Alongside the Nexus 9 tablet from HTC, Google’s also announced the Nexus 6 smartphone, made by a company that it’s sold off. No, I don’t quite get the logic either. Here’s what you need to know.
Actually, I guess I do get the logic; while Google owned Motorola it was perhaps reluctant to get Motorola to make anything for it because there’s some obvious conflict of interest issues with other OEMs that Google would want to court. It’s somewhat the issue that Microsoft may have with Nokia and Windows Phone, really. Anyway, on with the show…
As the name implies, the Nexus 6 is a 6″ Android smartphone, running, as the similarly announced Nexus 9 tablet does, Android Lollipop.
If I wanted to be truly pedantic (and I usually do), it’s a 5.96″ smartphone, which is still very large indeed, but I guess “Nexus 5.96” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. In screen specification terms, it features a 2560×1440 493ppi display, running a Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 chipset comprised of a quad-core Krait 450 CPU at up to 2.7 GHz per core with 3GB of RAM. Or in other words, as it’s done before with previous Nexus releases, all of a sudden, the best Android phone you can buy in pure grunt terms is a Nexus, albeit a really, really large one.
The camera is 13MP optically stabilised f2.0 lens at the rear and a 2.1MP 720p capable shooter at the front. In an era of selfie-obsessed cameras such as the HTC Desire Eye and the Oppo N1 Mini, it’ll be interesting to see if that level of front detail is enough to entice.
One of the advantages of packing in a larger frame is that you can shove more batteries into the phone, something I noted with the massive iPhone 6 Plus. The same is true of the Nexus 6, which will come with a 3220mAh battery capable of quick charging for up to 6 hours of usage from just 15 minutes of plugged in time, as per Google.
As with the Nexus 9, Google’s yet to say anything at all about local pricing and availability.
Update: Google Australia has confirmed with me that they’ll be available to pre-order in November, but not the pricing we’ll pay.
In the US it’ll go on pre-order on October 29th and start shipping in November for $US649 outright. That’s an interesting shift for the US market, where low contract prices have for a long while been the norm, but also a shift for Google, which had traditionally pitched the Nexus range as its affordable-yet-powerful range. Then again, $US649 would equate to around $740 Australian (which means, I suspect, that we’re talking $799 or even $849 when it does ship here), and that’s still a lot cheaper than a $1249 iPhone 6 Plus or Galaxy Note Edge.