welcome to my unboxing and review of the Nexus 5 it's my actual first pure
Android experience and after 3 weeks I
guess it's pretty nice but I don't really see what all the fuss is about
per se I don't mind sense and Touchwiz with the battery issues aside really
isn't that bad especially for non-power users so I'm going to kick this off in
my usual way with the stuff that other people already told you so first of all
there's no SD expansion the phone's available in 16 or 32 gig configurations
and that's it but other than that the hardware is absolutely exceptional for
$350 it's got a 2.3 GHz quadcore Snapdragon 800 processor and very
capable adreno 330 GPU the 5-in 1080p
screen is beautiful with good but not amazing viewing angles and and it has
all the best wireless functionality including AC Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.0 and Chi
wireless charging which works well with the official pad yay and even works well
with a cheap one that Brandon got on eBay so that's great the physical
overview of the device is pretty simple it's extremely light for its size which
I quite liked once I got used to it but I did find it a shade too big for me the
Moto X is about perfect for my small hands but people with mediumsized hands
will be very comfortable with this my device is a white one which with it it's
glossy Edge that I found slippery and smoother non soft touch rear finish is
in my mind inferior to the black one just don't tell that to the U extremists
the top has a 3 and 12 mm Jack tasteful joke done now uh the bottom has a
speaker grill for the one speaker and a dummy one that actually has a microphone
behind it and the side has a volume rocker and a stealthy SIM tray and lock
button on the left and right sides respectively I like this positioning but
I'd like it more if the buttons were a little harder to press accidentally the
volume buttons are easy to mash during video playback and I would often find
myself accidentally adjusting volume when going for the lock button and vice
versa on the back we find the much maligned camera as well as a Flash and
both LG and Nexus branding and on the front we find the screen it's very very
good maybe subjectively not quite my favorite but it's extremely good it's
1080p which is a stunning 445 pixels per
inch at this screen size and the viewing angles are solid with vibrant but not
oversaturated colors white whites and black blacks there was one thing that
irked me a little bit and whether it's motion blur sort of a smoothing effect
kind of thing or just a phenomenally slow panel I did find that when objects
were moving across it there was a bit of a distracting motion blur however if I
had to choose between good viewing angles and good color or good speed I
will take the former every time so it's one of my favorite screens so far I had
no issues with touchscreen accuracy and the touchscreen interface was not very
visible even on extremely uniform backgrounds uh haptic feedback feels a
little bit loose and is definitely below average tough to come from the Experia
Z1 but your mileage may vary with that one and the last thing about the screen
is I think the auto brightness was a bit of a missed opportunity it just doesn't
go down low enough in complete darkness I can manually override it but it seems
like this should be a relatively simple fix in software boot up time on the
device is slow but if that's to make it
faster during actual use then I'm for it I rarely reboot my phone anyway normally
um although my experience may be a bit unusual but I've actually had the Nexus
5 crash about half a dozen times on me in the last three weeks so Kit Kat
definitely feels a bit rough around the edges for me but I'm sure that'll change in time but I I'll take that trade off
for slower boot time for faster performance for sure now there's lots of
discussion online about the camera for my use it's okay I guess it's definitely
better with the 4.4.2 update but there's still no 4K or slow-mo or anything the
reality it is I'm not a power photographer though so since no one complained my cheesy Instagram pictures
were worse than usual I'm good the UI of the app really does need some work
though I appreciate simple design and swiping to the right to access the
gallery instead of having a dedicated button is natural and looks very clean
but I found it cumbersome to have to switch modes to record video or take
pictures rather than just having two dedicated buttons Optical image
stabilization worked very well and was very noticeable and the autofocus is
vastly improved in the 4.4.2 update but I still wish that clicking anywhere on
the screen while taking video would manually focus on that particular object
rather than just snapping a picture of it once more UI complaint about the
camera few buttons is not always better so let's talk about battery life now as
far as that's concerned I think some people were expecting more than a $350
device can deliver the Nexus 5 has a pretty mediocre 2300 milliamp battery
but it's also got some clever background power saving and Resource Management
features enabled by Android 4 .4 that really help it deliver solid performance
in everyday scenarios I thought the reality of it is if you Hammer the phone
with heavy use like gaming then its battery will drain like any other phone
with the same hardware and the one with the most milliamp hours wins in my real
world use I sometimes had 30 to 40% at the end of the day and as a somewhat
heavy non-gaming user I'm quite happy with that enabling art or Android
runtime which increases the storage space taken by your apps but makes them
faster to launch and easier to run has also been reported to improve battery
life significantly the only caveat here is that it also reduces app
compatibility including breaking WhatsApp with that said edzel one of my
staff was able to find a recompiling workaround that got WhatsApp working and
loves art but your mileage may vary the
phone never got uncomfortably warm for me except on my initial boot when it
installed a bajillion apps um so that was that was great speaking of all the
apps though iOS has had this functionality for years so I don't
understand why I can't fully uninstall apps directly from the home screens if
you're going to have a terrible app tray with no support for folders search or
other sorting methods please don't make me navigate through it to manage my apps
I have a lot of apps on my phone Sony's and HTC's app trays are much better I
guess you just really want people to stop using the app tray and start using
home screens the way that you intended for them to touche Google and no support
for basic toggles like portable hotspot flashlight or auto rotate what the
Google this is supposed to be the future even iOS has swiping up to turn the
flashlight on okay well fine thank goodness it's
Android so it's at least flexible I can install power toggles on iOS 7 no matter
