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So the thing is, the Nexus 5 was a near-perfect phone (especially considering it was released two years ago), and it's totally reasonable to think it's still do

So the thing is, the Nexus 5 was a near-perfect phone (especially considering it was released two years ago), and it's totally reasonable to think it's still doing the job very well -- it is. But that's a fact about the N5, not the N5X/6P. I mean, what would you want from a new phone that would show up on a spec sheet? Faster? Check, both of these are. The 808/810 aren't gigantic generational leaps over the 800, but they're significantly faster + 64-bit. Better screen? They're both bigger; >1080p resolution seems irrelevant on a 5"-ish screen (though obviously welcome on larger screens where 1080p would be under 400 dpi). More storage? Well, the 6P gives that to you, though the 5X doesn't. USB Type-C and faster charging? Check. Better camera? Check. Bigger battery? Check (2300 mAh for N5, 2700 mAh for 5X). More RAM? Check on the 6P, the same on the 5X. Plus the fingerprint thing is probably a bigger deal than you think. Loss of wireless charging is definitely a minus, though. So that's one downgrade, two specs that haven't changed on the 5X, and six that have; eight of those specs are better on the 6P. That's not a small upgrade, it's just that you have no reason to bother with an upgrade.

dozy 11y ago
Also, the improved 808 SoC at 20nm manufacturing process should offer better battery life over the 800 in the N5, even if they had the same battery capacity (which they don't, so it's a double-whammy there).
- inversionOf 11y ago
  The 808 is also a big little architecture, with two A57 cores and four A53 cores. The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings. As a Nexus 5 user I'm pleased with most of the changes and non-changes. 2GB is fine for a smartphone, and an image sensor with more than double the light capture area per pixel is brilliant, and if it delivers the better photographs will be worth it right there. Losing OIS...I don't think that's a downgrade as OIS was always suspect to begin with (not least because OIS only helps for lateral movements. It does nothing for rotational movements, and of course make subjects stand still. It yielded a tonne of unusable photos). The only thing I'm really displeased about is the removal of wireless charging. That was a really nice feature. Between the Snapdragon 810 and 808, the only real items of concern is that the 808 does not have h265 hardware encoding (the 810 does), and its image processing DSP is 12-bit per pixel rather than the 14-bpp of the 810.
  - DannyBee 11y ago
    "The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings." non-ARM-manufacturer citation needed :). My experience as a compiler guy (that makes the toolchains for these kinds of phones) has been that big little brings improvements to what these guys can shove on a chip and advertise, but so far not real improvements to battery life or real numbers. There reason why is pretty simple. In an ideal world, you don't want anything running at all. You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". What you want is to wake up, do whatever work is needed as fast as possible, and go back to sleep. Period. Sleeping chips are lower power, by far, than idling chips. If it's faster to do that work with an A57, it'll generally give you better battery life to do that. Again, this is right now, based on perf per watt/blah blah blah. Maybe someday, in the future, a53's will be so low power vs a57 that doing something else makes sense. But it's not true now, AFAIK. Instead, they make big-little because they can't really increase the speed of the higher end cores more without increasing power usage too much.
    - inversionOf 11y ago
      You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". Yes. You do. If I'm casually browsing non-intensive web pages, e-reading, or watching a Netflix movie, or even encoding a video, the background is doing IO rate limited system updates and basic data logging, etc, the vast majority of the time the CPU demands are very low, but frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question. An A53 has a much lower ceiling, but a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57. Yes, if you want to run a benchmark the A53 is not a good bet (and is generally worse in a workload power usage), but it is a very good bet for most real world usage.
      - DannyBee 11y ago
