Gadgetory

hey what's up guys I'm Kim PhD here and it's no secret that I like Android pure I've gravitated towards devices running stock Android for the past couple of months or a year - and there are a couple of other devices that have come out for people with the same preference as me but the Nexus release which is roughly once a year tends to be the one that we wait for the most so this is the newest one this is the Nexus 6 and it's basically a big Moto X running stock Android no no like a really really really big Moto X running stock Android it's kind of hard to show exactly how big this phone is since everyone has different size hands and everyone's coming from a phone of a different size but if you've ever seen some of the larger phones on the market like here it is completely concealing the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 which means the larger footprint it has bigger dimensions in every single way it's also pretty similar in size to the iPhone 6 plus at least in terms of height but it's much wider and the iPhone is super thin while the Nexus 6 is a lot more sloping and rounded this is actually the first phone I've had that doesn't fit in the cup holder in my car I've used some like really wide phones before the oneplus one the Galaxy Note 4 really wide but this one's just freaking huge and I think the Galaxy mega is the only one that's been this massive but yeah the hardware is essentially a larger version of that moto X with a couple of minor changes which are all good I think I personally think the Moto X was already one of the better design phones of the year and all the changes made are an improvement over that already great phone so besides being much bigger you also get the dimple from the older moto X 2 years ago which I actually think was better it's a nice soft indentation with a subtle Motorola logo not the off-color tramp stamp and the word Nexus is engraved and filled with metal or at least some shiny material that looks like metal on the back it has the same power and volume buttons from that Moto X the ridged power button on the side and it's excellent and very clicky and tactile so these are excellent buttons actually liked that a lot except now they're in the middle of the phone so pretty far down and that's actually really good for holding it and pressing them with one handed use again you're probably not going to use this phone with one hand very often but I think they're in the right spot and you get the same met band all the way around the phone which is great for the way it feels in the hand I like using the word rigid to describe it this is probably the best hardware for this new software which I'll talk about in a bit but basically the display sort of melts over on to the sides so it's not a sharp corner like the note for the glass is curved at the very edges so you can drag your finger on and off the display with no problem which means you're dragging things in from the side bars that are all over Android 5.0 and yet you still have that metal Bend to grip on to when holding the phone and that part isn't slippery so it's a nice combination of round and flat now the back of the phone is round 2 so that means it's not going to sit still on any flat surface which drives me crazy a little bit because basically I text while my phone is flat on a desk all the time but that's basically impossible with the Nexus 6 the back isn't even that slippery it's a soft touch material but if you touch it at all it's going to start spinning and rocking and rotating wherever is sitting so that felt less elegant to me but it probably won't be that big of a deal for most people and the Nexus 6 also gets dual front-facing speakers they protrude a little bit so you can't set it flat the other way either but something that's we didn't get that at all in the Moto X we only had one speaker front-facing before here we have two so we get that stereo image of very loud clear directional sound from all your media and all your games it's not quite boom sound in terms of volume or quality honestly the lowest two or three notches of volume are basically silent and the highest to both sound like the max volume but overall it's much louder and clearer than any rear-facing or downward facing speakers yet they still manage to keep the bezels pretty small and the funny thing about these bezels so they aren't the same size at all as you can see which is funny because we're used to that symmetrical forehead and chin look but it's a bit smaller on the bottom bezel than the top kind of like the phone is also a little bit thinner on the bottom than the top due to that big sloping curve but these small bezels and front-facing speakers allow for a massive 5.9 six inch quad HD AMOLED display and that right there is the biggest difference versus the Moto X this display is crazy good and very very sharp at 493 ppi and it's overall really good probably one of the best in any smartphone not the best I would still give that to the Galaxy Note 4 right now but I mean it's very bright super sharp has those pitch black blacks and awesome saturation and contrast ratios from being an AMOLED display viewing angles are pretty good except for the extremes where it starts to rainbow out but that's really at the far extremes and colors are pretty good except when you turn the brightness all the way down which turns the display noticeably super pink like very pink since there's so much bright white in Android 5.0 you notice this stuff when you're using a phone at night it makes it so obvious how salmon-colored things look but some might argue that's actually a feature it's better for your eyes no it's not a feature it's just not quite as color accurate as some other panels it's still definitely beautiful though I mean the display overall contributes to a great hardware package the Nexus 6 is quite a nice phone to hold it's technically water-resistant the back is soft touch the whole build is like I said rigid with that metal again it's really really really big I know everyone's probably told this to you already but seriously it's a huge phone so that gives you a huge canvas for Google to play on with the software and of course this guy is running stock Android 5.0 lollipop and Android on this phone has so much new I mean I feel like the more I use it the more I uncover new features I mean you just kind of find new things all the time like literally the other day I visited droid life and of course the status bar of my whole phone