Well, all the announcements have been made. It looks like the Nexus 6 will only be a larger-sized phone (no smaller option), and it doesn't appear to have wireless charging. It does have a turbo charge mode, though, that gets you six hours of battery life in 15 minutes, so that's pretty neat.

I'm mostly disappointed that it doesn't look like this phone will be sold the way the previous phones were. It looks like it'll either be sold on contract or you can pay a typical $650 for it unlocked. Perhaps that's because this is the first Nexus device that's actually a contender, specs-wise, and not a slightly older phone that they can make for cheap. Still, it looks like Google is going to keep their $350 Nexus 5 around a little longer and sell it alongside the 6. Strange.

Also released today:

Nexus 9: I prefer the smaller screen on the Nexus 7, actually. But it looks like a well made tablet and the keyboard accessory sounds good.

Android 5 Lollipop: This looks like a nice OS refresh. Clearly flat design is in these days. Looking forward to getting it on my phone, but I'm sure that'll take a while.

Nexus Player: I might actually be interested in swapping out my Sony Google TV for this. It looks like a good upgrade to the Google TV experience. Still, I'm going to have to wait for Plex to be released for it, as Plex is the only non-Google app I use on my Google TV. Huzzah! Apparently Plex is on it. *edit* Woah now, it looks like the Nexus Player will not have HDMI pass-through. Do not like. */edit*

Overall it's sort of a mixed bag for me. I think the 6 is a very impressive phone, but it just doesn't do it for me. I think that if it were the new $350 Play Store phone, I'd probably jump on it, but at $650 or under contract it just doesn't appeal.

Or does it?



I agree about the pricing. $650 is probably closer to the real market price than $350 is, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

That's how I feel. I might buy a T-Mobile US version of the Xperia Z3 or just keep my Nexus 5 a while longer. I would like to see how Android 5.0 feels on it first.

To me, Moto X for $450 with a .edu discount is much more appealing than the Nexus 6. Since I'm on T-Mobile now, The branded Xperia Z3 with Wifi-calling and LTE band 12 is more appealing still. The Z3 has the added benefit of being a reasonably sized phone. I'm not saying I won't ever get the Nexus 6, but it's the first Nexus I didn't immediately want without seeing it first in-person.

Good price on the Moto X (and I do qualify for .edu discount) but no wireless charging means Nexus 5 is probably the ticket for me.

Also, after reading that the Nexus 4 is getting Lollipop, I'm even sadder about breaking my screen, and thinking that maybe just paying to fix that might be better than getting an N5. Yeah, I know, crappy camera, but for situations where camera quality matters, I have an actual camera.

N6: The Motorola page does indeed show Qi charging. The massive battery is attractive for me as well, plus the turbo charge thing is clearly targeted at the airport traveler where you've got very limited time between flights and you're trying to top up your battery right now Of course, this means that we have yet another incompatible USB charging dingus. Although, for all we know, Motorola has secretly implemented USB Power Delivery 2.0, which is part of the sea change to accompany the new type C connector, which isn't yet officially here. We can dream, can't we?

N Player: They don't show the back of the thing, but they do show two separate cables. Presumably, that's power and HDMI (network via WiFi), although it would be cool if it could run off USB power like the Chromecast. What this clearly isn't, however, is a replacement for the Sony GTV / Blueray single-box solution. That's sad.

N9: The big thing, from my perspective, is that it's heavier than the Nexus 7 tablet, which is already something I'm looking to remove from my travel bag. (Too much damn weight.) I'll probably end up going N6 for myself (to replace N5 and N7) and hand my current N7 to my daughter, who will be perfectly thrilled with it. One notable thing about the N9, however, is that it's possibly the first product to ship with a 64-bit ARM core. That's a big deal for a variety of reasons, not least that it represents the clash of the titans with Intel. Now you've got an ARM chip that can reasonably run a 64-bit kernel and do all the things you'd expect from a server-class machine. Irrelevant for a tablet, but a very big deal in servers.

