Hey guys, Jarrod here and today we're going to be unboxing and reviewing the Google Nexus
6P smartphone from Huawei, you won't want to miss this!
First off the unboxing.
The box is made of a soft cardboard which is recyclable, inside we're greeted with the
letter "P" from "6P", on the other side of the card is some basic information regarding
the basic physical parts of the device.
Inside the box we have the phone handset itself, a USB type C charging cable and a USB type
C plug for charging straight from the wall outlet.
There’s also a Google Play 90 day free trial, the required tool to open the SIM tray, a
safety information booklet, and a USB type C to USB type A cable so that you can plug
the phone into your computer.
The Nexus 6P was released in October 2015 along with the Nexus 5X, apparently the P
stands for premium and after using the device for the last month I can agree with this,
the phone is definitely very premium feeling.
The Nexus 6P is available in 3 different colours, aluminium, graphite, and frost - I have the
graphite one here in this video.
The body is made of aluminium which gives it a really nice smooth yet strong feel in
the hand, it feels like it's well built and doesn't feel weak and cheap like the 5X does
which I had a play with in a store.
We'll start off with the physical aspects of the device itself.
It's quite big and is by far the largest smartphone I've ever used, coming from a 4.3" HTC Desire
HD.
The 6P weighs 178g yet still feels light due to the equal weight distribution over the
large space.
On top we find a 3.5mm headphone jack, I usually put my phone in my pocket top down so this
isn’t the best for me if I’m listening to music as it’s is easier for me to put
my finger on the scanner and pull it out of my pocket already in the same way i’d hold
it, if I put it in my pocket bottom first to accommodate a plugged in headphone cable
I end up picking it up upside down and have to rotate it around before use.
All that is on the left hand side is the nano sim card tray.
The bottom of the phone only has the USB type C port for charging and transferring data.
Over on the right we have the power button which has a rough gripped texture with the
volume up/down button underneath which is smooth to differentiate it from the power
button.
Both buttons are in a pretty friendly position for your fingers regardless of the hand you’re
holding the phone in, however I rarely found myself even using the power button as I primarily
use the fingerprint scanner to display the screen most of the time.
The front features the 5.7" Wide Quad HD AMOLED display, which is a resolution of 2560x1440
or 1440p with a 16 by 9 aspect ratio, resulting in an incredible 518 pixels per inch!
The display is also using Gorilla glass 4.
There's also two front facing speakers which actually sound pretty decent unless you put
them on maximum volume.
There's a notification LED which can be used once you enable it, I’ll leave a link to
a video showing how to enable the LED in the description.
Finally there’s also an 8MP f/2.4 selfie camera capable of recording video at 1080p
at 30FPS.
Over on the back we have the fingerprint scanner, the 12.3MP f/2.0 rear camera with IR laser
assisted autofocus with dual flash which can shoot 4K video at 30FPS.
The antenna bands also show around the all sides of the device, personally I don’t
mind this and like how the effect looks.
Now onto the internals of the device.
The Nexus 6P makes use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 v2.1, which is a 2GHz octa-core 64-bit
CPU.
For the GPU we've got the Adreno 430, and for memory there’s 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM available.
To power all of this we have a 3,450mAh battery which Google claim is rated for up to 10 hours
of video playback, or 100 hours of audio playback, or 440 hours of standby time.
In my own testing I only need to charge about twice per week, however I'm not a very heavy
user.
I managed to get 5 days of battery off of my first charge with the Nexus 6P which was
very exciting, a lot of this is likely owing to Doze, a new feature in Android 6.0 which
helps improve power management.
I also found that I was using just 2% of battery over night while sleeping for approximately
8 hours, granted I do enable airplane mode when I go to sleep which would help a little,
that is still quite respectable.
The 6P supports fast charging, meaning that you should be good to go with up to 7 hours
of use from just 10 minutes of charging.
I've run the phone down to 1% battery remaining and then fully charged it to give you an idea
of how long this took to complete with a relatively new battery.
While this is definitely not a perfect test as I did power the screen on very quickly
once each minute to record the battery level shown, I think it does serve as a good approximate
average.
While the test was performed background applications were closed and the phone was not otherwise
used.
