And then decide if you have to buy it...
An image clicked using Google Nexus 5X
The new Google Nexus 5X is an all plastic body smartphone from Google, which aspires to fill the shoes of its predecessor Nexus 5. This sharp looking mobile phone, made by LG has been packed with some serious hardware duly accompanied by the latest Android Marshmallow OS.
The retail price of Nexus 5X 16GB variant is 31,990 and 32GB variant is Rs 35,990.
Design
This top of the line smartphone has an all-plastic casing and boasts dimensions of 147mm x 72.6mm x 7.9 mm, besides weighing 136 grams.
It looks plain from the front, having just an earpiece, a front facing camera at the top, and a speaker at the bottom. The speaker also features a built-in LED notification light.
There is a slim strip of bezel surrounding the display. At the top of this smartphone, you will find the USB C charger, a microphone and a 3.5mm audio jack. The bottom of this device only has a small microphone.
Looking at the back panel, you will find the primary camera etched at the top centre with dual LED flash on its side and a laser autofocus finder placed at the extreme left.
There is also a circular chrome surrounded fingerprint sensor below the primary camera. The names of Nexus and LG are marked on the back. Although, the back panel is made out of plastic, it feels soft and silky to touch.
The sleep/ wake power and volume rocker buttons are placed on the right side of the device and on the left side is the Nano SIM tray. Overall, the build quality of this handset is good and is available in three different colour options of Carbon, Quartz and Ice.
Display
Google Nexus 5X is provided with a big 5.2-inch full HD IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen that projects images in 1080x1920 pixels resolution and possesses a pixel density of 424ppi. The pixel density though high does not match the brightness of an AMOLED display.
Its viewing angles are great, but legibility under direct sunlight is blurry. This amazing screen has been provided with the protection of a scratch resistant Corning Gorilla Glass 3 layer. The body to screen ratio of this handset is 69.8 per cent.
Camera
Nexus phones have consistently provided users with good quality cameras in all its models and the new smartphone is no exception. It is fitted with two powerful snappers for shooting high quality still photos, 4K videos and selfies.
Among the two, one is a 12MP autofocus camera placed at the rear, mated with dual LED flash and a laser autofocus finder. This arrangement allows the user to quickly focus on any object of interest and shoot 2160 pixel videos at the rate of 30 feet per second.
The second camera is integrated with a 5MP sensor and is embedded at the front of the handset. The main 12MP camera also features several software tweaks to help you take and edit photos. These include Geo-tagging, Touch focus, face/smile detection, panorama, HDR and HDR+. The secondary camera is without any flash support but is very good at taking selfies and 1080@30fps videos for video chatting.
Processor
Although this smartphone falls in the mid range category, it is very fast, which is largely due to its powerful hexa-core (quad-core 1.44GHz Cortex-A53 & dual-core 1.82GHz Cortex-A57) Qualcomm MSM 8992 Snapdragon 808 processor and Adreno 418 GPU.
Although, the processor is very fast we encountered a few lag in performance as we tried to run heavy resource hogging games, which we believe could be due to the relatively less capacity of RAM.
Operating System and UI
The best thing about a Nexus handset is that users will always get the latest Android OS shipped with the device. The Nexus 5X likewise comes with the just released Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS having small bloatware to give you a near stock Android experience.
The overall experience is smooth and not much different from the earlier Android 5.1 Lollipop OS. However, there are a few changes, which look very cosmetic. These changes include making the handset go to sleep or come to life by simply tapping the fingerprint sensor at the back.
In addition, you get a haptic feedback when you unlock the device -- single vibration if it reads your fingerprint and double if it does not.
The phone is also very sensitive, for if you place your finger incorrectly over the sensor there is a warning on the screen as to what has been done wrong and if it is done too many times, the phone auto locks itself and you have to enter the password to open it.
Another feature, which we find very cool, is that if the user double taps the lock button the camera gets activated, irrespective of it being in the sleeping or wake mode.
On the home screen, you have Google Now to check out your interest in the Internet. Moreover, the user can see all the notification cards and remove them at the launch screen itself.
To access Google Now feature from the home screen, you can just swipe right. If we swipe down once, we get to the notification panel and swiping down the second time takes us to the setting. However, if you wish to go to the settings fast, you can go for the two fingers slide down action. The app list can be scrolled down alphabetically wherein we can see features like ‘tap to focus’ and ‘pinch out to zoom’. We can also swipe right on the camera app to bring out the video recording mode.
Connectivity
This is a single SIM (nano) smartphone that allows user to access a lot of connectivity options including 4G, 3G, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, Hotspot, 3.5mm audio jack, AGPS, Bluetooth 4.2 with A2DP, and GLONASS. In addition, it also features Micro USB 2.0, Type-C reversible connector and NFC.
Sensors
The user experience gets a fillip on this handset thanks to the presence of a large number of sensors, including a fingerprint sensor, an accelerometer, a gyro, a proximity sensor, a compass and a barometer.
Memory
For storage, Google Nexus 5X is provided with 2GB of RAM and 16/32GB of ROM. It does not have any microSD card slot, which otherwise would have enabled you to add an external memory to it, should the onboard memory fall short.
Battery
Google Nexus packs in a 2700mAh Li-Po non-removable battery that gives a respectable talk time with moderate usage.
Other features
This power packed smartphone comes with several additional features, making it a very good competitor. These features include:
- Google Pay
- Plantronics Bluetooth headsets
- USB OTG Supported
- Google Chrome, HTML 5 browser, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Maps for Mobile
