Gadgetory

hey everyone my name is Taylor and ever since the Nexus 6 was announced last year it's been one of the most polarizing Android smartphones pretty much ever it's big it comes with some of the best specifications you can find on a phone anywhere and it has one of the best experiences we've ever seen on Android but there are a lot of things that not everyone knows about the Nexus 6 and a lot of things omitted from the spec sheets when it was first released so here are some Nexus 6 tips and tricks first things first this film comes unlocked from Google which is standard for most Nexus devices but unlike most unlike smartphones this phone in particular will work on pretty much any carrier here in the US so there are two separate SKU models one is for the US only and the other is for the rest of the world if you get the US only model of this phone you're looking at GSM support for 850 900 1800 and 1900 as well as CDMA bands 0 1 and 10 that's already a lot of support there but you're also getting WCDMA bands for one two four five and eight as well as practically all LTE bands basically this means that you could get the unlocked version like this one here straight from Google and put a Verizon SIM card in and it gets CDMA support LTE support make calls and have a fully functional phone and theoretically if you can get a phone from Verizon and have it unlocked you could also take that to another carrier if that carrier permits so it all is in the hands of the carrier not the phone the phone is capable and it's just up to the carrier to actually allow that but when you get a big smart phone like this which has an awesome display really loud speakers and practically caters towards multimedia consumption you're also going to want to keep an eye on your data consumption because you can blow through your data cap very very quickly the easiest way to do that is to pull down your notification shade and long press on your mobile network settings that's immediately going to shoot you over to a quick overview of your data consumption and then from there you can go into your data settings you can set your limit other things there but that's a quick way to check your data consumption for the month this smartphone may also come with a large battery in comparison to other smart phones it has a 30 to 20 milliamp hour battery but despite the proclaimed one day battery life many users struggle to make an entire day on this phone even though it does have a pretty large battery fortunately there are some ways to combat that one way is by turning off the ambient display mode which also the screen with notifications as they come in not totally unlike Motorola's own active or attentive display features on both Moto X's personally I really find the ambient display feature really helpful but if you turn it off google claims you will get an extra 80 hours of standby time so that's a pretty significant difference and if you want to improve the battery life on your Nexus 6 you might want to consider turning that feature off if you decide not to turn off that feature you may want to consider bringing this guy along with you this is the turbo charger which comes in the box with the Nexus 6 and it supplies a whopping 15 watts of the charge that's a lot more than what most other charger supply and with as little as a 15 minute charge google claims you can get another 6 hours of use out of the Nexus 6 now I don't know how close to that six hour figure I get with the Nexus 6 when I use the turbo charger but I can definitely say it charges a lot faster with this thing than the other charges I have despite having higher amperages the turbo charger definitely works and if you have another $35 laying around it's worth getting a second one unlike its smaller sibling the Moto X the Nexus 6 actually comes with qi wireless charging and that was actually something that was not mentioned on the spec sheets when this phone was originally announced it definitely has it in there and if you place this on a Qi charger it will definitely charge and now it's actually listed on the spec sheets on both motorola and google sites but originally it wasn't it's a really easy way to get a supplementary charge just drop it in the charger when you're not using it and when you pick it up later you'll have a little extra juice some people don't care for wireless charging it doesn't hurt to have it there personally I prefer it another feature not originally announced alongside the Nexus 6 is it's resistant to the elements like the Moto X it is water-resistant and it doesn't necessarily come with an IP rating or an ingress protection rating so I don't exactly know how protected it is against the elements but it definitely is because it has a nano coating just like the Moto X the 13 megapixel camera around back not only means you can take high-res pictures but also high-res video it's not enabled by default but if you go into the camera go to settings and choose your video resolution you can actually choose Ultra HD or 4k that's right this thing will also shoot in 4k and it's optically stabilized which is very very helpful lollypops new sound and notification settings might take some getting used to but they also come with a very very helpful feature called downtime downtime is basically a do not disturb mode which you can set on a schedule simply go to settings sound and notifications interruptions and scroll to the bottom there you can set the days of the week and start and end times for downtime another lesser-known fact about the Nexus 6 it has a notification LED but where it's actually right below the speaker on the front the earpiece speaker at the top there's an LED notification hit just underneath that just like with the first moto X it's not in use though and you can't use it unless you root so it's there it's for the taking but you have to be able to root and unlock your bootloader to take advantage of it finally because this thing has such a large display it's really nice to be able to take advantage of different keyboards now of course you can go to google play and download a third-party keyboard like swift key or swipe or any of those third-party keyboards but there's actually a built-in keyboard from Google which will actually allow you to take advantage of the extra space the next time you have your keyboard open long press on the comma and go to keyboard settings from there go to appearance and layouts custom input style and create a new keyboard choose your language of preference and then scroll down and select PC the next time you open your keyboard hit the globe key and you should have a dedicated number row alongside some dedicated symbols buttons going back to your old keyboard as as simple as hitting the globe key once more but that is going to do it for the Nexus 6 tips and tricks if you enjoyed it and I hope you did please click the thumbs up button below and subscribe to the channel to see more awesome content from the android authority crew right here on youtube also go to android authority comm for your source on all things Android until next time my name is Taylor Martin you can find me on twitter at casper tech and i see you in the next one