Hey guys, Jarrod here and today we're going to be unboxing and reviewing the Google Nexus
5X smartphone from LG, you won't want to miss this!
Inside the box we're greeted with the letter “X” from “5X” on a piece of card which
has a diagram on the back of the phone outlining where the basic components can be found.
Underneath that we have a wall outlet charger and included USB type C cable for charging
the phone.
Then of course there’s the phone handset itself, followed by a 90 day Google Play free
trial, as well as the tool required to open the sim card slot.
Finally there's a set of earphones included which sounds ok, they weren’t anything special.
The Nexus 5X was released in October 2015 along with the Nexus 6P, apparently the X
is in reference to the core of the Nexus brand, which makes sense as this phone is more in
line with what a Google Nexus device has traditionally been about in the past, which is providing
great specs at very competitive price point.
While the 5X is the lower end offering of these two Nexus smart phones, it definitely
has a lot of value to offer.
The Nexus 5X is available in 3 different colours, which are carbon, quartz and ice - I have
the carbon one here in this video.
The body is made of solid plastic which gives it a nice hard and light feeling in the hand,
however this does come off a little cheaper, less premium feeling compared to the aluminium
body of the 6P.
Let's start off with the physical aspects of the device itself.
The 5X is a decent size with a 5.2” screen, definitely big enough without being considered
oversized.
I have quite large hands and I can almost reach most of the screen with one hand, however
this is definitely a two handed device.
The 5X weighs 136g and feels quite light every time I pick it up.
On top we find nothing except the top microphone hole.
All that’s on the left hand side is the nano sim card tray.
The bottom of the phone has a USB type C port for charging and transferring data, another
microphone hole, as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Over on the right we have the power button with the volume up and down buttons underneath.
Both buttons are in a pretty good position for your fingers regardless of the hand that
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 5.2” Full HD LCD display, which has a resolution of 1920x1080
or 1080p which is a 16 by 9 aspect ratio, resulting in a high 423 pixels per inch.
The display also features Gorilla glass 3 and I’ve found the viewing angles to be
extremely good, any angle looks great.
There’s a single front facing speaker down the bottom which sounds.. ok, it’s a bit
tinny sounding and it looks like there are two speakers because the speaker grill at
the top looks the same but there’s just the one loudspeaker.
After listening to music the experience was definitely suboptimal and I would not recommend
it if having a good sounding loudspeaker is important to you, personally I never use loudspeaker
as headphones are always going to provide a higher quality and don’t involve disturbing
everyone else in the area.
There’s an RGB notification LED within the bottom speaker grill which can be used once
you enable it, I’ll leave a link to a video showing how to enable the LED light in the
description.
Finally there’s also a 5MP f/2.0 selfie camera capable of recording 1080p video at
30FPS.
Over on the back we have the fingerprint scanner as well as the 12.3MP f/2.0 rear camera with
IR laser assisted autofocus and dual flash which can shoot 4K video at 30FPS - We’ll
come back to the camera later on.
The plastic material that surrounds the whole phone looks nice but is quite the fingerprint
magnet, so I’d recommend using a case if you don’t want to see these sorts of marks
as they can get quite bad, at least with the carbon colour, it’s probably less of an
issue with a lighter coloured plastic as the fingerprints will be harder to see.
Now onto the internals of the device.
The Nexus 5X makes use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 1.8GHz hexa-core 64-bit CPU.
For the GPU we’ve got the Adreno 418, and for memory there’s 2GB of LDDR3 RAM available.
I’ve found these specs to be adequate in providing a smooth experience with the phone.
To power all of this we have a 2,700mAh battery which Google claim is rated for up to 10 hours
of video playback, or 75 hours of audio playback, or up to a blazing 420 hours of standby time.
In my own testing I only need to charge about 3 times per week with an average level of
use.
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 the phone was using just 1% of battery over night while sleeping for
approximately 8 hours, granted airplane mode was enabled which would help a little, that
is still very good.
The 5X supports fast charging, meaning that you should be good to go with up to 4 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 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 around 60% we start to see diminishing returns, where charging
starts to get slower and slower until we reach the 100% mark.
Overall it took 99 minutes to fully charge from 1% to 100% with the included wall outlet
charger.
In regards to wireless connectivity, the 5X supports 802.11a/b/g/n and AC standards with
dual band 2.4GHz and 5GHz available, so basically all current WiFi options as you’d expect
in a new phone.
In addition to this, Bluetooth 4.2 and NFC are also available.
Aside from the different colours, the only other differentiating factor that the device
offers is the internal storage size, which comes in 16gb or 32gb variants.
So with all of these decent sounding specs, how is the phone to actually use?
Overall I have found the phone fairly responsive and do not often encounter lag situations,
likely due to the decent 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 really good to use.
It works fast and allows me to easily unlock the device in under a second with minimal
effort.
I tried to compare it against the 6P but it’s just as accurate and fast in my experience.
It can be a bit inconvenient if the phone is laying down on a flat surface, as in order
to reach the fingerprint scanner you have to pick it up 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.
Speaking of having the phone laying down flat, I’ve found the curved camera bump on the
back to be a little annoying.
When placing the phone down flat on its back and trying to use it, it wobbles around due
to the bump being in the middle.
The bump is at least plastic so I don’t have any concerns with putting it down a bit
rougher compared to the Nexus 6P which has a glass bump, which made me feel like I’d
break the glass if I put the phone down too hard, so at least it’s nice that the 5X
seems to be a bit more durable in that sense.
Personally I would have been fine with a slightly thicker phone that had no camera bump with
more battery capacity, however thinner phones seem to be the current trend and this is definitely
not the only phone to fall victim to this, and will probably not be the last.
The phone is fairly thin for the overall size and specs within, and as mentioned I have
no problems using the phone one handed however it’s definitely a two handed device, especially
for people with smaller hands.
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 5X.
The same camera is also used in the Nexus 6P, so if the camera is your priority but
you're after a cheaper phone the 5X may be a better option for you.
The camera is also very fast at taking pictures, however when taking a constant stream of photos
I have noticed the phone 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 at night.
As you should be able to see HDR reduces the visible noise by a noticeable amount.
In conclusion the Nexus 5X is a somewhat average size phone with decent specs and good battery
life making it a good choice at it’s price point.
The price was recently dropped a couple of times making it even more competitive.
The clean and up to date Android experience provided by the Nexus series of devices makes
for a great user experience and the decent battery life keeps this feeling going for
a long time.
I’d recommend the Nexus 5X over the 6P to people that may have smaller hands or simply
don’t want an oversized phone, but still want good specs with a great camera and stock
Android experience at a lower price point.
So what did you guys think of the Nexus 5X?
Leave a like or dislike to quickly let me know or otherwise let me know down in the
comments, and don’t forget to subscribe for future videos like this one!