Contributor: Hussein Wehbe (twitter: @HusseinW)
Let’s start by saying that for a price tag of 350$, the Nexus 5 is an outstanding phone and an absolute bargain for that matter.
Hardware:
With only 130 grams and a thickness of 8.59mm, Google’s Latest flagship the Nexus 5 comes loaded with Android’s latest 4.4 Kitkat OS. The device is extremely light and thin. The Hardware is excellent, well crafted, and minimalist.
Two colors are available, black and in white. The black version – has a soft-touch treatment to the black back and sides, giving it an easy grip. The white version, meanwhile, is just as elegant and well crafted as the black, but the black sides have glossy finish while the back is matte white. Both have an embossed “NEXUS” logo on the back.
The front rocks a 4.95-inch, 1080 x 1920 display using IPS+ LCD panel technology providing you with a pleasurable viewing experience, rich, extremely bright colors and excellent resolution. At 445 ppi, the Nexus 5 has a pixel density that actually exceeds the Samsung Galaxy S4 at 441ppi.
The internals of the Nexus 5 hold a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor, 2.26Ghz quad-core Krait 400 CPU and Adreno 330 graphics with 2GB of RAM. You’ll also find a 2,300 non-removable battery. Up front, there’s a 1.3-megapixel camera with the ability to capture 1080p video.
On the back, an 8-megapixel camera, also with the ability to capture 1080p video, along with optical image stabilization (OIS), but It seems Google isn’t really bothered to compete on the camera front, the Nexus 5’s isn’t that great, has lots of focus issues, colors look washed out. It may not be as powerful as the iPhone 5S or Samsung’s Galaxy Cameras, but it can still do the job if you know how to shoot with a stable hand and in a proper lighting situations. The Nexus 5 camera now also comes with HDR+, which according to Google, takes burst shots and uses special algorithms to put them together into one shot.
The Nexus 5 also supports Qi standard wireless charging, meaning you’ll be able to use every third party chargers released.
The single speaker on the Nexus 5 isn’t loud, and the audio you get from it is low quality. Spoken word seems to come out distorted.
Software:
We won’t dive into the software side in details, but rather highlight few changes in KitKat. (You can check all changes in this video posted by Google)
-Google Now integration in the Nexus 5 is visible and it’s now just a swipe away from your home screen on the far left. You can still call it up from anywhere in the OS by swiping up from the home button. The “OK Google” speech-activated search has been added into the search bar on the main home screen, but unlike on the Moto X you can’t wake the phone by saying “Ok Google”, the phone needs to be unlocked for the command to work.
-Hangouts is now your default SMS app combining both text messages and hangouts chats, sadly, unlike iOS’s iMessage, the conversations are separated and there is no option to merge both threads together.
-Phone app. There’s now support for auto-look-up of incoming calls, very useful if you don’t have the contacts saved for caller ID, it has a search capabilities that let you look up businesses, contacts and other people within Google Apps domains.
-Mail app. While playing with the software, we have found it very disappointing; (Especially for MS Exchange users) is the extremely unreliable, slow, and painful. The mail app is unstable with its push function broken most of the times, even manual refresh won’t get the emails to flow and you would have to restart the device and refresh the email app to get emails flowing again. We have also seen a lot of posts about this issue across numerous forums. Hopefully a fix will be pushed with future software updates.
In conclusion, the Nexus 5 is an Android device that gives you an amazing raw experience without the manufacturers’ skins and useless features; you are simply dealing with pure Android experience. Having said that, Google needs to works on a quick fix for the Camera performance, Exchange issues and few bugs here and there, but the Nexus 5, in my opinion is by far the best android device ever made.
