Google along with Android 4.4 KitKat also announced the much awaited Nexus 5 Android reference handset at an event held a few hours ago at San Francisco. While this was much expected and came in hardly as a surprise, what shocked almost every tech savvy Indian out there was the fact that the Nexus 5 is all set to arrive in India very soon. This is quite unlike the previous occasions when Nexus class devices usually made a very late entry and were sold not by Google at all – but by the OEM themselves.
Soon after the official announcement of the Nexus 5, the Indian Google Play Store too went live with the Google Nexus 5 splash page. The prices of the devices are listed at the Play Store Devices store where the 16 GB version is set to be sold for Rs.28,999 while the 32 Gb version will go for Rs32,999. Decent prices considering the specifications of the devices. If the official arrival of the phone happens in a few days time, it would be timed perfectly to align with the festive season here in India with Diwali just around the corner. I was thrilled to see Google mention India in the official blog post announcing the Nexus 5. Credited to Sundar Pichai, this is what the blog post says:
“Nexus 5 is available today, unlocked and without a contract, on Google Play in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan and Korea (and coming soon to India), starting at $349.”
I couldn’t help but notice the special mention of India there. Pichai Ji showing some patriotism here? I don’t know!
Anyway, lets move on now towards the specifications of the Nexus 5 which thanks to some arrival of some really potent hardware on Android, doesn’t quite blow you away. But then, this is no laggard by any means and is still one of the meanest and fastest phones money could buy. It’s just that there are too many of them right now – you know, the likes of the LG G2, the Galaxy Note 3 and so on..
Display Processor and Graphics
Apart from featuring a 4.95 inch full HD, 445 ppi, Gorilla Glass 3 clad IPS panel, the Nexus 5 also packs in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chip that houses quad core CPU’s crunching numbers at 2.26 Ghz. The Adreno 330 GPU with its smooth graphics will ensure extended gaming sessions and increased girlfriend nagging
Camera
Devices carrying the Nexus name tag have been traditionally known to be thrashed by reviewers and the general public alike for carrying cameras that gave not so great results. This was especially unforgivable considering the kind of things Nokia and some other players were doing with their mobile phone cameras. The Nexus 5 hopes to fix those things – not entirely – but by a small margin. Thus we find that the Nexus 5 gets an 8 megapixel camera that supports Optical Image Stabilization. That is pretty much the only hardware improvement that the Nexus 5 has seen. The rest of the stuff will be handled by the improved camera options that Android 4.4 brings to the table. There is a front camera as well by the way. And as expected of a Nexus 5, the device can capture full HD videos.
Battery Life, Connectivity
I was disheartened to see the official spec sheet mention a 2300 mAH battery under the good for the Nexus 5. While it does run an untested version of Android, the kind of experiences I have had with Android devices and their battery lives I have had in the past, the 2300 mAH figure is alarmingly low for me. This at a time when the likes of the LG G2 and the Samsung Galaxy S4 (which are similar in size) come with larger batteries. On the connectivity front there are all the usual suspects like Dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4G/5G) 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, NFC and Bluetooth 4.0.
In terms of networks support, while most people would be happy to see 4G LTE arrive on a Nexus, mere mortals in India should be wary of the fact that the Nexus 5 at least on the spec sheets doesn’t seem to support the TD-LTE 40 band that networks in India have implemented – and are in the process of being implemented. But then, I guess most of ye all should be happy with 3G, no?
What then do you think of the all new Nexus 5? Worth the wait?
