Nexus 6 review - Google's Note 4 phablet rival

Google’s Nexus brand is a fickle beast, hopping from one manufacturer to the next. After a successful stint with LG, the latest recipient of its blessing is Motorola. That makes some sense as the company was Google-owned until its recent shift to Lenovo. The Nexus 6 is undoubtedly a Motorola device, being a dead ringer for the excellent Moto X (2nd Gen). It’s bigger, though, much bigger. Its titular 6in screen puts it among the largest smartphones we’ve ever seen, bigger even than the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 at 5.7in. But is bigger better?

DESIGN

We’ve already waxed lyrical at length in our admiration for the new Moto X’s design, and the same applies here. The rear is a delightful collision of lines and curves, all tapering to narrow edges that terminate in an aluminium frame. It feels very tough and rigid.

The smooth, slightly-soft rear panel is a pleasure to hold. The headphone socket, camera lens, Motorola and Nexus logos, and the USB port all fall perfectly in line down the centre of the handset. The ridged power button sits neatly under your forefinger; you’ll need it, too, as there’s no double-tap to wake, which we saw on the HTC Nexus 9 tablet.

The front of the phone is a gloss black and largely featureless. There are slim bezels, around 3.5mm, on either side of the screen. At the top and bottom are forward-firing stereo speakers, for watching videos in landscape aspect, but despite this there’s still little in the way of bezel above and below the screen.

There are no physical buttons here, as on Galaxy handsets or iPhones, with everything dealt with using onscreen buttons instead. There’s no rim or edge around the screen either, it simply curves away to meet the metal frame on the edge.

In terms of measurements, the 6in screen makes it understandably a bit larger face-on than the 5.7in Galaxy Note 4 - 159x83mm compared to 154x79mm. On paper it’s a tad chunkier as well, being 10.1mm deep compared to the Note 4’s 8.5mm. In practice though there’s nothing in it, with the nexus 6’s slender edges and subtly bulging rear panel feeling just as slender as the Note 4’s slim slab.

Of course, the sheer size will put some off. Our largest members of staff found they could still grasp the phone one-handed and reach across the display, but not to the opposite corner. Your average person is really looking at using this two-handed, especially given there’s no provision made to one-handed use, as with the resizing screen space on both the Note 4 and iPhone 6 Plus.

DISPLAY

However you tackle it, the screen is truly huge at a massive 6in across. The AMOLED display has the now-typical, but still absurdly detailed, 2,560x1,440 resolution we’ve seen on the Note 4 and LG G3. The sheer screen size does drop the pixels-per-inch figure to a mere 493, which is a tad below that of those other handsets, but not noticeably.

As important as raw resolution claims are the number of subpixels being used for each claimed pixel. The Note 4 uses Samsung’s latest AMOLED technology, which utilises a new diamond shaped pixel structure, with fewer of the larger red and blue pixels and more of the smaller green ones. The Nexus 6 looks to use an older subpixel structure with simpler bar-shaped subpixels. In practice that means the Note 4 is slightly sharper-looking. We’re splitting hairs here though, given how fine the detail is on both screens.

Colour is a far bigger issue for the Nexus 6. AMOLED screens have long suffered from inaccurate colour reproduction compared to their LCD cousins, though that has been offset by their far superior contrast. Now the two are converging, with contrast improving on LCDs and the Note 4 showing itself capable of good accuracy; largely thanks to multiple colour temperature settings, of which the ‘Basic’ setting accurately tracks sRGB.

After that, the Nexus 6 is a big step backwards. Despite having 100% sRGB coverage, the colours are way off the sRGB standard in our tests, being far too saturated and garish. Purists will hate it, but those who like their TV sets as they come from the shop, full of vibrant hues, won’t be overly put off. In our experience most people prefer something a bit livelier and warmer than sRGB but this is still over-egging it somewhat.

All that said, it’s hard not to enjoy watching downloaded iPlayer shows on the 6in display on the commute. A peak brightness of 286.91cd/m2 is slightly brighter than the Note 4, giving it the edge in terms of AMOLED screen brightness. For those who watch a lot of video on the go, or who want to watch around the home without reaching for a tablet, this is a satisfyingly big screen, with deep blacks and plenty of detail.

ANDROID

The Nexus 6 comes with Android 5.0, one of the first phones to do so. If you want to read about the new operating system in detail we suggest you head over to our Android 5.0 review, but we’ll cover the basics here.

The operating system has a fancy new look and lots of lovely new animations, called Material Design, where everything is simpler and flatter than before. The homescreen works much the same as ever, which is still more flexible than the competitions in terms of placing things, widgets and folders. A new app switcher lets you cycle through a rolodex of previous applications, and multiple Chrome tabs appear here, so it’s easier to get access to everything.

Notifications have been turned into Google-Now style cards, and you can see these on the lockscreen if you want, so you know what’s going on at all times. The Nexus 6 supports an ‘Ambient Screen’ mode where these lockscreen notifications appear (in black and white) whenever you pick up the phone or take it out of your pocket.

There’s also great new tool for backing up and restoring your handset. You can choose to restore all your apps and homescreens exactly as they were, letting you do a full reset whenever you like without having to reorganise everything afterwards.

There are numerous other tweaks, but it’s largely familiar stuff to look at. Beneath all that is a whole new codebase, with improvements to performance and battery life, plus support for 64-bit processors.

The big problem here is that Android 5.0 is just that and nothing more. On the Nexus 9 the new Gmail app has a tablet mode with a preview pane, but apparently the Nexus 6 isn't big enough for that and there's no setting to force it on. In fact there are no phablet enhancements here, such as being able to run two apps side-by-side on the Note 4. Plain Android is great, but sometimes you want more.