changed to match the theme on their site which is something mobile developers can do now with Chrome never came across that until today I asleep keep messing with the quick settings all the time since I use them more and more every day and I keep finding new functionality and new clickable things that happen when you press buttons one really nice touch which you'll discover like day one is the quick settings disappear when you're changing the brightness to give you a preview of the change you're about to make to what's underneath similar to iOS 8 very nice and there are so many clickable parts to the quick settings now that you can basically get to almost any setting you want in one or two taps at a time which makes it very fast to use the phone and I've learned all these things really just with a couple of days of using it there aren't so many big screen optimizations in Android 5.0 like you might find in a skinned version of Android Google keeps their design language very universal so they they don't build things in that you wouldn't also want to see on a 4-inch phone another pretty unique new feature is called ambient display which takes advantage of the o LED display to show your notifications instead of an LED light and basically the way it works is when you pick up the phone it'll show you your clock and a black and white version of any of the notifications you have waiting for you it's a very sleek way doesn't use much battery at all kind of pulses in a subtle way and then you can touch the screen to bring them all to color and interact with them without ever touching the power button so it's not quite the same as tapped awake but since it requires you to pick up your phone to get it going it's a little bit of an extra step but I kind of like it and since it's just a software feature theoretically it can be improved with software updates and keep getting better but we really notice is all these animations everywhere and I did a separate video an entire video review of Android 5.0 lollipop and all its features and what's new and what's awesome so I'll leave a link to that right below that like button if you want to check it out I talked about all these animations a lot I think that video makes a really good companion to the nexus review the thing about performance on this Nexus 6 is there's these animations all over the place in Android 5.0 and those animations are smooth and they move at a really high frame rate so it feels like the phone is moving very well but if you take a step back and look at overall performance it's not all that much better than other phones and it's actually even though it benchmarks higher than a lot of other phones it doesn't perform better than a lot of those phones and again this is mostly because it has all those pixels to push on that quad HD display the overall feel of the OS is buttery smooth all the way through and I love that it's just that sometimes launching applications or you see this occasional stutter things just feel like a half a step slow once in a while and you'll notice that because you didn't see those same stutters on the top of the line 1080p phones and it again feels like that first generation pod of quiet HD devices the same way we had that first generation pod of 1080p devices we're moving up into the performance of everything else and we'll soon see it I mean I'm sure software updates will continue to improve performance and I tend to be less harsh on things that I believe can be fixed with software updates and since it's a nexus it's first in line for software updates but again in terms of performance it's very very smooth as you would expect out of stock Android just don't expect it to blow your mind in terms of being better just because the benchmark score is so high now being huge also gives you all the x-ray advantages of having all that extra space inside and one of them is that huge battery space so the Nexus 6 at ten and a half millimeters thick with all those curves has room inside for a thirty two hundred million power cell so the battery life on the Nexus 6 you would expect I guess with Android 5.0 peer stock project Volta the Android runtime and a 3200 milliamp hour battery you would expect that with all that this phone should set a new standard for how long phones should last in your pocket not this one we are clearly still in that first generation of quad HD phones where basically all smartphones tend to be in this sort of a bubble of roughly average battery life and then quad HD phones are over here sort of moving up into this level over the next couple of months but we're still in that first generation and the Nexus 6 battery life is average at best now my usage isn't the same as everyone else but just to give a number my average screen on time at the end of the day after one charge with this guy was about three to three-and-a-half hours of use where with a 1080p stock Android phone like the oneplus one I use for a couple months I would get more like four to four and a half hours of screen on time so it'll still last me an entire day I'll usually dip into the last 15 percent of the battery at the end of every single day so it's not like I have plenty of battery to spare but it's a quad HD phone and it clearly suffers from having all those extra pixels to push around in the battery life Department now it does have a no LED display and you can save battery there and it has a pretty good standby time so if you have a light usage day you'll be totally fine but the main way that they essentially remedy this is by having turbo charging this is a Motorola device so it came with the Motorola turbo charger which is essentially just a higher amperage version of a regular charger that this will accept any cable will work and it worked really well it did get pretty warm while turbo charging but I don't think that harms the battery at all and I'd be surprised by how much charge I could get back by just a couple of minutes of being plugged in so if I had a particularly heavy day and I happen to be back near the charger before the end of the day and I want to juice up real quick just to make sure I get enough the turbo charging worked fantastic and at least that was a bright side of that also I could swear that the Nexus 6 is supposed to support wireless charging qi wireless charging but as much as I tried in as much as I tried to Finnick around with the Nexus 5 Qi wireless charger from last year's model I could never get it to recognize it or charge at all so