The Nexus 6 heralds a new era for Google's flagship mobile devices. Previously, we've expected its phones to pack all the hardware in at almost unreasonably low prices, perhaps at the expense of slick design. This year, its new phone goes all out, upping the price, the specifications, the size and the design. Google wants the Nexus 6 to be a no-compromise competitor to the best smartphones on the market.
Nexus 6 review: size
Google made a bad start to this brave new world with the Nexus 9 – its design and build quality were distinctly underwhelming for a premium device – so we were hoping the Nexus 6 would be an improvement. We weren’t disappointed: it’s a sumptuous and luxurious piece of personal technology.
To be fair, that’s hardly a surprise. The Nexus 6 has been manufactured in partnership with Motorola, a company with a good (recent) record of producing attractively designed Android smartphones. The Motorola Moto X (2nd Gen.) in particular stands out, and the Nexus 6 is effectively the same design, just bigger.
And when we say bigger, we really mean it. The Nexus 6’s screen measures an enormous 5.96 in across the diagonal. That’s 0.5 in larger than the Apple iPhone 6 Plus, 0.3in bigger than the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, and it gains nearly an inch on its cousin, the Moto X (2nd Gen.).
It’s a real handful of a phone, measuring 83mm across, a huge 159mm tall and 10.1mm thick. And it weighs a not inconsiderable 184g – making it the heaviest phone we’ve laid hands on in quite a while. Overall, it feels larger than all those phones we just mentioned, although the iPhone 6 Plus is slightly taller.
The Nexus 6 is most definitely a phone for those who favour cargo pants over skinny jeans, and who don’t mind texting with both hands. Unlike some recent larger-screened smartphones, there’s no software function to shrink apps down or move them within reach of a single thumb.
For us, the size of the Nexus 6 is a step too far, but we recognise that the scale of your smartphone is a very personal thing. Others might well find it’s the ideal size for them – the perfect compromise between compact tablet and smartphone.
It's also well worth remembering that, if you're teetering on the edge of whether or not to buy such a huge phone or not, using Google Now mitigates this problem somewhat. Since it's a Nexus device, Google's voice-control and dictation system can be activated using the key phrase "OK Google", which means you don't even have to tap the microphone icon in the search box to instigate voice control.
Even if one hand is occupied with a shopping bag or suitcase, this means all you need to do to dial or text a friend, search the web or even find a nearby coffee bar, is drag the phone out of your pocket, unlock it and speak. And the efficacy of the Google Now system and the Nexus 6's microphones means that this works with a remarkable degree of accuracy, and in even the noisiest environments.
In fact it's so good, and the Nexus 6 so big, that we've increasingly found ourselves turning to Google Now instead of using the onscreen keyboard to enter simple search phrases, because it's less effort and more accurate.
Nexus 6 review: design and other key features
Aside from its size there’s a lot to love about the Nexus 6’s design. There are no fancy customisation options – it’s only available in "midnight blue" or white – but elsewhere the design language is all Moto X (2nd Gen.), and that’s very much a good thing.
The phone is surrounded with a gently curved silver aluminium frame, which feels great in the hand. The smooth matte-plastic rear isn’t soft to the touch like the Moto X, but it doesn’t give an inch and feels pleasant under the finger. The Nexus logo is emblazoned in silver lettering across the back, lending the phone a touch of class. The screen, which is topped with Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3, is slightly curved at the edges, so thumbs and fingers slide on and off it without catching.
Above and below that screen sit a pair of stereo speakers that have to be among the loudest we’ve ever come across on a phone – they really pound out the volume and showed no sign of distortion, even with the volume turned all the way up. That makes the Nexus 6 a great phone for listening to podcasts and radio in the kitchen although, as you might expect, music still sounds rather tinny.
One feature the Nexus 6 has that the Moto X (2nd Gen.) can’t boast of just yet is Android 5 (Lollipop), a revamp that represents the biggest leap forward for Google’s mobile OS we’ve yet seen. Its colourful flat icons, updated core apps, notifications and lockscreen all hang together just as well as they did on the Nexus 9, and the whole shebang feels superbly responsive.
In terms of UI design, Lollipop is Google’s finest hour, and it really puts other manufacturers’ custom efforts in the shade.
Nexus 6 review: display
Fundamentally, the Nexus 6 is really all about the screen. Why else would someone put up with such a giant smartphone if not for all that extra space? So it's important to nail this critical element, and the Nexus 6 gets off on the right foot. Motorola has employed an AMOLED panel behind the Gorilla Glass frontage, so the black level is deep and contrast superb.
Using AMOLED technology should allow the phone to keep power demands to a minimum when using Android Lollipop’s “Ambient display” mode – where notifications appear when the phone is in standby. This is a great feature, but you might want to think about switching it off. Google quotes up to 250 hours of battery life with it on, a figure that leaps to 330 hours with it off – a significant 32% longer.
As has become the norm for larger flagship smartphones of late (the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and LG G3 come to mind), the resolution of this enormous screen is Quad HD – that’s 1,440 pixels across and 2,560 down.
This gives a faintly ridiculous pixel density of 493ppi, and though we remain unconvinced that even a 6in display needs that many pixels, there’s no denying the screen is sharp, with crisp text and sharp images all round.
