Nexus 6P Reviews

• FEATURE
• Google finally gets the phablet right with the Nexus 6P
• The best big screen Android experience
• Google gets better at big phones

Specs & Hardware : 

• Operating System: Android 6.0 Marshmallow 
• Display: 5.7 inches; Corning® Gorilla® Glass 4; Fingerprint 
• Rear Camera: 12.3 MP 
• Front Camera: 8MP 
• Processors: Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ Adreno 430 GPU 
• Memory & Storage: RAM: 3 GB LPDDR4; 
• Internal storage: 32 GB, 64 GB, or 128 GB 
• Dimensions: 159.3 X 77.8 X 7.3 mm 
• Weight: 178 g 
• Color: Aluminium; Graphite; Frost 
• Battery: 3,450 mAh battery; 
• Ports: USB Type-C; Single Nano SIM slot: 3.5 mm audio jack 
• Material: Anodized aluminum 

Design:

The Nexus 6P is big enough to keep up with the trend of phablets but small enough to feel grippy in your hands. The thin body and rounded edges at the rear make the device manageable in your palm, but the finger occasionally finds it tough to reach all corners of the 5.7-inch screen.

The Nexus phones have brought many firsts this year and one of them is the Nexus 6P’s full-metal body. The device comes in three colours: Aluminium, Frost and Graphite, which is a smudge magnet. Go for Aluminium or Frost if you don’t want to repeatedly wipe smudges off your device. Another plus is that the handling experience is fantastic. The flat sides are easy to grip, the metal feels nice and cool in the hand, and the heft makes this phone exude feelings of high build quality.

The metal unibody, chamfered edges and crisp buttons make it a premium build worthy of the flagship title. The keys are placed on the right side and a textured surface makes the power button stand out.And, that shouldn’t really be a surprise. Even though Huawei’s own phones always fall down due to overbearing software, the Chinese firm has been excelling in design for a while now. This year’s Mate S being the best yet.

Display:

The Nexus 6P's 5.7-inch display features a Samsung AMOLED panel, with a pixel-dense quad-HD resolution and boy, is it good. While the Nexus 6 suffered with poor viewing angles and whites that almost looked pink, the screen on the 6P is rich in accurate colours and has nicely inky blacks. As it’s AMOLED, whites can look a little muddy but really, come on, that’s a small sacrifice I can live with.

As seen with the last few Nexus smartphones, the Nexus logo is oriented vertically. This time, the logo is painted right onto the metal back, instead of being an insert made of a plastic that can peel off in time. If you prefer things a little more toned down, Google has sneakily added an sRGB display mode deep inside the Settings menu. It cools the colours down a bit, but I prefer the original mode.

Viewing angles are fantastic, as is outdoor visibility. I had like a slight hint more brightness though, and the screen's auto setting is a bit dodgy. It judders noticeably as it changes, but i have found this an issue on most Android phones. Ambient Display is another bonus that comes from the AMOLED panel. Pick the phone up, or wave your hand over it, and a brief black and white view of the time or any current notifications will pop-up. It’s great handy if the phones on your desk and it doesn’t use as much battery as lighting up the whole panel.

Camera:

Nexus 6P’s primary camera. It’s a 12.3 Megapixel shooter that comes with laser assisted phase-detect autofocus.While clicking photos outdoors with ample sunlight, the camera predictably produces very good pictures with a fairly accurate colour reproduction and sharpness that’s commendable. As the light goes down, the Nexus 6P still retains a lot of colour accuracy and sharpness, and the only problem that arises is that of noise. If you’re taking photos around sunset time, you’ll see a fair bit of graininess in your photos. Switching to HDR mode might solve this, but the HDR mode takes a lot of time to process the images and get ready for the next shot. It’s a shame that a sensor this good doesn’t offer manual settings by default and doesn’t let you play around with light. 