Android 5 / Lollipop: From most users' perspectives, it's a very incremental release over Android 4.4. They've done a ton of under-the-hood work to make the system more efficient on older hardware, and they're blurring the line between web pages and apps (convergence being a buzz word, I guess), but the seriously new stuff is Android Auto and Android Wear, which work just fine with older phones.

Sony Z3: they degrade the camera performance when you unlock the phone. Because DRM. Or something. No thanks.

N6 vs. OnePlus: Now this is an interesting discussion to have. The OnePlus is occupying the niche formerly occupied by the earlier Nexus devices -- damn good hardware for half the price of the very best hardware. Is the N6 worth roughly 2x the price of a OnePlus? Good question. Also, on price, can somebody explain to me why the tablets are so much cheaper than the phones when they have essentially the same electronics (or, for some tablets, like the N9, they've got *better* electronics), bigger batteries, and bigger screens? You'd think the tablets would cost *more* but they cost less.

This is a bit tongue-in-cheek repost of this...

New Android OS Lollipop? Meh. Basically what you could get elsewhere a year ago. Another TV puck? Apple pushed on this a while ago. Hopefully it will work with Apple phones as well. New tablet? Good on them for going 64bit (but not on the phones?), but boo for the non-standard keyboard attachment, so you can't just buy any third-party keyboard. (No doubt they've patented the keyboard connector so third-party keyboard makers have to pay to play.) Apple's going to need to ramp up the keyboard points, but otherwise iPad seems to be a much more useful tablet.

Hmmm....

Anyway, I went digging through the specs, and one thing jumped out of the discussion on multi-user support:

Screen pinning: pin your screen so another user can access just that content without messing with your other stuff

This. This is fantastic for a specific use case that I've got. I have a Play Store All Access thing attached to my Gmail account. I'd like to share this with my daughter, without giving her full access to rummage around my email and all the rest of my stuff. If this means what I think it means, then I can "pin" Play Music to my account and let my daughter do that without having any of my other privileges. That's excellent.

Does anybody know if the Nexus 9 has cellular data available? The spec page doesn't mention it (but it is pretty sparse).

Haven't seen info on what LTE bands, but I'd assume it's probably enough to ensure pretty wide compatibility.

Thanks, I haven't seen that.

You mean apart from the iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air 2 and HTC Desire 510 ?

And last year's iPad Air with A7

And last years iPad mini, I'd forgotten about them

It has just occurred to me that then 510 is probably having to run in 32 bit mode at the moment, isn't it Lolipop that brings 64 bit Android ?

Indeed, Lollipop is the first Android release with a 64-bit Dalvik runtime system. Sorry, I didn't realize that the ARM64 cores had been shipping for such a long while.

Bringing this discussion over to the Google thread:

I'm curious, how many apps do you know of using the NDK? Figures out there put this at 50% of the top 250 apps according to ARM, either due to the NDK or other paths to running native code on Android. That seems unusually high to me.

Also looks like Android 5.0 is the end of the road for Dalvik at last. Android Runtime (ART) has now replaced it. The benefit here seems to be moving from a just-in-time approach to ahead-of-time, boosting application performance and lowering battery consumption.

I've never understood that "explanation". The fairly obvious best method would be to only compile the app the first time it is run, or at installation time only, and keep the compiled copy around thereafter.

But the stock explanations for the two runtimes present each as "all or nothing" --> Dalvik being "nothing" pre-compiled, and ART being pre-compile "all".

Right now, with ART, if I upgrade the phone or simply wipe the cache, there's a 5-20 minute delay on the reboot while the system tediously recompiles every last app.

So I use Dalvik instead.

.NET (on Windows) allows you to pick one. By default, code is JITted, but the installer can opt to compile it (via ngen). Seems like the right answer.

Device upgrades are fairly rare for most users, as is wiping the cache. Upgrades tend to also happen when plugged in, allowing the AOT compiler to run the CPU at full speed without impacting battery life.

