Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm KB HD here and this is the Nexus 5 this is easily one of the most anticipated phones of this whole year and now it's here now it's official and this is the full review so start off with the design so this one comes in black or white and a 16 or 32 gigabyte model I chose the 32 gig white I'm calling it the Stormtrooper phone others are calling it the panda phone but I like it I think the design is pretty classy pretty clean and neat I did a full video actually on all the differences between the black and white model so that'll be the first video link right below that like button but the the only thing I found since that video is that those white Nexus 5 is really not actually pure white it's actually more of a shale or off-white color to prevent it from getting noticeably dirty very quickly and that works but the Nexus 5 has a very understated design like some other Google hardware LG manufactures this guy but it looks almost nothing like the LG g2 that it's technically based off of as a soft touch finish on the back and it's totally flat like very little curved until you get to the outside edges and then there's a camera bump but one thing that really strikes you when you're holding the Nexus 5 is just how light it feels in the hand when you first pick it up out the box it feels unreasonably light but it's only a hundred and thirty grams so way lighter than the Nexus 4 and the HTC One that's made of metal it's actually the same weight as the Galaxy s4 but it still feels more solid in the hand because of that soft touch finish on the back the rubberized back and although this white one does have some glossy plastic on the sides but in the words of Matias Duarte this is hardcore plastic now seriously he actually said that either way the rest of the Nexus 5 design is pretty solid the buttons are really nice and clicky ER and more tactile than most other phones that screams quality and speaking of quality another thing about this phone that's impressive is the display and rightfully so it's a 5-inch 1080p display and it's incredibly sharp as you'd expect with 441 pixels per inch and it's an LCD display so it's super high brightness in daylight the viewable a ton of angles and overall a very accurate pleasing display to the eye the only possible complaint I could have about this panel are the contrast ratio sometimes it looks a little bit washed out and the fact that I could see the LCD panels backlight when holding the phone at an angle I don't know if I just got to use 2 AMOLED displays that don't have this problem or never realize this but it became a thing that I just kept noticing but this is hands-down a big beautiful display it's even accented a bit more by the fact that the navigation bar at the bottom and the notification is up top or transparent so the display really just dominates a big wall on the front of the phone also another minor thing I noticed on the white model the circular earpiece which is already pretty unique kind of glows a bit and every time I pull the phone out of my pocket especially outside I kind of have expected that to be the notification light because it's so bright but it's not it's just a really bright constantly glowing white orb in the rest of an otherwise black phone the actual notification light is multicolored and it's in the bottom center just like the Nexus 7's but I think it would have been awesome if they put the multicolor LED in the earpiece oh and the the earpiece on the device and the voice quality are actually pretty good actually really liked that little accent for the earpiece but what's not really good is this speaker oh you try to cram the same specs as a high-end $700 phone into a 350 dollar phone you inevitably have to make some sort of shortcut and speaker at the bottom of the Nexus 5 is definitely one of those shortcuts it is very very very very very bad for any smart phone not only is it firing out of the bottom of the phone which means sideways audio and landscape but just like the iPhone 5s only the left grille is a speaker and the right grille is just a pretty microphone so if you accidentally cover just that tiny area with your finger which I did all the time you ruin the audio and have to readjust your hand easily the most disappointing part of the hardware on the whole Nexus 5 is that speaker now onto something that a lot of other people have been disappointed by in the hardware is the camera all right because of a lot of the other high-end internals on this phone a lot of people are expecting the camera to be high-end as well it's not it's not there one of those shortcuts that LG had to make to get this device to be just $350 off contract so it's definitely a conscious decision they made in fact this phone is shares almost all of the same internals as the LG g2 which is much more expensive off contract but they use a different camera sensor and totally different optics so this was a conscious decision that they made to go with this sensor it's an 8 megapixel sensor behind F 2.4 glass with optical image stabilization and an LED flash nothing too extreme here here's the thing the photos that it takes are average I'd say better than the Moto X and the Nexus 4 not as good as the Galaxy Note 3 or Lumia 1020 somewhere in the middle average the outdoor situations and brightly lit scenarios where you'd expect any camera to do well it does fine the shots are decent with sharpness and detail and the colors are accurate which