My Xperia Z managed to last almost 2 years before things started to go awry. Sure it wasn’t exactly a smooth road for the entire time I had the phone, what with the NFC update refusing to apply every time I rebooted my phone or the myriad of issues that plagued its Android 4.4 release, but it worked well enough that I was willing to let most of those problems slide. However the last month of its life saw its performance take a massive dive and no matter what I did to cajole it back to life it continued to spurt and stutter making for a rather frustrating experience. I had told myself that my next phone would be a stock Android experience so I could avoid any potential carrier or manufacturer issues and that left me with one option: the Nexus 6. I’ve had this phone for just over a month now and I have to say that I can’t see myself going back to a non-stock experience.
First things first: the size. When I moved to the Xperia Z I was blown away by how big it was and figured that anything bigger would just become unwieldy. Indeed when I pulled the Nexus 6 out of the box it certainly felt like a behemoth beside my current 5″ device however it didn’t take me long to grow accustomed to the size. I attribute this mostly to the subtle design features like the tapered edges and the small dimple on the back where the Motorola logo is which make the phone both feel thinner and more secure in the hand than its heft would suggest. I definitely appreciate the additional real estate (and the screen is simply gorgeous) although had the phone come in a 5″ variant I don’t think I’d be missing out on much. Still if the size was the only thing from holding you back on buying this handset I’d err on the side of taking the plunge as it quickly becomes a non-issue.
The 2 years since my last upgrade have seen a significant step up in the power that mobile devices are capable of delivering and the Nexus 6 is no exception in this regard. Under the hood it’s sporting a quad core 2.7GHz Qualcomm chip coupled with 3GB RAM and the latest Adreno GPU, the 420. Most of this power is required to drive the absolutely bonkers resolution of 2560 x 1440 which it does admirably for pretty much everything, even being able to play the recently ported Hearthstone relatively well. This is all backed by an enormous 3220mAh battery which seems more than capable of keeping this thing running all day, even when I forget that I’ve left tethering enabled (usually has about 20% left the morning after I’ve done that). The recent updates seem to have made some slight improvements to this but I didn’t have enough time before the updates came down to make a solid comparison.
Layered on top of this top end piece of silicon is the wonderful Android 5.1 (codename Lollipop) which, I’m glad to say, lives up to much of the hype that I had read about it before laying down the cash for the Nexus 6. The material design philosophy that Google has adopted for its flagship mobile operating system is just beautiful and with most of the big name applications adhering to it you get an experience that’s consistent throughout the Android ecosystem. Of course applications that haven’t yet updated their design stick out like a sore thumb, something which I can only hope will be a non-issue within a year or so. The lack of additional crapware also means that the experience across different system components doesn’t vary wildly, something which was definitely noticeable on the Xperia Z and my previous Android devices.
Indeed this is the first Android device that I’ve owned that just works, as opposed to my previous ones which always required a little bit of tinkering here or there to sand off the rough edges of either the vendor’s integration bits or the oddities of the current Android release of the time. The Nexus 6 with its stock 5.1 experience has required no such tweaking with my only qualm being that newly installed widgets weren’t available for use until I rebooted my phone. Apart from that the experience has been seamless from the initial set up (which, with NFC, was awesomely simple) all the way through my daily use through the last month.
The Nexus line of handsets always got a bad rap for the quality of the camera but, in all honesty, it seems about on par with my Xperia Z. This shouldn’t be surprising since they both came with one of the venerable Exmor chips from Sony which have a track history of producing high quality cameras for phones. The Google Camera software layered on top of it though is streets ahead of what Sony had provided, both in terms of functionality and performance. The HDR mode seems to actually work as advertised, as demonstrated above, being able to extract a lot more detail of a scene than I would’ve expected from a phone camera. Of course the tiny sensor size still means that low light performance isn’t its strong suit but I’ve long since moved past the point in my life where blurry pictures in a club were things I looked on fondly.
Overall I’m very impressed with the Google Nexus 6 as my initial apprehension had me worried that I’d end up regretting my purchase. I’m glad to say that’s not the case at all as my experience has been nothing short of stellar and has confirmed my suspicions that the only Android experience anyone should have is the stock one. Unfortunately that does limit your range of handsets severely but it does seem that more manufacturers are coming around to the idea of providing a stock Android experience, opening up the possibility of more handsets with the ideal software powering it. Whilst it might not be as cheap as other Nexus phones before it the Nexus 6 is most certainly worth the price of admission and I’d have no qualms about recommending it to other Android fans.
