I waited for few months in 2014, hoping that Google would announce interesting new Nexus phone. Yes they did, Nexus 6 is a good phone with impressive hardware specs. But the screen size is just too big, and the price is way too high for a secondary phone. So I end up getting last year’s model: Nexus 5.
Hardware Specs
As many people already know, Nexus 5 is a great phone, and it remains a good phone for a phone released over a year ago. It packs Qualcomm SnapdragonTM 800 2.26GHz. For graphics, this phone is powered by Adreno 330 450MHz GPU, which deliver snappy graphics in the 4.95” 1920 x 1080 display (445 ppi) display. The 2300 mAh battery can easily survive a busy daytime. I don’t really use the camera, but for those interested, Nexus 5 is equipped with 8 MP rear-facing and 1.3 MP front-facing cameras.
Look and Feel
I like the design of Nexus 5. It’s simple and elegant. It took me a while to figure out that the serial number at the back is actually a removable sticker. I’m so glad I can get rid of it.
The power button is positioned at the right side. This is the same position as my iPhone 6, so there is no need to adjust my habit. I quickly miss the physical home button at the front screen. Having to press a button at the side of my phone feels super counter-intuitive. Let’s see if I can get used to do this in the next few weeks.
Operating System
My unit arrives with KitKat 4.4.2 preinstalled. Few taps to the System Updates menu in Settings app easily help me to update the operating system to 4.4.3, then 4.4.4. I stopped there for a day, to get a feel how this phone works with KitKat, before finally hit the update once again to get Android 5.0 Lollipop via OTA update.
Nexus 5 running KitKat is as smooth as I would expect. All the default apps work flawlessly. I visited Google Play store to get some apps that I frequently use (like Facebook, WhatsApp and some other apps for Melbourne’s public transport) and was generally happy. The process was smooth without issues. Some of the best apps to play movies and to read comic books are still generally the same apps that I already used 2 years ago, of course these apps have been updated many times.
After playing around with some apps on KitKat, I decided to upgrade to Lollipop the next day. The first thing I noticed is the bright-themed Settings app, love it. It’s probably just about color choice, but it’s completely normal for human to prefer design using certain color compared to another. Next, I noticed that the notification center is also updated. Somehow I prefer KitKat’s style for notification center, but it’s just personal preference.
Overall, Nexus 5 handles Android 5.0 Lollipop nicely. I like the look and feel of the new launcher, including the new bright-themed app list.
Notification center (the one we pull from the upper edge) looks better. However, it took me a while to figure out how to clear the notifications. The clear button is moved to the bottom of the list, and if we have plenty of notifications, we would need to scroll down before we see the button. Accessing the menu to turn on/off WiFi, Bluetooth and flight mode takes an extra step compared to iPhone’s control center. Not something major but does annoy me a little bit as it is one of the thing I do very frequently. Sure there will be tons of apps to do that with one touch. However I always prefer the default way provided by the operating system to do things, unless it’s really necessary to get a third party app.
Apps
Nexus 5 gets its apps from Google Play Store, so it’s pretty much the same with most other Android smartphones. On the positive note, I do notice that most apps are designed better for my Nexus 5 screen compared to my Nexus 7 (2013) screen. So I guess it’s true that many Android apps are still generally designed for smartphones, with somewhat less attention to tablets.
Battery Life
In Nexus 5, battery life is good, but not spectacular. According to its specs, Nexus 5 has 2,300 mAh Li-Po battery, promised to survive 17 hours of talk time in 3G. In my typical style of usage, I found that I generally need to recharge this phone twice a day (mid-day and at night before sleep).
Notifications
A bit similar to Nexus 7, notifications in Nexus 5 is not my favorite part of Android. It’s annoying to see the pulse notification light so I quickly turn it off. I also dislike that I can only disable “show notification” switch in Settings app without the capability to control what kind of notification I want to see for each app. Some apps do have these options in their settings, and that means I need to go inside every app to explore their notification settings. Again, I miss the red notification badge in my iPhone.
On the bright side, Android 5.0 Lollipop finally brings notifications to the lock screen, something they should have done long ago. I would love to have the ability to control which apps can show notifications in my lock screen and which apps shouldn’t appear there at all.
There is a setting to allow only “priority” interruptions, which kinda close to iPhone’s “do not disturb” mode, yet somewhat different. Allowing only priority interruptions give us some sort of options of what kind of interruptions we want to see. If we want to go totally uninterrupted, there is another mode called “none”, which essentially means no interruption, not even alarms.
Lock Screen
Lollipop brings a redesigned lock screen. The swipe gesture to unlock our phone is now a swipe-up gesture. There are 4 things we can do from the new lock screen: opening a specific app from its notification (requires to clear security), unlocking the phone (requires to clear security), dialing emergency number and opening camera app.
For security, we can choose no security, swipe only, pattern, PIN or password. I am already spoiled by iPhone’s press home button to unlock (thanks to built-in fingerprint sensor), but I guess using PIN would also do fine. Setting a security level would allow us to choose between showing all notifications in lock screen, show notification but hide sensitive content, or show no notification at all.
One thing I would like to praise is the ability to enter owner info. This is really really good. Well done, Android. You’ve done this better than iPhone. There are good people out there that might just want to return lost phones to their owners. I used to do this my editing my iPhone lock screen wallpaper using Photoshop. This trick kinda half-work since iOS7 because they blurred the background image when there is a notification in lock screen. Yes, they allow us to locate our lost phone’s location, allow remote wipe and remote lock-down. But what about telling people who might find our phone about where and how to contact us? Currently iOS doesn’t prove an easy way for us to put this information.
Overall Impression
So far I like this phone. It’s not perfect and there are things I need to get used to. Will use this as my primary phone for a week or so before I decide on whether I should return it, use it as primary phone, or use it as backup phone.
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