is nice not every smartphone gets the colors right but in situations where you'd say you know hey it'd be nice to get a really sweet shot here and questionable lighting don't count on it don't count on getting a sweet shot out of the Nexus 5 because it isn't happening it's just not that high-end a sensor and it's not up to that task no shot that you get from the Nexus 5 is going to blow anyone out of the water and make them think oh wow you took that with a phone no way I mean it does fine and the shots that you take are good enough to share on Twitter and really anywhere on the web but like we said this isn't going to match the $700 high-end smartphone cameras naturally it actually does its best it really shines in low-light no pun intended okay that was totally intended but low-light is one of its strongest points thanks to the optical image stabilization in fact I'd say this Nexus 5 takes some of the best low-light shots of any smartphone next to the HTC One of a full gallery of all my sample shots linked in the description below if you want to check out any of those I think a lot of the reason people aren't as happy with the Nexus 5 camera experience is because it's not fast anymore it used to be really fast if you remember when the Galaxy Nexus was introduced had instant shutter you could just fire off photos rapid fire and instant shutter would take care of that for you really fast the Nexus 5 as far as I can tell it just doesn't have it anymore there's no instant shutter in this new camera app and cameras have always been the weakest point of Nexus devices and this is no exception the software is pretty slow to open up the camera app and then once the camera app is open it's pretty slow to actually take the photo once you've pressed the shutter button a lot of times you want to get HDR mode on and that particular mode takes us a full second or two actually turn on and then actually taking hdr+ photo also takes a full second or so before it processes and you're already ready to take the next shot so in between shot time is really long the first time you take a shot it takes a while to open up the camera and it takes a while to switch between modes so I would characterize this as a slow camera and that doesn't give anyone any sort of confidence when taking shots with it I mentioned in another review video of a recent phone the Moto X where the camera was just awful as well this is on a very very software level this could be entirely fixed through a software update I would encourage Google to push the stock camera after the Play Store like Motorola did with theirs and make it better through that because this is really the worst part of the software this phone this camera app could use a lot of work but at least something that I loved about the Nexus 5's camera app is the video mode the optical image stabilization makes for some really smooth video which is awesome focusing is pretty quick you can take pictures while recording and the microphone is really good as you can probably hear it's easily one of the best in any smartphone I've ever used and that's LG's fault so good job LG I appreciate the awesome mic and the video quality is that much better because of it but of course this is the Nexus device so the main focus here let's be honest really isn't the hardware it's most definitely the software and of course this is running the latest version of brand new Android 4.4 KitKat in fact it's the only device right now on the market running KitKat and the word I would use to describe KitKat on this phone is clean that's the word that keeps coming to mind when looking at this new design in fact it feels like a very understated minimal OS for a very clean minimal understated phone design first thing you'll notice is the transparency and they've removed a lot of the holo blue accents from jellybean and made those elements pure white so there's no crazy colors going on here anymore for the most part except for that Settings app which apparently they forgot to remove the blue from but the real point here of the new design is to let the apps take center stage let the Play stores take center stage and apps are now the main focus even their icons are bigger and as a newly adjusted Roboto font and even this further supported immersion mode which will encourage apps to take up the full screen and hide the notification bar and the navigation bar now KitKat is way less memory hungry than previous versions of Android in fact it lowered the system requirements to half a gig of ram so that's not a problem for the Nexus 5 plus the Nexus 5 has a Snapdragon 800 2.3 gigahertz quad-core processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM so performance here is exactly as you would expect it's buttery it's very responsive and smooth and silky and whatever other words you want to use to describe the feeling of using stock Android on a high-end device it's all of that and that goes for multitasking and switching between open apps and for launching new apps and this goes for web browsing and scrolling around in Chrome it's all very familiar stuff like the Google Play edition galaxy s4 and the Google Play edition HTC One it performs just like those which is great and since jellybean supports trim an newest version of android supports trim as well long story short here is this phone is likely going to perform really well just like this for years to come but even after knowing all that you know it's weird the battery life I'm surprised by how