        No, you don't. Encoding a video should not be CPU, so let's get that out of there. Most of the rest is more GPU dependent than CPU dependent. The amount of CPU time you should be spending on these tasks is really low. For example, web browsing and reading, the CPU should be asleep most of the time. Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of very silly little tasks for A53's to do, but what you listed are not those tasks. It's more things like "syncing" or something that is a poll loop and event bound, not something that is in any way CPU bound. Period. CPU bound stuff is not something for the A53's in this to tackle. It makes battery life worse. That is what the actual, in-the-field data says. " a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57" Truthfully, for most A53 cores, this is true only in the dreams of the chip designers. "but it is a very good bet for most real world usage." Then what, pray tell, do you expect the A57's to be doing in this world? And why, in practice, has big.little and other things not shown any better battery life at all if it's really a better way of doing things. I have no doubt it may be a better way of doing things in the future, but it ain't right now ;)
mattmaroon 11y ago
I love wireless charging, but my Nexus 6 has such horrible battery life, and charges so much faster wired, that I end up using a cable a few times a day. Especially in my car. I can pretty much only get away with using a Qi charger at bedtime. So to me the USB C is a big win.
- dublinben 11y ago
  How do you use your phone, that you get less than a single day's battery life from the current Nexus 6? I can easily get 1-2 days use out of mine.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Think of how much you use your phone. GP uses phone twice as much. b^)
- mkozlows 11y ago
  Yeah, I suspect that was a big part of their thought here -- USB-C charging is very fast, and whatever marginal convenience win you get from wireless charging would almost certainly be overshadowed by the speed of wired charging.
  - TheRealWatson 11y ago
    I'm not ready to consider the wireless charging just a marginal convenience. Once I started using it I could not tolerate not having it. The only place I use the cable is in the car, where I'm not supposed to be holding the phone anyway.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mjrpes 11y ago
Occasionally, my Nexus 5 is dead in the morning because the phone was not perfectly placed on the wireless charger. Until Google expands the charging area on the phone to eliminate this problem, I don't mind going back to wired charging.
- noja 11y ago
  Get a better wireless charger with multiple coils.
  - mjrpes 11y ago
    I purchased Google's officially sanctioned charger, figuring the Nexus 5 would be optimized for it. Looks like it has been discontinued: https://store.google.com/product/nexus_wireless_charger https://store.google.com/product/nexus_wireless_charger Are there better ones out there that don't have as much of an issue with placement? My blind assumption was the problem lies with the phone's limited charging area, not the charger (which I presumed was nearly the whole surface).
- arjie 11y ago
  I have the Tylt http://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Charger-Galaxy-Nexus-Phones/dp/B00DG8NUC8/ http://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Charger-Galaxy-Nexus-Phones/d... but it is far from the only device in that form factor. Strongly recommend.
  - mjrpes 11y ago
    OK that looks much better designed. Definitely would recommend that over a flat charger, based on my experience.
- TheRealWatson 11y ago
  I have a cheap Qi charger (aren't they all cheap these days?) and this only happened to me once or twice in the two years with the N5.
munchbunny 11y ago
Interestingly my problems with it are exactly three things that aren't addressed in the new models: 1. The wireless charging, while seemingly a small thing, was to me a huge improvement in my experience of using the phone. The fact that I can sit down at my desk, plop the phone down, and it'll just work, and when I get up to leave I can just pull it off my desk. Removing the USB cable interaction made the phone a much more invisible and organic part of my day. Might not be important to others, but I would very much miss it. 2. Lack of removable storage. Small deal but it was a nice quality of life feature. 3. Battery that's hard to replace. My phone upgrade cycle is very long, usually longer than the lifetime of the battery. I'm feeling it in my Nexus 5 right now. But the main thing that might prompt me to upgrade is just software performance creep. The latest software updates have really turned my phone into a slideshow, and that's getting really frustrating. But the spec improvements are certainly both appreciated and necessary.
- dmethvin 11y ago
  I really like the wireless charging on my Nexus 5 as well. Going back to the cable would be fine with me but I would prefer something that takes a little less effort to insert and I'm always concerned about breaking the connector. I just found a really interesting MagSafe-like connector for the classic micro USB [1], maybe they will make something soon for the new USB3 that the 5X uses. And before some of you say that MagSafe has patents on this, remember that the magnetic catch for a power cord was used on deep fat fryers YEARS before MagSafe [2]. [1] http://www.dxsoul.com/product/wsken-micro-usb-metal-magnetic-adhesion-charging-cable-w-metal-plugs-white-901408130 http://www.dxsoul.com/product/wsken-micro-usb-metal-magnetic... [2] http://www.cpsc.gov/PageFiles/102855/Fryers-DeepFat.pdf http://www.cpsc.gov/PageFiles/102855/Fryers-DeepFat.pdf