The front-facing camera on the Nexus 6P is a no-frills 8 Megapixel unit, which is devoid of any newer features such as autofocus, a flash (LED or screen-simulated) and shoots basic 1080p videos. That being said, the camera is pretty good under all circumstances. There’s just a fair bit of lens distortion, and it keeps noise down in most indoor shots. The sunlit shots can be a little overexposed if the metering decides to get a bit wonky. Nonetheless, it’s a well rounded camera for its time.

Performance:

The Nexus 6P comes with an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, clocked at 2 GHz, and backed by the Adreno 430 GPU and 3 GB of RAM. This processing package remains the 2015 flagship standard, and the great experiences seen with the other high-end smartphones throughout the year is also found here. Moving through the homescreens, opening and closing applications, and multi-tasking have all been an absolute breeze. Gaming on this device has also been a treat, not only because of the processing package, but also because of the display and the dual front facing speaker setup, that all contribute towards enhancing the overall experience. Once again, the Nexus proves that it isn’t just sheer power that allows for great performance, and that software optimizations are certainly needed to properly take advantage of the all the power that is available.Fingerprint reading is now an built-in feature of Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which Google calls Nexus Imprint, that is backed by Huawei’s pedigree of good fingerprint scanner iterations, which really shows with the Nexus 6P. The set up process is very simple, and using the scanner is even easier. All you need to do is rest the finger on the circular area on the back, and when the phone is off, it wakes up unlocked and ready to go, without even showing the lockscreen. 

Paired with 3GB of RAM, the Nexus 6P is comfortably one of the fastest Android phones around. Android 6.0 Marshmallow and Nougat feel super smooth on the 6P, and its GeekBench 3 scores of 1,207 in the single core test and 4,301 in the multicore test only confirmed this further. Admittedly, the Nexus 5X scored higher in the single core test, but its multicore result is almost a full 1,000 points slower, proving that the 6P is the more efficient multitasker.The Nexus 6P handles multitasking with ease as well. We opened up a lot of apps, including some heavy, memory consuming ones such as Lightroom and Snapseed along with the gaming apps running in the background, and we didn’t see the 6P slowing down much in that process. In our photo editing tests, while working with JPEGs was a breeze, the 6P stuttered just once in the whole review process while exporting a RAW file to JPEG file.

However, heating is an issue on the 6P, as we noticed during the gaming and multitasking tests. It also heats up significantly while connected to a Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 compliant charger.

Pros: 

• Excellent Battery
• Excellent Display
• AWESOME Performance
• Decent Camera
•  Ton of RAM
•  Great Fingerprint Scanner, Nicely Put Together

Cons: 

• USB Type-C Might Cause A Few Headaches If You Travel And Forget Cable
•  No Micro-SD; No OIS

Battery:

For long gaming periods will drain the phone's battery quite substantially, but the 6P should easily be able to get through the day before having to return it to the mains. Admittedly, I was a little disappointed that its huge 3,450mAh battery only lasted just two minutes shy of 12 hours in our continuous video playback test with the screen set. the Nexus 6P supports fast charging courtesy of its USB Type C port. This is really handy, as it not only means you can top up your phone quickly during the day, but its reversible connector also means you don't have to faff about working out which way to put the cable in. It took just 15 minutes to get to 20%, and 40 minutes to get to 50%. In an hour, I had 72%, but it took a little longer to get back up to a full 100%, taking just over an hour and a half in total. Still, this is pretty quick considering the size of its battery.

Verdict: 

Google has killed the Nexus lineup and replaced it with the Pixel and Pixel XL. But that doesn’t mean that the Nexus 6P doesn’t make sense. The availability of the 6P is dwindling fast, but even now it makes sense as a premium device to own if you like the pure Android experience. The Nexus 6P has fantastic design and build quality, a detailed and vibrant display, efficiency-driven software, performance that shames practically everything else we have used, good battery life, and a camera that can take on the best in the industry. If we had to find any flaws, they are that the Nexus 6P does not have expandable storage, dispenses with wireless charging, and may be considered a bit expensive. 

The 6P, with the Nougat update, is still a good device for multimedia consumption and multitasking if your budget doesn’t stretch far enough to accommodate the Pixel XL. Oh, and the Nexus 6P looks brilliant.