Google launched its latest own-brand smartphone with little fanfare. A simple press release, then two hours later the LG-manufactured Google Nexus 5 was available to buy.
The phone itself is a big deal, though. It is, quite simply, amazing value. Almost everything about the Nexus 5's specification is top-drawer, from its Snapdragon 800 processor to its Full HD screen and the very latest version of Android; 4.4 KitKat (now updated to 4.4.2, see below). Phones with this kind of specification are usually more than £500 SIM-free, but the Nexus 5, astonishingly, is over £200 cheaper than that.
Android 4.4 KitKat is also an impressive update to the operating system, which not only brings improved performance and more features, but is the first stock version of Android to look properly attractive. We normally don’t mind when Sony, Motorola and Samsung, for example, add custom skins to their Android builds, but we prefer the way 4.4 looks to any custom version of the OS. For more on Android 4.4, see the section below.
The Nexus 5 is amazing value for a top-drawer smartphone, but if you're on a serious budget don’t forget about the Motorola Moto G: a fully-featured Android 4.3 smartphone for just £130, which will be updated to Android 4.4 in January.
The Nexus 5 isn't cheap, but it's a bargain for what you get
The handset doesn’t feel cheap. It's a simple slab with rounded-off corners and a pleasing rubberised rear, which we think feels classier than the shinier Samsung Galaxy S4. You don’t get the super-classy build quality of the metal-and-glass Sony Xperia Z1 or the metal unibody HTC One, but the phone's chassis is classy enough to match its internal components.
NEXUS 5 DISPLAY
The Nexus 5 has a 5in 1,920x1,080 display, which is fast becoming the standard for high-end smartphones. We struggled to find fault with the IPS panel. Whites are pure, text is super-sharp, and the touchscreen surface has just the right amount of resistance to finger dragging to make it a pleasure to use. Side by side with the very best screens, such as the AMOLED panel of the Nokia Lumia 925, the Nexus 5's display has lower contrast and less saturated colours, but comparing screens of this quality just comes down to splitting hairs.
Android 4.4 KitKat is prettier than previous versions
NEXUS 5 SPECS AND BENCHMARKS
The phone's quad-core processor runs at 2.2GHz, and leads to seriously snappy performance. The Nexus 5 completed the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in 706ms - quicker than even the Sony Xperia Z1, our previous Android Sunspider champion. It also managed a huge 17,496 in the 3DMark Unlimited benchmark, which is up there with the Z1 for 3D performance; good-looking 3D games such as Real Racing 3 ran beautifully.
NEXUS 5 ANDROID 4.4
With benchmark figures like these, it's no surprise that the Google Nexus 5 runs Android 4.4 beautifully (recently slightly updated to 4.4.2, see below), ripping through menus, opening apps and panning around web pages with rarely a hesitation. Android 4.4 is by far the most attractive version yet of Google's operating system. The redesigned, larger icons, more modern compressed fonts and coloured backgrounds make it look far more like a consumer interface than an engineer's plaything; stock Android has now caught up with the custom editions from Sony and Motorola for attractiveness.
Aside from the redesign, the OS has been tweaked to make Google's services more tightly integrated. Swiping left from the main homescreen now goes straight to Google Now, which displays a number of cards relating to your recent activities on Google; if you've searched for a place on Google Maps, for example, if will automatically display a route based on whether you usually walk, drive or take public transport. You can also set Home and Work addresses, and Google Now will display weather information for those two locations automatically. You can also set it up to display customised stock information or sports results, among other things.
We didn’t find Google Now life-changing, but it was useful; we just wish it could work out that an extra three minutes' walk to a different London Underground station would shave 20 minutes off the recommended route and cut out a couple of changes.
Swipe left from the home screen to access Google Now's dynamically-updated information cards
The Phone app now searches for local places as well as through your contacts, so you don’t have to search for a place through Maps or your browser then plug the phone number into the Phone app; you search and phone from the same place. There have also apparently been some improvements to the voice search; we found it worked reasonably well, letting us navigate to places with distinctive names (Leicester and Croydon were fine, Purley was more likely to take us to the East End of London than the South) but we'd still usually use it to call people when driving than for general smartphone tasks.
Android 4.4 is also more tightly integrated with Google+ than previous versions. Hangouts, the Google+ group chat app, is now the default for messaging, so you can choose whether to send an SMS to a phone number or a Hangout message to someone in your Google+ circles. If your contacts don’t use Hangouts on their phones the message will appear when they next log in to Google+, but strangely not in the notification area of the Google homepage. We found this made it easy for messages to be ignored, so we had to be careful to send messages via SMS rather than Hangouts if the recipient wasn't a habitual Google+ user. You could always make sure this doesn’t happen by using a third-party SMS app from Google Play.