  - hatsix 11y ago
    I backed this kickstarter for a magsafe-like usbc connector: http://www.znaps.net/ http://www.znaps.net/ We'll see if it follows through.
    - deleted 11y ago
chrsstrm 11y ago
>Plus the fingerprint thing is probably a bigger deal than you think Am I the only person on the planet who doesn't want a fingerprint reader on my phone? I don't want to secure anything of importance with my fingerprint - fingerprints are usernames, not passwords. This just feels like the equivalent of writing your password on a Post-It and sticking it to your monitor.
- mmanfrin 11y ago
  I thought I wouldn't care for it on the iPhone, but it's honestly a nice convenience. It's not for security, it's for simple auth (like when unlocking the phone or authorizing a payment on the app store).
  - detaro 11y ago
    > (like when unlocking the phone or authorizing a payment on the app store) Aren't these the things where you'd want security?
    - CardenB 11y ago
      Unlocking your phone is done so frequently that many people opt not to secure it. The best security is one that you use. It's arguably more secure than a 4 number passcode, which someone can easily watch you enter over your shoulder. Buying things on the App Store requires you to type in a password for the first purchase every so often. Then you use your finger print.
      - smileysteve 11y ago
        > It's arguably more secure than a 4 number passcode My friends often have to share their passcodes with me; at which point it's like, what's this adding?
        CydeWeys 11y ago
        I don't have a passcode on my phone to protect it from my friends ... similarly I don't have a lock on my front door (that I give spare keys to friends for) to protect me from my friends.
piyush_soni 11y ago
Nope. All those 6P 'checks' on a 5ish inch screen - that's what we needed. Oh, and OIS. HTC tried and failed at all this "bigger pixels" thing.
eropple 11y ago
> Better screen? They're both bigger; > So that's one downgrade Two, and one critical. The Nexus 5 was absolutely the biggest phone I would consider, and even that was really too big. Making one phone a dinner plate and one phone a centimeter-larger dinner plate is atrocious. Apparently only Sony wants my money (and honestly the Z Compact series is still too big).
- dexterdog 11y ago
  I used to be the same guy complaining about all of the phones being too small. I like the big phones of today, but I understand the complaints some people have.
  - mixmastamyk 11y ago
    Think of the difference between a basketball player and say a short woman and it is easy to see we need both. They couldn't wear the same gloves.
    - dexterdog 11y ago
      I know that. Actually it was the basketball players and other pro athletes that I always thought looked so ridiculous using iPhones before the 6. That being said, my wife is quite small and she had a Note2 and now a Note4 and she loves them that size because it keeps her from needing a computer for most of her stuff.
- shadowmint 11y ago
  Hm...? It's higher resolution, but the 6P is physically slightly smaller; 5.7" vs 6"; (77.8 x 159.3 x 7.3mm vs 82.9 x 159.2 x 10.0mm).
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    The comparison was to the 5.
- dgemm 11y ago
francisb07 11y ago
I honestly wouldn't have minded if they kept the same form-factor and aesthetic with the original N5 (the one I use and love right now), and just did an internal overhaul...similar to how Apple does minor cosmetic changes, but a whole world of upgrades internally.
bipin_nag 11y ago
Agree with you. Another thing I would stress on is the price constraint. Don't forget that Nexus 5 was said to be a high-end phone but 200$ cheaper. Given a price to stick to, it is very difficult to improve the specs substantially to wow the existing customers. Look at Oneplus one- the flagship killer and its successor- two not considered to be killer at all. I don't think existing customers would want to upgrade to the newer version. Speaking as someone who does not own a Nexus 5, I would say I am very impressed by the specs and am waiting to purchase it. There aren't many phones better than this (keeping in mind the price). A lot of Nexus 5 owners have pointed that the newer one does not have wireless charging and OIS. I feel that improving the overall experience matters more. Even though both are nice-to-have features it still does not help the crappy battery and low-quality camera that much. The 5x solves the existential funks first by adding those improvements. And due to the price limitation the nice-to-have features had to be dropped.
lenkite 11y ago
Any 'better' camera sucks without optical image stabilization which neither phone has.