what I do I still can't change the layout of my quick toggles or even lock
the device in landscape mode on iPhones or iPods so I guess at least Google's
flavor of intentionally bad design is superior here speaking of bad design
another thing I didn't like multitasking is such a simple thing to do right and
yet no one does it yes 3 and 2/3 is technically multi but
nine is definitely better this scrolling through everything nonsense didn't work
well for Windows Vista and it's really not any better here I like both OS 10's
expose a and ironically Chrome for Android's implementations of
multitasking better one positive here
though is that at least switching between running apps even games and videos is really Snappy like super
awesome let's move on to Hangouts as your SMS application which wasn't super
awesome um I don't like it Windows Phone 8 did the whole integrating all your
accounts thing much better with the people Hub it integrated more services
such as LinkedIn and pulled all the messages together for easy reference
Google for some phenomenally like I
can't can't figure out why they did this some reason ties all your SMS messages
into one of your Google accounts and you need to manually switch between them to
see message histories across services with the same people one person can have
multiple Google accounts Google please
stop treating Google accounts like everyone has just one and we should all
use our real names and we should all be on Google Plus
and the day Google lets us have a master Google account that can admin the others
is an extremely happy day for me on top of the inconvenience of not being able
to search for things it's just not ergonomic the switcher is in the top
left corner I don't care how big your hands are that's really hard to reach if
you're operating the device one-handed another small complaint is that clicking
the new message icon in the top right doesn't fire up the keyboard right away
to search for my contacts Google I clicked this because I wanted to message
someone who I didn't just message who was in the most frequently accessed
contacts the recent contacts on the very last page the whole thing just feels
very first attemp which I guess is natural enough since it is um there's
even stupid stuff like not being able to copy part of a message like an address
to paste into Google Maps with all of that aside it's just software I'm sure
they're going to get it sorted out but for now I'd rather use anything else and
once again thank goodness I'm on Android because I can my last major complaint
about the phone is that whether it's a software or Hardware thing the GPS takes
longer than my old iPhone 4 to lock in my position and if I deviate from the
path set out for me compared to my HTC1 it'll take over 10 seconds longer to
figure that out and calculate A New Path for me so that was a little bit frustrating let's move back to the
things I like the multicolored notification LED with light flow being
able to color change and you know change the pattern for different stuff is great
and swiping down from the top for notifications now works without pausing
media playback which is absolutely incredible it's so convenient to change
brightness or see incoming messages while keeping my YouTube video running
in the background love it swiping up from the bottom for Google Now working
all over the phone is great as well I mostly use Google Now to set my alarm
for the next day and navigate with GPS but when Google now supports more voice
commands I will definitely be ready to do lots more other stuff as a swift key
lover the stock Android keyboard did bother me a little bit at first but it
learned really fast and I love how natural it feels to click on my
misspelled words and how many options it gives me to correct them that's really
cool it took about a week and a half but now I really like it I'm still going
back to swift key but it's definitely my second favorite the thing I find it
lacks compared to swift key is the prediction of your next word doesn't
seem to learn from your frequent phrases in the same way every time I've typed
Nexus on this device since I got it I've followed with a five but it still
suggests one to me the phone part of this phone also needs some love now
because it's really really good I love the sticky preferred primary contacts
numbers and the option to be able to change it and lock it in rather than
just having it guess all the time I Love Dialing by name it prevents me from
having to dig through my contact list and most importantly Google caller ID is
awesome like awesome it picks up on numbers from VoIP lines that my normal
caller ID just calls unknown numbers allowing me to avoid spam calls and
calls from my in-laws who have boip much more easily it also populates pictures
and info for people and businesses so privacy concerns aside I absolutely love
it and I think it's great call Quality is also great aside from the audibility
of the speaker phone for me but the speaker is just quiet in general for
calls and for media playback so if I had to complain about something here I I
guess it would be that face rejection might need a little bit of tweaking I
hung up on people a few times but I'm sure that's a quick fix all that's left
now are final thoughts if you want the latest vanilla Android experience with
stunning performance housed in a device that delivers amazing specs for the
price then go buy one it's good build quality too the constant updates are
great I mean in fact it's gotten a 4.4.1 and 4.4.2 update already and this is the
perfect product for tinkerers and enthusiasts with that in mind I still
think I'd recommend something with like touch whz to a less techsavvy friend or
family member because with bleeding edge software comes bleeding edge workarounds
and tweaks and all that kind of stuff speaking of techsavvy workarounds
audible.com head over to audible.com Linus to workaround not having the time
to sit down and read Game of Thrones to find out what's going to happen next on
the show you can sign up for their monthly audiobook service and listen to
it in the car or on your phone while rep performing repetitive tasks at work and
the best thing about it is that the first month is absolutely free so visit
audible.com Linus to get started now
it's the end of the video time guys so the usual thing like it if you liked it
dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment and let me know from everything
you've read or if you have an exus 5 already tell me your feelings what is
your most favorite and what is your least favorite thing about the Nexus 5
I'm actually very curious to see how your opinions align with what I said in
the last 15 minutes or however long this video went on for and I will definitely
be reading them so thank you and also don't forget to subscribe I think we're
done here