In terms of colour and brightness performance, we’re less impressed. The main problem is that the Nexus 6 employs content-based dynamic contrast that cannot be disabled. Even with “adaptive brightness” switched off in the settings (this adjusts brightness depending on the ambient lighting conditions), the Nexus 6 constantly adjusts the brightness according to what’s displayed onscreen.
Thus, while white text on a dark background looks gleamingly brilliant, the white background of a web page will look slightly dim. In fact, brightness can swing by as much as 70cd/m2, an adjustment that’s particularly noticeable when opening up the Settings menu (which has a white background), from a homescreen with a dark background.
That makes any definitive judgement over colour accuracy impossible, since it’s effectively in constant flux. Even by eye, however, the colours on the screen look slightly off, and in many cases a little overenthusiastic, even lurid. One thing is clear: this screen isn’t a patch on the Samsung Galaxy Note 4’s or the iPhone 6 Plus’.
Nexus 6 review: Core hardware and performance
Nexus products are usually cutting-edge when it comes to core performance, and the Nexus 6 is no different. Inside is one of the fastest mobile SoCs that Qualcomm produces – a quad-core Snapdragon 805, running at 2.7GHz with 3GB of RAM and an Adreno 420 GPU – which is the same getup as found in the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.
As expected, the Nexus 6 swatted aside all the benchmarks we threw at it, matching the Note 4 blow-for-blow. It’s reasonably competitive with the iPhone 6 Plus, as well, until you get to the GFXBench gaming tests – that’s because, with a 1080p screen, the 6 Plus has a far lighter workload than the Nexus 6.
Still, 27fps in the latter test is perfectly respectable, and in real world gaming the Nexus 6 put in a decent showing. It’s amazingly slick and responsive in every other situation, too, whether browsing heavy web pages or Googe Maps, and asking it to multitask doesn’t faze it either.
It does, however, get rather hot when used intensively. The top portion of the screen hit 41 degrees Celcius at times and the rear 39 degrees, which becomes uncomfortable after a while.
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iPhone 6
Plus
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Samsung
Galaxy Note 4
|
Nexus 6
|
| SunSpider (ms) | 349 (Safari) | 745 (Chrome) | 806 (Chrome) |
| Peacekeeper | 2,606 | 1,310 | 1,025 |
| Geekbench 3 sc | 1,628 | 1,095 | 1,054 |
| Geekbench 3 mc | 2,922 | 3,268 | 3,279 |
| GFXBench T-Rexonscreen (fps) | 52 | 27 | 27 |
| GFXBench Manhattanonscreen (fps) | 31 | 11 | 12 |
Nexus 6 review: battery life
Battery life is a more mixed picture. For light- and moderate-use scenarios, it’s excellent. In our 720p video-playback test, where we put the phone into flight mode and set the screen as close to 120cd/m2 as possible, the capacity of the Nexus 6’s 3,220mAh battery fell at a rate of 6.8% per hour.
It’s in good company here, nearly matching the Note 4’s result of 5.9%, although it falls some way behind the iPhone 6 Plus’ 4.9%.
The audio-streaming test, which gives an indication of a phone’s standby performance, resulted in a depletion rate of 2.3% per hour, slightly better than the Note 4 and on a par with the 6 Plus.
In other good news, the Nexus 6 has wireless charging built in, and comes with a “Turbo” AC charger supplied in the box, which we found was capable of ramping up the charge very quickly indeed: 17% in 15 minutes is enough of an emergency boost to be really useful. And the improvements wrought through Android 5's "Project Volta" mean that standby stamina is exceptional: we left the Nexus 6 on a bedside table overnight at 3% capacity, forgetting to plug it in, and it still had 1% remaining eight hours later.
Push the CPU, however, and stamina takes a dramatic turn for the worse. In the GFXBench battery test, despite the fact that the frame rate is capped at 22.4fps (lower than the maximum the phone is capable of), a result of 144mins is pretty poor, and well short of the iPhone 6 Plus’ time of 206mins, which is rendering more than twice the number of frames.
In all, though, it’s a thumbs-up for the battery life – just don’t expect it to last long when you’re gaming hard.
| iPhone 6 Plus | Samsung Galaxy Note 4 | Nexus 6 |
| 720p video playback | -4.9%/hr | -6.2%/hr | -6.8%/hr |
| Audio streaming | -2.2%/hr | -2.9%/hr | -2.3%/hr |
| GFXBench battery test (projected runtime) | 206mins (52fps) | 206mins (12.3fps) | 144mins (22.4fps) |
Nexus 6 review: camera
On paper, the Nexus 6’s cameras look decent, too. The rear camera has a top resolution of 13 megapixels, an f/2 lens, 4K video recording, optical image stabilisation (OIS), and a dual-LED ring flash. The front-facing camera can capture 2-megapixel stills and 1080p video. It can’t quite match the Samsung Galaxy Note 4’s 16-megapixel snapper, but beats the 8 megapixels of the iPhone 6 Plus.