dozy 11y ago

Also, the improved 808 SoC at 20nm manufacturing process should offer better battery life over the 800 in the N5, even if they had the same battery capacity (which they don't, so it's a double-whammy there).

inversionOf 11y ago
The 808 is also a big little architecture, with two A57 cores and four A53 cores. The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings. As a Nexus 5 user I'm pleased with most of the changes and non-changes. 2GB is fine for a smartphone, and an image sensor with more than double the light capture area per pixel is brilliant, and if it delivers the better photographs will be worth it right there. Losing OIS...I don't think that's a downgrade as OIS was always suspect to begin with (not least because OIS only helps for lateral movements. It does nothing for rotational movements, and of course make subjects stand still. It yielded a tonne of unusable photos). The only thing I'm really displeased about is the removal of wireless charging. That was a really nice feature. Between the Snapdragon 810 and 808, the only real items of concern is that the 808 does not have h265 hardware encoding (the 810 does), and its image processing DSP is 12-bit per pixel rather than the 14-bpp of the 810.
- DannyBee 11y ago
  "The A53 cores will likely carry the vast majority of every day use, and redouble the battery savings." non-ARM-manufacturer citation needed :). My experience as a compiler guy (that makes the toolchains for these kinds of phones) has been that big little brings improvements to what these guys can shove on a chip and advertise, but so far not real improvements to battery life or real numbers. There reason why is pretty simple. In an ideal world, you don't want anything running at all. You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". What you want is to wake up, do whatever work is needed as fast as possible, and go back to sleep. Period. Sleeping chips are lower power, by far, than idling chips. If it's faster to do that work with an A57, it'll generally give you better battery life to do that. Again, this is right now, based on perf per watt/blah blah blah. Maybe someday, in the future, a53's will be so low power vs a57 that doing something else makes sense. But it's not true now, AFAIK. Instead, they make big-little because they can't really increase the speed of the higher end cores more without increasing power usage too much.
  - inversionOf 11y ago
    You don't want A53's "handling the majority of the workload". Yes. You do. If I'm casually browsing non-intensive web pages, e-reading, or watching a Netflix movie, or even encoding a video, the background is doing IO rate limited system updates and basic data logging, etc, the vast majority of the time the CPU demands are very low, but frequent enough that putting a CPU to sleep is completely out of the question. An A53 has a much lower ceiling, but a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57. Yes, if you want to run a benchmark the A53 is not a good bet (and is generally worse in a workload power usage), but it is a very good bet for most real world usage.
    - DannyBee 11y ago
      No, you don't. Encoding a video should not be CPU, so let's get that out of there. Most of the rest is more GPU dependent than CPU dependent. The amount of CPU time you should be spending on these tasks is really low. For example, web browsing and reading, the CPU should be asleep most of the time. Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of very silly little tasks for A53's to do, but what you listed are not those tasks. It's more things like "syncing" or something that is a poll loop and event bound, not something that is in any way CPU bound. Period. CPU bound stuff is not something for the A53's in this to tackle. It makes battery life worse. That is what the actual, in-the-field data says. " a much better middle tier power usage level, than the A57" Truthfully, for most A53 cores, this is true only in the dreams of the chip designers. "but it is a very good bet for most real world usage." Then what, pray tell, do you expect the A57's to be doing in this world? And why, in practice, has big.little and other things not shown any better battery life at all if it's really a better way of doing things. I have no doubt it may be a better way of doing things in the future, but it ain't right now ;)

mattmaroon 11y ago

I love wireless charging, but my Nexus 6 has such horrible battery life, and charges so much faster wired, that I end up using a cable a few times a day. Especially in my car. I can pretty much only get away with using a Qi charger at bedtime. So to me the USB C is a big win.