maybe I'm gonna have to buy another charger maybe they'll release another Nexus charger this year but couldn't get that to work there's also a battery saver mode that disables a bunch of radios and limits performance and things like that to get you the most editor last 15% or so of your battery but I almost avoided using it since the animations all got super choppy when you limit performance so I'd rather just pop in the charger for a few minutes and charge up overall battery grade for the Nexus 6 I'd give it something like a c-plus but again if you grade it on a curve and compare it to all the other quad HD phones the note 4 would get that a plus and then Nexus 6 would get something like a B+ also connectivity on this phone is something that's done really well surprisingly well even though it's a little thing if you're an 18 T customer like I am stick your nano SIM in the top and you have all your bends get to go plug and play you're a t-mobile customer stick your nano SIM in you're good to go all your bends plug-and-play you have cellular customer same thing if you're a Verizon customer same thing this is plug and play with a Verizon nano SIM 2 and it has all those bands which is probably the best way to do it because we all saw what happens when you try to work with Verizon for Nexus now cameras and Nexus phones have never really been a strong suit to put it lightly there's hope for it every year and it does get better each time but it's never really an A+ camera this time it's Motorola Stern to give it a shot and I basically like I said it's a blown-up Moto X so you're looking at the same 13 megapixel sensor here with a ringed diffuser around an LED flash on the back plus that extra space inside is enough room to add optical image stabilization so the software to take photos is great it's very very fast getting back to the Galaxy Nexus roots of a near-instant shutter at least in decent light but it seems to have some focusing problems in less than decent light so sometimes I'd tap to take a picture and then it would totally re hunt to find focus again and then snap but overall taking photos on the huge crispy bright viewfinder hard to complain about that so with the photos themselves the camera is actually better than the Nexus 5 which is good it should be and the colors look really good the sharpness is on point and it's a pretty decent image most of the time so thumbs up there it's fun because it actually looks really really good when you're taking it on the phone on looking it on that awesome display but when you take it back to the computer and blow it up and really inspect them I can see some of that Motorola image processing and a little bit of softness but overall I'm impressed to say the least that this isn't a disappointing camera anymore at all there are still a few gripes though tap to expose for one thing was super aggressive so if you tap to expose on a dark area it's going to blow out your highlights with a hot exposure but vice versa is true too so if you tap on a bright area to expose you lose all of your shadows in darkness so you really want to be careful where you choose to tap to expose with this camera because the dynamic range is not that great and depending on where you tap you can end up with two totally different images but hey you still have HDR Plus which is great and works very well and we also still have those other features in the Google camera that people tend to forget about like the panorama mode which keeps getting better and better it's getting better at not only taking pictures but stitching them together without any flaws so I'm often impressed with the results here and photo spheres which are still really cool and I'll actually upload this one here to Google+ and link it in the description too I think it looks really good and you can basically stand where I stood while looking at the photo kind of like the bubble in Google Streetview but overall you have photos and videos from the Nexus 6 were pretty good way better than just acceptable so that made me happy it shoots 4k video too and still has optical image stabilization so that was great even though it still had some focus hunting problems once in a while and there's no HDR for video obviously so the dynamic range is limited again but overall it's good to have and a welcome addition and the photos in anything but the lowest of low light were very shareable and pleasant to the eye so I give the camera the most improved award especially compared to other nexuses so good job Motorola also I am super ready for the raw photo capabilities whenever they arrive so at the end of the day overall yes this is a nexus but we got to keep in mind that this is still a huge quad HD Moto X running stock Android that's the TL DW of this video and if you like that if you like that idea or that concept then you'll love this phone and the thing is this isn't this isn't the best quad HD phone right now I will give that crown to the Galaxy Note 4 with a better display a better battery life and overall very similar specs but you have to deal with TouchWiz on the Galaxy Note 4 and that software is not my favorite in the way it looks at the way the way it acts and feels so Android 5.0 here is stock and when you get Android 5.0 on the note 4 it's not really going to look like this basically you have to be really into software and really want Android 5.0 in order to justify this one being a better buy it is a little bit less expensive too it's six hundred and forty nine dollars to start which is marginally better than some other really high-end phones like this but this is a phone for the Android heads the Android purists who don't mind moving to the larger display even if you don't get any extra optimizations or any crazy bells and whistle features this is for the people who are really into it for stock Android and if you're into it for that this is the best phone you can buy right now no regrets right there but again there are plenty of other choices out there for you to decide between I am comfortable making this my daily driver at least for now well I think it's one of the best software experiences on any phone right now but that might change and I will certainly have videos on other phones coming up of tees other things already that I'm working on right now but that's basically it that's the Nexus 6 so thanks for watching I hope you enjoy feel free to subscribe if you want to see more videos like this and I'll talk to you guys in the next one bass you