PERFORMANCE

The Nexus 6 uses the same Snapdragon 805 chipset as its main rival, the Note 4. It’s hard to compare the two directly though, as we’ve only seen the Note 4 running under Android 4.4 and only seen the Nexus 6 running Android 5.0. We ran all our usual benchmarks and got the usual results: the Nexus 6 is seriously fast.

Its 2.7GHz quad-core processor, with 3GB of RAM, whipped through our tests and Android 5.0 ran smoothly, with all its new fancy animations. Its SunSpider browser speed test score was a very respectable 792ms. That’s a good score in this test with Chrome but the Note 4 is quicker in its own browser. However, in real-world testing there’s nothing in it, with both rendering complex pages in an instant.

In games it was equally impressive, coping with complex 3D graphics with ease. A score of 23,205 in the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited test is a couple of thousand points behind the Nvidia Tegra K1-powered Nexus 9 tablet, but nothing else can better it. In Epic Citadel it managed 51.5fps on Ultra High quality at its native resolution. There are simply no real Android games that will trouble this handset.

Performance simply isn’t an issue here, with it equalling the efforts of other current flagship devices. However, it’s worth pointing out that this is probably the last of Qualcomm’s high-end 32-bit chipsets, with its upcoming 808 and 810 models both being 64-bit. It’s a little disappointing then, with Android 5.0 now available, that the new flagship handset doesn’t make the most of its support for 64-bit computing.

BATTERY LIFE

The Nexus 6’s 3,220mAh battery isn’t huge given its large screen size, the Note 4 has the same size battery in a handset that its noticeably smaller. In our battery rundown test it managed to continuously play a video file for a respectable 12 hours and 41 minutes with the screen set to 170cd/m2, so it should easily coast through a full day of usage. However, the Note 4, presumably with a more power efficient display managed to last a huge 18 hours and 55 minutes in the same test, making it a far better bet for those who use their phones heavily all day.

^ As you can see it's that big screen that's the big draw on your power

Battery life may not be the best, but getting power into the Nexus 6 is a breeze. It comes with a 9V 1.6A turbo charger, which charged the handset at around 1% of battery per minute, with the battery being full in well under two hours. This is thanks to Qualcomm’s Quick Charge technology, and makes it one of the fastest charging phones we’ve ever seen - although the Note 4 can pull a similar trick. The Nexus 6 does come with Qi wireless charging too, which is handy and not on the Note 4.

CAMERA

We’ve done initial testing on the camera in our labs, and the results are pretty impressive. It uses a 13-megapixel sensor measuring roughly 1/3in across, which is a smaller than the one on our benchmark Galaxy S5 handset. However, it has a brighter F2.0 lens, compared to the F2.2 on the Galaxy S5. More importantly, it includes optical image stabilisation, which also comes on the Note 4, to help give you steadier shots.

In our indoor still life test we found the Nexus 6 sat between the Galaxy S5 and the iPhone 6. The Galaxy S5 has aggressive noise reduction which eradicates fine detail and the results look flat and a little overlit. The Nexus 6 does a far better job, there’s a slightly greenish cast but plenty of detail and noise is kept to a soft patina. The iPhone 6 still comes out on top through with spot on colours and plenty of detail.

^ Comparing the Nexus 6 and Galaxy S5 - Click on image to see at full resolution

The Nexus 6 has a dual LED ring flash around it lens, apart from looking rather smart it’s also more powerful than most flashes and the ring is designed to diffuse the light to stop things looking too harsh. We’re not convinced of the latter yet, but it’s certainly a decent flash with good reach.

Moving outdoors into a sunny day it was harder to make comparisons. The Nexus 6 took pictures with spot on colour and plenty of detail. It dealt better with high-contrast scenes than the S5, even without using HDR mode.

^ Outdoors it coped well with carried lighting and produced true-to-life colours

It’s a good camera, though it does lack fun and useful features. There’s no burst mode for starters, so you’re limited to tapping the buttons over and over. You do get panorama and Photosphere modes, but that’s pretty poor compared to the wealth of playthings on Samsung’s models.

CONCLUSION

The Nexus 6 isn’t a bad phone but it’s not a great one either. The handset is lovely, the camera’s good, but the screen has some issues and the battery life isn’t the best. At £500 for a 32GB model it’s not cheap, but it’s £100 cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 (32GB). They’re similarly priced on contract at present, a bit below £40 a month for a decent contract and a free handset, mainly due to a lack of competition on the Nexus 6 at present.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 is the better phablet overall. It has a superior screen, a handy stylus and numerous software tweaks to make the most of its big screen. However, you’ll have to live with Samsung’s strong riff on Android.

A lot of Nexus 4 and 5 owners would have been far happier with an updated ‘Nexus 5.1’ than this phablet. But since that isn’t forthcoming, it’s hard to recommend a straight-forward alternative for them. The Nexus 5 had its share of issues, notably a rather average battery life, but its low price and middle-of-the-road screen size gives it a far wider appeal than its new step-sibling - especially given you can buy one for as little as £239 at present.

If that feels a bit old hat, and like us you’re keen on the Nexus 6’s design, then you can buy a smaller version in the form of the Motorola Moto X (2nd Gen). It looks great, has a great set of useful Motorola apps, a practically unchanged Android 5.0 OS, but still suffers with some colour accuracy issues.

We’re not bothered by the size of the Nexus 6, but despite that we’re finding it hard to justify switching to the new handset from our trusty Nexus 5, and that’s with both sitting freely available on our desk. The next-generation of smartphones need to find something new and exciting if the manufacturers expect us to keep upgrading.