inconsistent that battery life really was with this Nexus 5 now it has a Snapdragon 800 chip and that's supposed to be a power sipper and Android 4.4 is supposed to be less memory intensive and there's supposed to be you know new location settings in Android 4.4 to use even less battery an optimization on a Nexus device should be at an all-time high and has a modest-sized 2300 million power battery but yet actually could not make it through an entire day on the Nexus 5 battery without recharging at some point during the day still haven't done it and that sucks I mean I get up at 7 a.m. and at some point before maybe 5 p.m. the battery will be dead and I have to get it onto a charger now it helps that this supports wireless charging so I can just drop it on an orb anywhere and it helps that it's actually a quick charger because it's only a 2300 million power battery but still I wish the battery was better the phone is very slim it's it's one of the thinnest out there and it's already extremely light I would not have a problem at all if LG had put a larger battery inside and made it a little bit thicker bigger phones even the curved phones out there right now tend to be a little bit easier to hold from the flat thin ones and this is a flat fin phone and I would have rather seen a slightly bigger and maybe more curved phone with a bigger battery just to get it through the day at least once now as technically a developer device I don't even know how much Google would care about the battery life the camera and the speaker on the Nexus 5 but at least two out of these three things could potentially be fixed with an update to Android straight from Google and it's a nexus so you will get that update fast and I love KitKat already it's the most advanced version of Android yet it's the most beautiful version of Android yet and that makes using the phone an absolute pleasure and I use my phone all the time I'm basically a power user I could say and if I could find a way to get more than what seems like the maximum of three hours of screen on time in one charge I would be super happy with this phone but even now I am definitely satisfied and I'm moderately happy using what I think is a really sharp eye catching device and the best version of Android out there KitKat it also has one of the smallest learning curves of any versions of Android there is more visual cues starting right on the lockscreen where they have an up arrow for Google now and an actual camera icon like iOS 7 that tells you that you can swipe to get into the camera it's an even better thought-out operating system and you can see much more attention to detail and a lot of places even if they did forget to take out the holo blue from the settings there are so also all kinds of little little things in android 4.4 that you notice after a while they're like hey why does it do that you know little quirks like in the hangouts SMS integration it has a separate thread for your hangouts and your SMS from the same person I feel like it should recognize names and combine those there's also two photo apps and Android 4.4 not really sure why if they're planning on merging them or not I don't know they're just kind of there so there's little things like that but you'll probably end up seeing all the biggest problems with it fixed in software updates and like 4.4.1 very soon which you will be seeing immediately if you have a nexus 5 so the bottom line is this Nexus 5 is the most Google phone that's ever been made it's it's some people like to call it pure Android and as far as we can tell it still is but it feels like a Google experienced Android whereas you also have the Samsung experience Android and HTC and the Sony experience Android this feels like the Google version of Android which a lot of people will like if you're looking for a high-end device with no compromises and all the best specs and on paper statistics and numbers and things like that the Nexus 5 is just flat out not for you you'd be better off with something like the HTC One or the Galaxy Note 3 or the Lumia 1020 or something like that but if you're looking for the most pure google experience and you want to be first in line for android updates and you want to have all the same things that the other Nexus is have plus a little bit because it's a Nexus 5 well then this is the phone for you buy it the Nexus 5 when you don't consider the price is great the Nexus 5 when you do consider the price is in a league of its own because there really isn't any other $350 phone with a Snapdragon 800 and the latest version of Android there just isn't another phone like that for $350 so it's in a sort of a class of its own which is why a lot of people have a hard time deciding what to compare it with it inevitably gets compared with other $700 phones rather than other $350 phones I think Google could decide to make a $700 nexus and not make any compromises like the camera and the speaker but right now this is the Nexus 5 we have and it's recommended for a certain group of people and if you're considering buying it you're probably in that group of people you know who you are and I wouldn't hesitate I would just pick one out anyway this is Ben mkbhd thank you for watching if you enjoyed this video review of the Nexus 5 be sure to share it and of course there's a subscribe button below if you want to see more videos like this coming up very soon either way I'll talk to you guys in the next one thanks for watching talk to you later peace you you