Mark Pickavance looks at the more affordable of the two official Google phones, which has just seen a price drop
I really wanted to cover the Nexus 5X when it first launched in September 2015, but a combination of circumstances contrived to scupper me at every turn. However, my patience has been rewarded in several ways, not least that Google recently dropped the price of the 16GB model to £299, and 32GB version to £339.
When you consider the hardware in these devices is actually better than many premium priced phones, it became an offer I just couldn’t refuse.
At the time of writing, Google was also offering a free Chromecast worth £30 and £20 credit for the Play store, further eroding any resistance I might have to buying this phone.
Bludgeoned by these temptations, I eventually succumbed and ordered a 16GB black Nexus 5X that arrived just two days later, along with a £15 bumper cover I’d decided to get. In retrospect, if I’d waited for the credit code from ordering the phone, I could have had the cover for free.
Some people might wonder why I didn’t get the 32GB model, but my own experience is that I don’t keep large amounts of data on my phone, and I’ve previously had no real issue with a 8GB models.
Actually, the whole buying saga is something I’ll cover elsewhere, because what I really want to talk about is the Nexus 5X and why you might want one.
New Toys
What I don’t intend to do in this feature is crawl through the innards of this device, saying what’s new and how it directly compares with other phones you can buy. I’ve included a hardware breakdown that you can read at your leisure, but what I’d like to concentrate on is what makes this phone different from other Android devices you can purchase today.
Unpacking the Nexus 5X, two things struck me immediately, the first being that at a snip under 15cm, this is a big phone that would have been classed as a ‘phablet’ a couple of years ago. The second notable aspect is while it’s large, it isn’t heavy, weighing in at just 136g.
In the box with it is an offer for Google Play access, a charger and a small tool for accessing the SIM tray. Initially nothing remarkably there, I thought, until I noticed that the charger and its associated cable are the new USB Type-C standard.
Having used the phone for a couple of weeks now, I can state that this is one of the best features, even if it doesn’t really allow you to borrow another charger in a pinch.
This port not only makes sending files over from a PC significantly quicker, it also allows the Nexus 5X’s battery to be totally charged in around 100 minutes. And the port also supports reverse charging, so a fully charged phone (tablet or laptop) can be used to charge another device.
The only downside to the Type-C connectivity is that the charger also has one of these ports as standard. This allows the cable to be reversible with the phone, but it also means that unless you have a PC with a USB Type-C port on it, you’ll probably need a USB Type-C to USB standard-a plug cable, for which Google would like another £10.99.
It also makes a converter that allows any standard USB device plug into the Nexus (also £10.99), and two adapters that enable you to get video output from the phone to either HDMI or DisplayPort, each for £32.99.
The standard charger is a 15W model that is designed for a single phone, but it does make a 22W variant that can charge two devices, and a 60W universal charger designed for much larger devices, tablets and Chromebooks, which also use the Type-C standard.
More about power use later, but thankfully the device came with at least 60% battery, and I was able to push on and start personalising the device right away.
All New Android
Powering up the Nexus 5X for the first time, there’s a new animated Android logo to entertain, before it drops into what looks like the same initialisation routine that’s been around since KitKat.
Why the phone assumes we’re all Americans, I’ve not idea, but it must please those on the other side of the Atlantic. At this point I hadn’t installed my SIM, which is my preferred choice, but perhaps if I had it might have worked out that I wasn’t anywhere near the USA.
Then the normal routine went off on an excursion where it asked me if I was transferring from another Android phone, and then it gave me some instructions that only work on Android 6.0, just to confuse the non-technical user.
If you ignore all this, you can get to the Google account phase, and after achieving that, you can choose to copy from any devices associated with that account and sync with virtually any prior Android version.
After this, the phone went on the typical rampage where it attempt to install 30-odd applications while moving all your personal data over, while also in this case downloading a system update from 6.0 to 6.0.1.
With the 802.11ac wi-fi support and fast broadband, this didn’t take long, and very soon I was able to get more familiar with what had changed from Android 5.1.1 to 6.0.1, aka Marshmallow.
Initially I thought very little, but lots of minor alterations started to grab my attention, especially those to do with Google Now. That’s been added to the lock screen, along with a button to access the camera immediately.
