Nexus 5 Review

Google isn’t really trying to build the best Android phone. What it’s trying to do is get the internet, Google-style, in as many hands as possible, and it realises the way to do that is to produce its own affordable, desirable handset. Google’s Nexus 4 started something – something big. And with the Nexus 5 the search-giant has taken its vision of how Android should look and function on a smartphone several steps further, adding in better spec, new hardware and a raft of new features. 

The vanilla (or stock) Android is becoming more friendly and the Nexus line growing more accessibly, these products have always garnered attention from tech-savvy enthusiasts more than average smartphone buyers. The new Nexus 5 with KitKat aims to revamp Android’s basic phone and SMS experiences, while making it easier to get to use Google Now, one of the platform’s greatest assets.

Unlike the LG G2, upon which its hardware is said to be based, the Nexus 5 keeps its buttons and ports in the usual, sensible places. Power lives on the right, a little higher up that before; volume is on the left, micro USB down below and headphone jack up top. On the bottom of the phone is the USB connector, and two sets of speaker holes. A round LED notification light is placed below the display, while the sensor array and the front camera sits above it.

The Nexus 5 comes with an IPS LCD display with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels and pixel density of 445 ppi. The display comes with Corning's Gorilla Glass 3 protection making it resistant to scratches. The Nexus 5’s 4.95-inch, 1080p IPS LCD is big, bright and beautiful, and while it might not be able to unseat the HTC One’s SuperLCD3 or the Galaxy Note 3’s Super AMOLED in terms of contrast and vibrancy, it’s a great-looking display regardless.

The Nexus 5 is powered by a 2.3GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU and an Adreno 330 GPU, which is just about the fastest chipset you’ll find in any Android phone right now. That’s paired with an ample 2GB of RAM and 16 or 32GB of internal storage. The former gets you 12.55GB for your own stuff, the latter provides a more roomy 26.76GB. The Nexus 5 sports an 8-megapixel rear camera with Optical Image Stabilization, and a 1.3-megapixel front facing camera. Also lurking inside the N5’s chassis is a 2,300mAh battery and Qi wireless charging receiver.

There are some changes made in kitkat. The first change that you'll notice is the transparent status and navigation key bars at the top and bottom, making the Nexus 5's screen look bigger and brighter. The Android 4.4 KitKat lock screen also features a small camera button, which helps in opening the camera app via the lock screen widget directly from the lock screen.

The most obvious refinements in KitKat are visual — it’s lighter, flatter and more colorful, in contrast to the dimmer sci-fi stylings of Honeycomb through Jelly Bean. However the prevailing “Holo blue” text, icons and accents that dominated Android 4.0-4.3 have been all but eliminated. The result is not just an Android that’s brighter, friendlier and more accessible, but also an OS that looks a lot sharper.

Consider the three biggest app changes in the new OS version — the launcher, the dialer and Hangouts, the default SMS app — in Android 4.4, all three have been augmented with more Googley features.

Android 4.4 also includes a revamped Phone app that now automatically prioritises your contacts based on the people you talk to the most. And one of my favorite feature of the Nexus 5 is that you can also initiate voice search when it's in the unlocked state by simply saying, 'Ok Google’, followed by your command.

Google has also combined its chat service and the Messaging (SMS) app into one app, Hangouts. The app lets you chat with your friends who use the Hangouts (erstwhile Google Talk) service and send messages to contacts. For people who don't actively use Google's instant messaging service or Google+, there's no value add that the unified app offers. It could also confuse these users if they've got unkempt Google+ profiles as it lists Google contacts on top when you want to compose a new message.

WRAP UP: The Nexus 5 is an improvement over last year's Nexus 4. As a high-end Android phone, the Nexus 5 doesn’t exactly nail it in every category. However the price point, speed and quality of user experience makes the Nexus 5 a great device.