dublinben 11y ago
How do you use your phone, that you get less than a single day's battery life from the current Nexus 6? I can easily get 1-2 days use out of mine.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Think of how much you use your phone. GP uses phone twice as much. b^)
mkozlows 11y ago
Yeah, I suspect that was a big part of their thought here -- USB-C charging is very fast, and whatever marginal convenience win you get from wireless charging would almost certainly be overshadowed by the speed of wired charging.
- TheRealWatson 11y ago
  I'm not ready to consider the wireless charging just a marginal convenience. Once I started using it I could not tolerate not having it. The only place I use the cable is in the car, where I'm not supposed to be holding the phone anyway.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mjrpes 11y ago

Occasionally, my Nexus 5 is dead in the morning because the phone was not perfectly placed on the wireless charger. Until Google expands the charging area on the phone to eliminate this problem, I don't mind going back to wired charging.

noja 11y ago
Get a better wireless charger with multiple coils.
- mjrpes 11y ago
  I purchased Google's officially sanctioned charger, figuring the Nexus 5 would be optimized for it. Looks like it has been discontinued: https://store.google.com/product/nexus_wireless_charger https://store.google.com/product/nexus_wireless_charger Are there better ones out there that don't have as much of an issue with placement? My blind assumption was the problem lies with the phone's limited charging area, not the charger (which I presumed was nearly the whole surface).
arjie 11y ago
I have the Tylt http://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Charger-Galaxy-Nexus-Phones/dp/B00DG8NUC8/ http://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Charger-Galaxy-Nexus-Phones/d... but it is far from the only device in that form factor. Strongly recommend.
- mjrpes 11y ago
  OK that looks much better designed. Definitely would recommend that over a flat charger, based on my experience.
TheRealWatson 11y ago
I have a cheap Qi charger (aren't they all cheap these days?) and this only happened to me once or twice in the two years with the N5.

munchbunny 11y ago

Interestingly my problems with it are exactly three things that aren't addressed in the new models: 1. The wireless charging, while seemingly a small thing, was to me a huge improvement in my experience of using the phone. The fact that I can sit down at my desk, plop the phone down, and it'll just work, and when I get up to leave I can just pull it off my desk. Removing the USB cable interaction made the phone a much more invisible and organic part of my day. Might not be important to others, but I would very much miss it. 2. Lack of removable storage. Small deal but it was a nice quality of life feature. 3. Battery that's hard to replace. My phone upgrade cycle is very long, usually longer than the lifetime of the battery. I'm feeling it in my Nexus 5 right now. But the main thing that might prompt me to upgrade is just software performance creep. The latest software updates have really turned my phone into a slideshow, and that's getting really frustrating. But the spec improvements are certainly both appreciated and necessary.

dmethvin 11y ago
I really like the wireless charging on my Nexus 5 as well. Going back to the cable would be fine with me but I would prefer something that takes a little less effort to insert and I'm always concerned about breaking the connector. I just found a really interesting MagSafe-like connector for the classic micro USB [1], maybe they will make something soon for the new USB3 that the 5X uses. And before some of you say that MagSafe has patents on this, remember that the magnetic catch for a power cord was used on deep fat fryers YEARS before MagSafe [2]. [1] http://www.dxsoul.com/product/wsken-micro-usb-metal-magnetic-adhesion-charging-cable-w-metal-plugs-white-901408130 http://www.dxsoul.com/product/wsken-micro-usb-metal-magnetic... [2] http://www.cpsc.gov/PageFiles/102855/Fryers-DeepFat.pdf http://www.cpsc.gov/PageFiles/102855/Fryers-DeepFat.pdf
- hatsix 11y ago
  I backed this kickstarter for a magsafe-like usbc connector: http://www.znaps.net/ http://www.znaps.net/ We'll see if it follows through.
  - deleted 11y ago

chrsstrm 11y ago

>Plus the fingerprint thing is probably a bigger deal than you think Am I the only person on the planet who doesn't want a fingerprint reader on my phone? I don't want to secure anything of importance with my fingerprint - fingerprints are usernames, not passwords. This just feels like the equivalent of writing your password on a Post-It and sticking it to your monitor.