Once past the lock screen, the first major change I encountered was that the home screen by default only has a single page, and sliding it to the right reveals a Google Now feed. This seems similar to ways that both Samsung and HTC both modified the UI, neither of which I personally appreciated.
Thankfully, you can dispatch this approach and return to a more conventional layout, and you can also add extra home screens if you’re a fan of widgets.
One new twist I especially liked was that if you have an app that’s on the home screen and you decide you don’t want it any more, you can choose either to remove the icon, as before, or actually uninstall the app directly from there.
Google Now On Tap
As we’ve progressed through KitKat and Lollipop, the importance of Google Now has been elevated. Whenever you’re using the phone, Google Now is listening, and the range of commands and words that it understands are extensive.
Google’s search possesses more than just the ability to answer questions, though. Now you can run apps, call people, dictate messages and generally operate your phone with just your voice.
Also, on this device, Marshmallow has a whole new level of capability that Google calls ‘on Tap’. If you’re not prepared for it, this can take the whole ‘second guessing’ aspect of Google Now to a new level of creepiness. However, you do have to intentionally activate it in this instance, so there is some degree of control.
What it does is allow you to call on Google Now in any app, and the software will scan what you’re looking at (email, YouTube, a picture or whatever) and provide relevant search information based on that.
For example, if you’re reading an SMS message about meeting at the train station, this feature could automatically bring you map navigation to the nearest railway or warn you that it conflicts with a prior engagement.
Exactly how you react to this will depend on how comfortable you are with Google knowing large amounts about your life, work, relationships and friends.
It certainly goes beyond the party tricks that Siri and Cortana can do, as it’s baked into the Android OS at a much deeper level.
To enable this functionality to be even better, Google has built a whole Voice API that apps can plug into, allowing almost any tool to be voice controlled, and if designed with that in mind, they can use the API to talk back to you.
Activating On Tap is simply a matter of holding down the home button, and it will leap into action for those prepared to have an excessively well-informed digital personal assistant.
It might be worth considering that when our machine overlords eventually take control, they’ll know how compliant you’ve been. Just saying…
Security
Confusingly for users, there appears to be a war on encryption being drummed up in some quarters that should know better. But as phone devices go, the latest Nexus phones do have some neat security features that should, in theory, keep their devices relatively safe from all but the most professional device hijackers.
Up until this point all security updates have been delivered with system updates, but now they come independently through a new secure mechanism.
Device encryption arrived first with Lollipop, but under Marshmallow the phone is fully encrypted by default, much I presume to the annoyance of those in the security services who like to snoop on us.
Therefore when the phone is locked, it’s reasonably secure, and therefore much effort has been put into the locking mechanism and additional layers of security that you can apply to it.
Most people expect pattern, PIN and password locking, but to those the Nexus 5X and 6P add a dedicated fingerprint reader that is required to be used before any of those extra inputs.
The sensor for that is on the rear of the phone below the camera, and you can initially confuse the two. However, it didn’t take long for me to get used to it, and it will read a finger very quickly once on the sensor.
But you can go beyond even that and create lock scenarios where the phone can only be accessed at specific geographic locations, when it sees a friendly face, hears a friendly voice or when it can sense a Bluetooth device (like Google wearable tech) or even on a predefined wi-fi network.
This is called ‘Smart Lock’, and you can make it as specific as you like, depending on what level of paranoia you’re experiencing at any particular time.
In addition to disabling access to those who might have stolen your phone, this functionality also links to a set of features that enable the device to be sandboxed for BYOD (bring your own device) situations, enabling the phone to be inherently more secure at work than it is at home.
Another off-shoot of the high security and a feature that you can use specifically with the fingerprint reader is the Android Pay functionality. However, it isn’t available in the UK, and although Google has suggested it will be here in 2016, it hasn’t said exactly when. That Australia is on Google Pay already suggests that bringing this technology to the UK might have run into some sort of legislative roadblock, unfortunately.
But should Google unblock this obstruction, the 5X is ready to sanction payment with your fingerprint.
Camera
The rear camera in my old Nexus 4 isn’t up to much, when compared with the ones I’ve used in recent flagship phone designs. But the one in the Nexus 5X is rather nifty, even if it doesn’t have optical motion compensation.
Built around the Sony’s Exmor IMX377 CMOS image sensor, it has 12.3MP capture resolution that seems well suited to indoor photography, using relatively large 1.55 -micron pixels to gather as much light as possible.
