Nexus 6, A Mark Of A New Era ?!

by Hisham Daou · Published October 23, 2014 · Updated February 29, 2016

The Nexus 6 was unveiled by Google in collaboration with Motorola. The new smartphone sports a massive 6″ screen, the display is a QHD 2560 x 440 AMOLED with a 493 ppi pixel density. The device is powered with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 processor clocking at 2.7GHz, accompanied by an Adreno 420 GPU. Pretty much all the top specs are included in the device. 13 MP Camera with 4K video capture capability. NFC, BLE and WiFi 802.11ac 2×2 MIMO. Dual front-facing speakers. Brushed Aluminum body and so much more. Probably the best feature being Android 5.0, which I had the chance to flash on my Nexus 7 tablet and I must say, I am loving it.

Everyone agrees that despite all these specs, this is not enough to mark a new era in the smartphone industry, so what is the deal ?

I still remember few years back when I used to wait from year to year to see how smartphone manufacturers released their yearly flagship devices. Every year these new devices used to put the ones form the previous year to shame. With every new device came a set of new abilities that previous devices where not able to reach. The latest releases of Android, even though they were flashable using community supported ROMs, didn’t perform that great on old devices. Many lagging problems deemed the experience somehow underwhelming.

A flash forward, and the underwhelming comes from another place now, the phone releases. With every flagship release of this year I had an underwhelming feeling that the new phone, no matter what they tried to cram inside it, just didn’t fulfill my geeky needs. The Samsung Galaxy S5 is a great phone by itself, but is the upgrade from the S4 to the S5 worth it ? We can say the same about pretty much all the newly released devices : HTC M8, Samsung Note 4 and even the iPhone.

So where does the Nexus 6 fit in all this. As an Android fan, I used to wait for Google every year to release a cheap device with medium specs and great experience. That was the case with all the past Nexus devices. Furthermore, the new release used to be a direct replacement of the previous one. In other words, once the new device was released the old one was phased out and removed from the Google Play Store. But that is not the case with the Nexus 6 and the Nexus 5. Even though the Nexus 6 is now released, it is not aimed to sit where the Nexus 5 currently reign. Google is still offering the Nexus 5 in the Play Store. The Nexus 6, stepped up the game offering quality build that no other Nexus device has offered since the initial HTC Nexus One. We loved the design of the Nexus 5, but it is not the Aluminum design of the Nexus 6.

From all the above comes the questions:

If Google chose to release a mid end device like the previous years, would it have made any difference compared to the Nexus 5 ?
Would the new device brought any added benefits over the old Nexus 5 running the latest Android 5.0?
Did the Smartphone tech race started to slow down?
Will we see any innovations in the smartphone hardware department in the near future? Or have we just reached a new Era in the smartphone industry where we will be seeing minor updates from year to year?