After the charge gets to about 70% we start to see diminishing returns, where charging
starts to get slower and slower to reach the 100% mark.
Overall it took 95 minutes to charge from 1% to 100% with the included wall outlet charger.
It took just 36 minutes to reach the 50% charge mark.
In regards to wireless connectivity, the 6P supports 802.11a/b/g/n and AC standards with
dual band 2.4GHz and 5GHz available, so basically all of the common WiFi options as you'd expect.
In addition to this, Bluetooth 4.2 and NFC are also available.
Aside from the colours, the only other differentiating factor that the device offers is the internal
storage size, which comes in 32gb, 64gb or 128gb variants.
So with all of these great sounding specs how is the phone to actually use?
Overall I have found the device extremely responsive and have not yet encountered any
lag situations which is obviously due to the killer specs and clean Android experience
that the Nexus series of devices are well known for.
Of course being a Nexus device we can also expect relatively quick updates and newer
features sooner when compared to other Android devices on the market.
The fingerprint sensor has been fantastic to use.
It works very fast and allows me to easily unlock the device in under a second with minimal
effort.
You can store up to 5 different fingerprints at once, I ended up adding the primary finger
I use to unlock the phone 3 times to improve the overall coverage of the finger.
This is not to say the scanner is not accurate, because it is very accurate - as long as you
place a part of the finger on the scanner that you scanned when adding the finger it
will work fine every time very fast.
Over time I found that I would brush my finger on the scanner from all sorts of different
angles which weren't covered in the initial scan, so I added the same finger as a new
fingerprint and put all of these odd angles and different parts of my finger in which
I have found improved things a lot.
I've noticed that when I go to pull the phone out of my pocket my hand goes into the required
grip to place the finger on the scanner so that by the time the phone is out in front
of me it's already been successfully unlocked.
It can be a bit inconvenient if the phone is laying down on a flat surface, as in order
to reach the scanner you have to pick it up every time to unlock the phone, however you
can also set up a secondary method such as a PIN which can be used as an alternative
so it's not the end of the world.
In the stand that I use at my desk I can reach behind the phone with my finger and unlock
it as the stand doesn't cover up the fingerprint scanner which is quite nice.
The stand I'm using here is the CoolerMaster Jas Mini, I'll leave a link to it in the video
description if you’re interested.
The phone is quite thin which surprised me considering the specs and battery size, although
I suppose it's a bit easier to spread all of the components out when the device is this
big.
The size has definitely taken some getting used to, after I first got it there were times
I thought it was going to fall out of my hand simply because it was so long and I was holding
it towards the bottom.
Over time I seem to have adjusted my grip and don't face this problem any longer.
Speaking of the phone being laid down on a flat surface, initially I was quite worried
that while putting it down the glass on the back which covers the camera might accidentally
break if you put it down too hard.
The camera bump didn't actually end up being anywhere near as big as I thought it would
be, however I'm still careful when I put the phone down flat as the glass bump does come
into contact with the surface that you’re placing it on and I saw some early reports
of people complaining that the glass easily smashed, so it's definitely something to keep
in mind when you put the device down - it seems like a bit of a poor design decision
to be honest.
The camera is excellent, the photos that it takes are definitely the best I've seen from
a mobile device, all of these photos have been taken with the Nexus 6P.
The same camera is also used in the Nexus 5X, so if the camera is your priority but
you're after a cheaper phone this may be an alternative option for you.
The new double press the power button in Android 6.0 has also been really useful, it allows
you to quickly get to the camera even when the phone is locked.
The camera itself is also very fast in taking pictures, however when taking a constant stream
of photos I have noticed the device warm up a bit with HDR enabled, which is expected
based on the additional image processing taking place.
HDR does a pretty good job at making the photos look a whole lot nicer, here are some example
photos with and without HDR.
As you should be able to see, primarily in the shots taken at night, HDR reduces the
visible noise by a noticeable amount.
In conclusion the Nexus 6P is a larger sized phone but packs in the specs and battery life
to make it worthwhile.
The clean android experience with no lag thanks to the amazing internal specs makes for a
great user experience and the absolutely amazing battery life keeps this going for what feels
like forever.
So what did you guys think of the Nexus 6P?
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