That’s exactly the same sensor in the 6P, but having extra processing power has enabled a few video options on that phone that the 5X isn’t blessed with, like 240fps video.
That said, it can capture 4K resolution video at 30fps, or 1080p video at up to 120fps (slow-motion). There’s a laser autofocus system and dual LED flashes, and the camera app has been revamped to include HDR+, among other special modes.
I like some of the new ease-of-use features in both the app and added to Android. While using the phone, you can double-tap the power button, and it immediately takes you into camera mode, and when you’re there, a single swipe sends you from still to movie and back again.
Specifications and good software design are useful, but what really convinced me that the 5X makes a major step forward in picture quality was some of the images I captured using it. Where I’d normally deploy my trusty Canon Ixus for close-up product shots, the Nexus 5X is more than capable of doing that job and providing me with sharp and well-saturated pictures.
I’ve included a few here for you to better appreciate. I’m sure that there are phones with even better cameras, but the one on the Nexus 5X is rather good.
Power Management
The first Nokia I had nearly 20 years ago offered 650 hours standby, but modern smartphones make that era seem like a distant memory.
Looking at the specifications, you might conclude that the Nexus 6P got the better deal with a 3450mAh battery, rather than the 2700mAh battery in the Nexus 5X. That’s more than 20% extra for the 6P, although it has an octo-cored CPU and a much higher resolution display to blow that power budget on.
What they both have to extend battery life is both specialised power management silicon and the introduction of ‘doze’ mode into Android 6.0.
The purpose of these features is for the phone to be more aware of what it’s doing – specifically when you’ve put it down and therefore don’t need high-demand applications draining your power.
How well this works is well demonstrated by leaving the phone overnight without charging – something that I wouldn’t recommend on most phones. Typically, they’re at least 15-20% light of their charge by morning, whereas the Nexus 5X was usually 1-2% down at most.
If you resist the temptation to play games, a single 100% charge can last for several days – something I hadn’t experienced for some time.
Other tweaks to do with the display also enhance power use. Picking up the phone, it will normally display a simple lock screen view but in a mono low power display mode. If you then touch the display, it will wake up to add colours, but if you want to just see the clock or what messages you’ve had, then you’ve just saved some power.
Where it’s less wonderful is with gaming and video playback, both of which burn through your battery life disturbingly quickly.
If you like to watch TV shows on the train, I’d strongly recommend you carry the Type-C charger with you, because you’ll need to use it when you get to work.
Probably the best feature is one that you can manually activate called ‘Battery saver’.
This gears the phone down to use the minimum power for any task and not to keep checking email and social media until you specifically use those apps. It disables automatically while the device is charging, so it might work well for people who leave the phone on their charger for much of the day.
Strengths
There are lots of things about this design I like, but many of them are to do with just how responsive it is, regardless of what task you give it.
The few benchmarks I ran confirmed that compared with many phones and quite a few tablets, the Nexus 5X is cooking with gas.
In a single task, it’s at least 50% quicker than the Nexus 5 it replaces, and 25% in multi-core tests. The results are closer to LG’s G4 which, given that it uses the same SoC and was built by the same company, isn’t a huge surprise.
Faster processors and more numerous cores are part of the story, but I’d also contend that part of this achievement comes down to the architecture of the 5X (and 6P), and how it radically different from any Nexus phone designs that have come before.
In terms of the OS features, being a Nexus it’s well insulated from the bloatware that many branded phones suffer from. That leaves more space for user data and provides a generally slicker user experience.
While Android 6.0 isn’t a radical departure from 5.0, it does seem less prone to performance-impairing memory leaks or allowing apps to hog resources.
If you compared the 5X with the 6P, it gets beaten on many features but generally by relatively small amounts.
A 1080p display is fine for most uses, and the rear camera can capture some wonderful images even in relatively low light conditions.
In many respects, the Nexus 5X harks back to the original concept of the Nexus One, being a well-balanced platform designed to showcase Android in what is effectively a mutual appreciation society.
There are more powerful phones around, like the 6P, because the Nexus 5X doesn’t attempt to be the very best; it’s aiming to be good at most things without being the master of any job.
However, one area it firmly wins is the price, being at least £75 cheaper than the 6P when you compare the 32GB models directly.
