
Nexus 6 Review - dollaaron
http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/12/nexus-6-review/
======
sliken
The summary basically is that for about twice the money of the nexus 5 you get
worse battery life, much dimmer screen, and generally slower performance than
the nexus 5.

Other reviews recently posted:
[http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/12/7200705/nexus-6-review](http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/12/7200705/nexus-6-review)
[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/11/nexus-6-review-the-
pr...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/11/nexus-6-review-the-premium-
price-still-comes-with-compromises/) [http://www.anandtech.com/show/8687/the-
nexus-6-review](http://www.anandtech.com/show/8687/the-nexus-6-review)

I was pretty shocked how bad the screen is, scored something like #26 of 28
phones in brightness, similarly poor with saturation accuracy. Arstechnia
seems to think the slow I/O is the worst offender for the general laggyness.
Read bandwidth was 73% of the nexus 5, 37% of a note 4, and 30% of the Moto X
2014 (well regarded for it's responsiveness).

Pretty disappointing. Too bad google didn't pick something like the droid
turbo/Moto Maxx for the next nexus device.

~~~
chdir
Agreed. I hope that's the take home message for Google. They started something
good with Nexus and made it better with Moto . But 2014 has been a
disappointment so far. Hope the successor of Nexus 6 addresses all these
issues (and pray it's not called Nexus 7).

~~~
muppetman
The reason the Disk IO is so slow is due to encryption being the default in
Lollipop!

[https://plus.google.com/+JeremyCamp1337/posts/iDyPjEuEf51](https://plus.google.com/+JeremyCamp1337/posts/iDyPjEuEf51)

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r0h1n
I also happened to read Anandtech's Nexus 6 review [1] today, and here's how
they described the N6's display.

 _> The Nexus 6 shows significant regression in color accuracy from the Nexus
5, and the maximum brightness is much lower. It should also be noted that
despite its higher resolution, its larger size means that compared to the
Nexus 5 the pixel density only increases 12% from 441 PPI to 493 PPI. The use
of a PenTile RGBG subpixel layout also means that there is actually an overall
decrease in subpixel density._

 _> Overall, the Nexus 6 display is quite poor relative to the displays on
other smartphones like the Galaxy Note 4, iPhone 6, and HTC One (M7). It's
also a definite regression from the display on the Nexus 5, which is
concerning given the fact that the Nexus 6 is $300 more expensive. It has been
speculated that Motorola is unable to source the latest generation of panels
from Samsung Display, which would explain why many of the panel
characteristics are similar to previous generation AMOLED panels in the Note 3
and Galaxy S4. Although the efficiency of AMOLED displays when displaying
black helps to reduce power usage with features like Ambient Display which
wakes up the phone when notifications arrive or it is picked up, I don't
believe it's worth the trade-off if it involves such heavy sacrifices in color
accuracy and brightness._

[1] - [http://www.anandtech.com/show/8687/the-
nexus-6-review/3](http://www.anandtech.com/show/8687/the-nexus-6-review/3)

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davidbanham
I'm confused about people carping about brightness. I found the OLED on my
Galaxy SII was great and needed much less brightness than an LED.

The thing that's got me irritated is the sub-par camera _again_. I'm really
frustrated with the camera on my N5, and I'm now worried that the only place I
can go is an iphone 6+. Do not want. :(

~~~
dingaling
> I'm now worried that the only place I can go is an iphone 6+

LG G3 or Xperia Z3. Probably the best photographic phones on the market by a
long margin ( assuming you are outside China and can't lay your hands on a
Vivo Xshot ).

Edit: the Note 4 camera is said to be pretty decent but not quite in the same
class, though the screen has excellent accuracy. I have no experience with
Nokia-Microsoft phones.

~~~
mercer
Would you say the LG G3 and Xperia Z3 have better camera's than the iPhone? Or
do you mean in comparison to other Android devices?

~~~
dingaling
> Would you say the LG G3 and Xperia Z3 have better camera's than the iPhone?

Technically, better ( honest-to-the-scene ) cameras and lenses.

But Apple does a lot of magic in software to make their images 'pop'.

I think it's probably comparable to, say, Sigma[0] versus Zeiss SLR lenses.
Sigma make some astonishingly good wide-angle SLR lenses but Zeiss give a
certain appealing 'look' even if they're actually less competent in some
measurements.

[0] yes, they of the mega-zoom infamy. But their new Art series of lenses is
amazing.

------
dfritz
> Pros: Reasonably priced for what it is

A year ago, we had a 5" smartphone (Nexus 5) for 399€ and a 7" tablet (Nexus
7) for 299€. Now, we have a 6" smartphone (Nexus 6) for 699€. Is it reasonably
priced?

~~~
dagw
When the Nexus 5 was released it was one of the cheapest reasonably specced
Android phones you could buy. The Nexus 6 on the other hand is one the most
expensive Android phones on the market. It's only reasonably priced if you
define reasonable as "not more expensive than an iPhone 6"

~~~
dfritz
Yet, the Nexus 5 was already 50€ more expensive than its predecessor, the
Nexus 4.

~~~
jmnicolas
No it was the same price (350€) if you bought it with the same amount of
storage (16 GB) than the Nexus 4. For 400€ you had the 32 GB version.

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AlyssaRowan
Not for me. It's too big, way too expensive for what it is, the battery isn't
removable (a killer!), no SD card, the screen isn't up to its peers, not even
AArch64 and the battery life is worse than the Nexus 5.

I was hoping for something _good_.

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VLM
Someday in the near future, a noob will see my classic Nexus 7 tablet and
exclaim "That's the cutest little phone I've ever seen, where can I get a
phone that small?"

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sigkill
One thing that perplexes me is Google's decision. On one hand they've gone
with very bright whites and vibrant (almost iOS like) colors and design in the
newest Android 5.0 version. On the other hand, they use an OLED panel for
their reference+flagship phone.

~~~
k-mcgrady
Do they need to use OLED to do the 'active notifications' thing where it shows
notifications by only activating required pixels? That's a pretty big Lollipop
feature so maybe the decision was based around that.

~~~
jug6ernaut
No its not "needed" but if you dont have an OLED screen it will have a
noticeable impact on your battery life. Depending on which particular device
this may or may not be an issue. If you have a device that barely manages to
make it through the day as it is, ambient display is not for you.

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muppetman
For all those mentionin the Disk IO being slow, it's due to encryption being
the default now!
[https://plus.google.com/+JeremyCamp1337/posts/iDyPjEuEf51](https://plus.google.com/+JeremyCamp1337/posts/iDyPjEuEf51)

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grokys
Websites! Don't automatically play videos when someone visits! Especially
don't make the pause button do nothing.

That one article I'm not reading then.

~~~
mdellabitta
That's one reason why you should set up plugins to be click to play.

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chj
Can't believe 64bit is still not supported. Apple did it 1 year ago.

~~~
Filligree
How would 64bit help?

These devices still don't have more than 4 GB of memory, let alone single
applications pushing that limit, and it's not x86; the biggest win in moving
to amd64 was the increased number of registers.

Which is not to say that there aren't others, but I don't think it's a clear-
cut as for x86.

All of which is to say that I don't know. How would it help? Please explain,
as I'm not that familiar with ARM hardware.

~~~
chj
There are many improvements. To name one, arm 32bit has only 16 32-bit
registers, while 64bit has 32 64-bit registers. That means instead of putting
variables on stack, now you can put them in registers.

