ll be interesting to see how it affects game playing, as we’ve been used to dead flat displays ever since we started laying finger to glass a couple of years ago.

Google claims that the screen’s “luminance is up to 1.5x higher than conventional LCD displays.” This is no doubt a result of the Super AMOLED technology introduced by Samsung in its Galaxy S handset – which the Nexus S bears a strong resemblance to.

The Nexus S is also powered by the same 1GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird processor as Samsung’s device. It’s a fine chip by today’s standards, but with 2011 set to be the year mobile processors go dual-core, it could find itself left behind pretty rapidly.

One area that will certainly be a huge improvement with the Nexus S is in its software, with the device set to showcase the new Gingerbread 2.3 version of Android OS.

Google runs through the key improvements over on its Official Google Blog. These include: “user interface refinements, NFC support, a new keyboard and text selection tool, Internet (VoIP/SIP) calling, improved copy/paste functionality and gyroscope sensor support.”

It also features a natty new black and green colour scheme, making it more mint choc-chip than gingerbread.

The Nexus S with Gingerbread will be available in the UK from December 20 online or through Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy. Our US cousins will receive it four days earlier.