It’s also worth noting that if you look at the recently announced Microsoft Lumia 950, it has a very comparable specification, having the same CPU and GPU, though possibly a better screen. Microsoft is currently asking £419.99 for that phone SIM-free, making it more expensive than the Nexus 6P!
Take a quick look around those phones that are one notch down from the very top, and you’ll find many of them are more than £400, even if they’re not as sophisticated as the 5X in many important respects.
The combination of power, performance and price is one that is difficult to ignore, if you still think that spending £300 on a phone is acceptable.
Weaknesses
Some people will probably think that the 5X is still too big to be an everyday phone, but for anyone in middle age the extra screen size is invaluable.
However, it’s large, and with a very smooth back it could very easily shoot out of an inside pocket if not properly secured. Because of that, a bumper or cover is an absolute necessity, to avoid expensive accidents.
While I really like the Type-C charging, what’s less desirable is that the battery isn’t user replaceable. In about three years, to my estimation, I’ll be sending this away to a specialist to get the battery replaced, probably spending more than I’d like to extend its life.
On the flipside of that argument, with the Type-C connection you can get 3.8 hours of use from only ten minutes of charging, so you shouldn’t need to charge it as long or as often.
My only regret, moving from the Nexus 4, is the loss of Qi charging. According to Google, it focused on making Type-C as useful as possible, and in doing so sacrificed wireless charging. Google’s choice, but I do miss it.
Battery life is good by smartphone standards, but that is somewhat like saying one air tank is better than none when you’re underwater. You still really need to charge once a day if you use it more than occasionally, even if the 5X is very good at rationing what power it can carry.
Another mistake, in my opinion, was not to give this phone a micro-SD card slot. This isn’t just because I wouldn’t pay for the 32GB model, but because Google modified Android in version 6.0 to treat micro-SD differently, allowing you to make them dedicated to that specific phone and have their space be merged with the internal storage seamlessly. It seems mildly bonkers that it did that and then made a phone that doesn’t allow for micro-SD expansion.
I’m also not overly thrilled about the placement of the headphone jack at the bottom of the phone, which seems an unnatural position to me.
And Google needs to pull its fingers out about Google Pay in the UK ASAP, though that’s not specifically a 5X issue.
These are mostly minor points, and so far they haven’t massively detracted from what has generally been a very positive experience and a massive leap in capability from the Nexus 4.
Final Thoughts
Part of me hopes I never get to see the Nexus 6P, because if it’s substantially better than this device, then I’ll be mortified. Looking at the specifications, there aren’t many places where it’s substantially better, having exactly the same rear camera and sensor array as the 5X.
The cheapest Nexus 6P is also £414, and that’s probably more money than I could realistically justify spending on a phone, given that I’m primarily located at home.
My logic in buying this was that it’s big enough to replace my tablet along with my phone, thus I’ve avoiding the need for two devices.
It also allows me to see where Google is taking Android, which now seems a very long way from the Éclair and Gingerbread era where I first joined this train.
For Apple’s sake, I hope it can convince its users not to try one of these out, because I firmly believe that spending more than £539 on an iPhone 6S could seem excessively indulgent when you can almost have two of these for the same money. That’s a battle that Apple is fighting across the board, and one it’s not prepared to reduce its massive profit margins over.
As for the Nexus 5X, LG did a remarkable job of putting this together while exploiting the Marshmallow feature set. Where the Nexus 5 and 6 didn’t really get people excited about the pristine Android platform, the Nexus 5X has done that again for this reviewer.
My only valid concern is that in two or three years (the realistic lifespan for a smartphone these days), technology is likely to have moved on and prices comes down.
Since the 5X and 6P arrived, rumours have circulated that Google wants to do more direct design of the Nexus products, rather than farming them out to the likes of LG, Asus, Samsung or Huawei. When they’re replaced, we’ll undoubtedly learn more, but I’m not sure what value Google sees in designing phones when there are some very capable companies around that can follow instructions.
Emulating Apple’s control obsession won’t take Android where most users would like to see it go, so I hope that this rumour mill is grinding chaff in this instance.
It needs to embrace the many good things that are in these devices, and push ahead to make them even better with the next iteration.
If you want a really good Android phone, don’t care for branded bloatware, and are prepared to spend a little extra, then the 5X could be the handset for you.
But you can get a perfectly effective Android phone for less, if you don’t normally hang on to your phones for more than a couple of years.