In testing it performed much better than expected (given how disappointing the Moto X 2nd Gen’s camera was), capturing largely clean images and video in good light, and well-exposed and -focused photographs and video in low light, without recourse to the dual-LED flash.
If there is a weakness, it’s the speed of autofocus system. It isn’t anywhere near as fast as Samsung Galaxy Note 4 or iPhone 6 Plus, both of which employ phase-detect autofocus like a DSLR or compact system camera. The Nexus 6’s doesn’t have that, instead relying on contrast detect, and this takes quite a while to lock focus. In video, it’s more of a problem, as the focus jumps distractingly backwards and forwards as you pan the camera around.
In general, though, we’re pleased with the results from the Nexus 6’s camera, and it’s nice to see that Google has refrained from messing about too much with the camera software. It’s simple, effective, and not overladen with features, yet it puts most of what you need a tap and swipe or two away. The only major thing it lacks is full control over ISO and shutter speed, but as compensation, it is possible to tweak the exposure up and down.
Nexus 6 review: connectivity, storage, price and call quality
As you’d expect of a high-end handset, connectivity is cutting-edge. The Nexus 6 has Cat 6 4G support for download speeds of up to 300Mbits/sec and uploads of 50Mbits/sec. There’s 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi, which we saw hit speeds between 8MB/sec and 9MB/sec when reading a large movie file at close range from a network share. NFC is covered, too, as is Bluetooth 4.1, and you also get SlimPort for HDMI output via the phone’s USB port.
As far as storage is concerned, there are two different configurations of the Nexus 6 to choose between: a 32GB and a 64GB model. Both represent good (if not exceptional) value, at £499 and £549 SIM-free respectively. To put it into context, the iPhone 6 Plus (16GB) is much more expensive, the 16GB version costing £619 and the 64GB version £699, while the 32GB Samsung Galaxy Note 4 goes for £599.
Finally, call quality is perfectly respectable. The Nexus 6 goes loud enough that you can hear your caller in even the noisiest environments. Just be careful not to put the phone to your ear in speakerphone mode: you’ll come away with your ears ringing.
Nexus 6 review: verdict
The Nexus 6 has taken us by surprise in the short time we’ve had it. Once you sidle past the unavoidable fact of its gargantuan size, there’s an awful lot it does right. Battery life is good, the camera is excellent, and the build and design quality are second to none. And although its rivals hold an edge over it in many areas, the differences aren’t huge.
For us, the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 remains top dog in the big-phone stakes thanks to its slightly more manageable size and stylus input, better camera and superior screen, but if you’re in the market for a big phone (and make no mistake, this is a real bruiser of a handset) you’d be doing yourself a disfavour by not putting the Nexus 6 on your shortlist.
Nexus 6 review: the competition
Samsung Galaxy Note 4
The Nexus 6 is great value, but if you want the best big smartphone on the market in your pocket, you'll have to look elsewhere. The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 isn't quite as bombastic, but despite similar specifications and performance, it's the more accomplished all-rounder.
First, it's a much more manageable phone: although the screen is only 0.3in smaller, the Note 4 is a much slimmer, lighter and more pocketable device. The quality of the screen is better. It's more readable on bright days outdoors than the Nexus 6, and it's more colour accurate, too (if you choose the Basic colour profile), despite the fact that it uses the same type of screen technology.
And the Note 4 is the more flexible, capable device. Don't want to enter text by tapping the screen? Use the integrated, pressure sensitive stylus. Want to control your TV from phone? You can with the Note 4 thanks to its infrared transmitter. The camera is pretty awesome as well, especially the phase detect autofocus sytem, which locks onto your subject with far more surety than the Nexus 6's can.
There are things the Note 4 doesn't do as well as the Nexus 6. It won't always be running the latest version of Android, for instance, and it's always likely to be encumbered by Samsung's Touchwiz skin. But we'd happily put up with that - and the higher price - to get our hands on what is the best big screen smartphone around.
Read our full Samsung Galaxy Note 4 review here.
Apple iPhone 6 Plus
The iPhone 6 Plus is Apple’s biggest ever smartphone, and if you’re considering moving up to a phone of the larger variety, it should be on your shortlist alongside the Nexus 6 and Samsung Galaxy Note 4.
Of the three, the 6 Plus has the smallest display at 5.5in across the diagonal, and it’s also the slimmest and lightest. In our opinion, that makes it the easiest to wield one-handed, although we are talking small degrees here. Most of the time, you’ll need both mitts to operate the 6 Plus, just as with the Nexus 6. The resolution of the screen is also lower, at 1,080 x 1,920, but viewed from a normal distance you'll struggle to tell the difference.
The iPhone 6 Plus has equipped its "phablet" with a lower resolution camera than the Nexus 6 at eight megapixels, but otherwise it’s more than a match for the Nexus 6’s snapper. In particular, it focuses much more quickly, thanks to its phase detect autofocus system. The iPhone 6 Plus’ battery life is superior to the Nexus 6’s as well.
The major difference between the iPhone 6 Plus and the Nexus 6, though, is price. Although the Nexus 6 is the most expensive Nexus device to date, it's still a good deal cheaper than the iPhone 6 Plus; and that, in our view, nudges it very slightly in front.