NEXUS 5 CAMERA - UPDATED 22ND APRIL 2014
The Nexus 5 camera has gone through two major changes since launch. The original camera app was sluggish to launch and take photos, though this was largely fixed in the update to Android 4.4, plus it was frustratingly minimal in its interface design. However, that app has now been removed entirely, with Google moving even such core functions to standalone apps, which are then easier to update regularly without updating the operating system itself.
GOOGLE CAMERA APP
The new Google Camera App is actually available for any Android 4.4 device. It launches very quickly on the Nexus 5 from the home screen, and can still be launched straight from the lock screen too, so you don't miss a shot while fumbling with your unlock code.
The app is simple and easy to use, there's a big onscreen shutter button, while tapping the screen is only used for adjusting the focus and exposure point. The volume rocker is pressed into service as alternative shutter button, obviously it doesn't have the half-press capability of a proper shutter button, to let you lock focus and exposure, but it's still handy and has a light enough touch so as not to move the camera when you press it.
There's not much in the way of settings, a swipe from the left edge brings out a menu with options for video, camera, panorama, photo sphere and lens blur. The first two are self-explanatory, while the panorama and photo sphere modes guide you to take multiple pictures (either in a line or as a segment of a sphere) and then stitch them together into one large image. This works pretty well, with the joins almost imperceptible at the kind of sizes you'd share such an image online.
The Panorama mode works well, though as is typical it struggles with varying light levels
The new lens blur mode is designed to create the short field of focus effect that DSLR cameras achieve, great for blurring out the background of portraits. You centre the subject then move the camera upwards after pressing the shutter. The motion gives the Nexus 5 some depth data to work with, based on which it blurs the background. There's a slider so you can choose the severity of the effect, but you tend to lose detail in your subject as you adjust it upwards. With a steady hand and a very still subject you can get some reasonable results, but other manufacturer's efforts are better.
The new Lens Blur mode certainly blurs the background but if you aren't careful it will blur your subject too
IMAGE QUALITY
With the many changes to the camera app since launch, we've also seen the image quality refined. The Nexus 5 has an 8-megapixel sensor, which is few pixels by current standards, but images were generally fine in daylight, with accurate colours and well-resolved details. You do lose detail quickly if you crop into your images though, due to the low pixel count.
The initial camera app tended to overexposure, but this seems to have been largely fixed by the updates. Colours have been warmed up a little, and it looks good and sharp now too. It’s a little grainier than some cameras, so it looks like the noise reduction algorithm has been tweaked to more detailed shots, rather than softer, more 'pleasing ones' something we prefer. The camera now prefers faster shutter speeds and higher ISOs (for sharper but noisier shots) over its previous preference for slow shutter speeds and lower ISOs (which produced some blurred images).
Photos are reasonable in low light, but noise reduction led to some smudgy details. It's not the best camera we've seen, and is the only evidence of LG compromising to keep the Nexus 5's price down, but it's still more than adequate for most uses.
Perfectly good shots from the 8-megapixel camera
NEXUS 5 VIDEO
The Photos have been improved then, but the quality of the video footage was always rather good. When filming outside in the street, we saw lifelike detail, strong colours and little noise in the 1080p footage, but the lack of optical image stabilisation means some camera shake is inevitable.
When compared side by side with the video from a Samsung Galaxy S4, which itself has a high-quality video camera, the S4's footage had significantly more noise and some interference on repeating surfaces, such as brickwork. We much preferred the Nexus 5's video in daylight.
NEXUS 5 ANDROID 4.4.1 and 4.4.2
We’ve already discussed the main improvements from the post-release updates to Android 4.4 on the Nexus 5 in the camera section. There are a few other notable changes though. First, the maximum volume of the speaker has been upped considerably, it’s now much louder turned up full, and though it starts to distort a little at maximum volume, it’s certainly a nice additional option for when you want to watch a YouTube video with a friend.
The update was reported however to cause excessive battery drain for some users, something that may be related to the use of Skype or other certain third-party apps which access the camera. For more details see our article: Google Nexus 5 battery drain camera bug fix in the works. We haven't noticed the problem on our handset.
NEXUS 5 CONCLUSION
The Nexus 5 is a fantastic phone for the money. We love Android 4.4, the Full HD screen is excellent, the phone is seriously fast and, if 16GB of storage from the £299 version isn’t enough, the 32GB edition is a reasonable £40 more. Better still you can buy the handset now SIM-free for £20 less than the RRP, just £280 from Carphone Warehouse.
The Google Nexus 5’s only drawback is battery life; it managed just 7h 22m in our video playback test, which is three hours less than we expect to see from a modern smartphone. If you use your phone intensively, you'll need to top it up during the day. This is the handset's only real flaw, and isn’t enough to stop it winning a Best Buy award.
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