mmanfrin 11y ago
I thought I wouldn't care for it on the iPhone, but it's honestly a nice convenience. It's not for security, it's for simple auth (like when unlocking the phone or authorizing a payment on the app store).
- detaro 11y ago
  > (like when unlocking the phone or authorizing a payment on the app store) Aren't these the things where you'd want security?
  - CardenB 11y ago
    Unlocking your phone is done so frequently that many people opt not to secure it. The best security is one that you use. It's arguably more secure than a 4 number passcode, which someone can easily watch you enter over your shoulder. Buying things on the App Store requires you to type in a password for the first purchase every so often. Then you use your finger print.
    - smileysteve 11y ago
      > It's arguably more secure than a 4 number passcode My friends often have to share their passcodes with me; at which point it's like, what's this adding?
      - CydeWeys 11y ago
        I don't have a passcode on my phone to protect it from my friends ... similarly I don't have a lock on my front door (that I give spare keys to friends for) to protect me from my friends.

piyush_soni 11y ago

Nope. All those 6P 'checks' on a 5ish inch screen - that's what we needed. Oh, and OIS. HTC tried and failed at all this "bigger pixels" thing.

eropple 11y ago

> Better screen? They're both bigger; > So that's one downgrade Two, and one critical. The Nexus 5 was absolutely the biggest phone I would consider, and even that was really too big. Making one phone a dinner plate and one phone a centimeter-larger dinner plate is atrocious. Apparently only Sony wants my money (and honestly the Z Compact series is still too big).

dexterdog 11y ago
I used to be the same guy complaining about all of the phones being too small. I like the big phones of today, but I understand the complaints some people have.
- mixmastamyk 11y ago
  Think of the difference between a basketball player and say a short woman and it is easy to see we need both. They couldn't wear the same gloves.
  - dexterdog 11y ago
    I know that. Actually it was the basketball players and other pro athletes that I always thought looked so ridiculous using iPhones before the 6. That being said, my wife is quite small and she had a Note2 and now a Note4 and she loves them that size because it keeps her from needing a computer for most of her stuff.
shadowmint 11y ago
Hm...? It's higher resolution, but the 6P is physically slightly smaller; 5.7" vs 6"; (77.8 x 159.3 x 7.3mm vs 82.9 x 159.2 x 10.0mm).
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  The comparison was to the 5.
dgemm 11y ago

francisb07 11y ago

I honestly wouldn't have minded if they kept the same form-factor and aesthetic with the original N5 (the one I use and love right now), and just did an internal overhaul...similar to how Apple does minor cosmetic changes, but a whole world of upgrades internally.

bipin_nag 11y ago

Agree with you. Another thing I would stress on is the price constraint. Don't forget that Nexus 5 was said to be a high-end phone but 200$ cheaper. Given a price to stick to, it is very difficult to improve the specs substantially to wow the existing customers. Look at Oneplus one- the flagship killer and its successor- two not considered to be killer at all. I don't think existing customers would want to upgrade to the newer version. Speaking as someone who does not own a Nexus 5, I would say I am very impressed by the specs and am waiting to purchase it. There aren't many phones better than this (keeping in mind the price). A lot of Nexus 5 owners have pointed that the newer one does not have wireless charging and OIS. I feel that improving the overall experience matters more. Even though both are nice-to-have features it still does not help the crappy battery and low-quality camera that much. The 5x solves the existential funks first by adding those improvements. And due to the price limitation the nice-to-have features had to be dropped.

lenkite 11y ago

Any 'better' camera sucks without optical image stabilization which neither phone has.