Nexus 5 Review: Flagship hardware for half the price

arstechnica.com

15 points·eigenvector··3 comments

Not sure if it's fair to call it "flagship". I have one now and it seems blazingly fast and it's nice to have stock android... but the device isn't without compromise. The battery life is 'meh' and the camera is pretty crappy (the speakers are also weak, but not what I'd consider to be a core feature of a 'flagship' device). So you can definitely tell they cut corners on those two (very important) aspects of the phone. Overall I still really like it, though.

The article makes the same points, but that doesn't change Google's positioning of the product. This is the "Google phone". It says so on the front of the blue box packaging. It says so in the Kit Kat OS we've waited so long for. To have to wait for some future Google Now/OS update to support background use of "OK Google" in such an otherwise well-thought out device... It's a bit irritating.

And the camera could be fixed with software but... see above.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great phone, but I'll be trying the iPhone 6 next and I'm looking at Wi-Fi enabled photo cameras for the interim.

But how many updates will it get before it's not supported any more? I got a Galaxy Nexus last year (from Google at I/O, in fact), and it's already unsupported in that it isn't getting KitKat.

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