Also consider it may not just be the one app the user launched that needs to go through the JIT compiler. With intents as Android calls them, an app may be calling functionality from other apps on the system. Each of those other apps is also going to need to go through the JIT compiler. I'm unclear when the second JIT run would happen; at initial app launch, or when the user taps a share button or similar action that invokes the second app. I'd hope this happens all at initial app launch, to avoid a random performance hitch after tapping a button.

I can see where this is going to slow down some development or those users who frequently upgrade their phone with community builds of the OS. It seems this is mostly a decision to benefit the majority of Android users who don't develop for their phone or root it. They are going to tap upgrade for their OS every once in a while and have a longer process. In return when they tap Angry Birds, it's going to launch a bit faster and save a bit of battery life.

I have no idea what percentage of Android APK libraries out there are using native code, but as Google has been pushing Intel tablets plus better compilers, every Android dev should certainly be aware of what's going on here. I figure that the only places where there will be real problems are when an app is carrying along some huge library (game engine, etc.) written in C or C++. That's obviously a problem for games, but it's less clear whether the problem goes far beyond.

As to Dalvik -> ART, I believe the picture is more complicated than it's been painted here. Dalvik was originally interpreted and then a JIT was added (in Android 2.2, says Wikipedia). ART has two separate backends -- a JIT and a "real" compiler based on LLVM. I have no idea how they decide which one to use at what time.

The idea of install-time compilation is old. Very old. Like IBM did it with System/38 in 1979 (later superseded by the AS/400 line). By distributing code as "vertical microcode", and compiling it when installed, IBM had the design freedom to completely swap out the underlying machine architecture. I believe the latest AS/400-compatible boxes are just PowerPC on the inside. It's smart for Android to follow the same path, since it means that whenever a new hardware features is available, the compiler can take advantage of it immediately.

So, yes, reinstalling Android is that much slower because you're recompiling all your apps. However, it's just not something that happens all that frequently. Besides...

LG G3 - Sony Z3 - One Plus One - Nexus 6 - iPad Mini Retina

Good size comparison photo of the Nexus 6.

Hoo boy! That's a big phone, isn't it? Although honestly I don't have any familiarity with the three phones on the left, having never held one before. I've held an iPad Mini, but only in the store, and the size difference is pretty big.

This is a pretty neat tool for size comparisons.

When I started this thread, I had no intention of purchasing the Nexus 6.

Today I bought one.

I'm still getting used to the massive size, but other than that I'm really enjoying it. It's way faster than my Nexus 5, particularly in launching the camera and taking photos.

In regards to the wireless charging: the Nexus 6 has it, and it works with the Nexus 5 charging block, but apparently it doesn't have the magnets that the Nexus 5 has, so there's nothing keeping the phone on the block. Does anyone have a recommendation for a wireless charging mat?

Random observation: the Nexus 6 is so large that my Nexus 5 fits almost entirely within the borders of the screen of the Nexus 6, with at least half an inch on the side.

I'm itching to buy one, myself, but I'm grimly waiting until I've got a decent privacy solution. Android 5 isn't yet supported by XPrivacy nor has CyanogenMod released any builds of CM12 with their various wonderful privacy features.

My hope is that, by the time that CM12 is out there, the price will have started falling on the Nexus 6. A couple months is usually enough time for normal phones to start being discounted. Why not this one?

I wouldn't hold my breath! The Nexus 5 never dropped in price.

Quick update: I have a new favorite feature of Lollipop that I haven't seen get any attention in the tech press: when someone calls me, it doesn't take up the whole screen!! To be more accurate, it looks like if I already have the phone on and unlocked, the OS assumes that I'm in the middle of something, and that I might want the option of ignoring the intrusion of a phone call. So instead of taking over the entire screen, a box comes down from the top, only taking up about 10% or less. I then have the option of accepting or ignoring the call. If the phone is off when a call comes in, it takes up the whole screen as usual.

Galaxy S5 does something similar with their interface when ringing and also during a call has a little hovering icon with the other party's image to let you easily jump back to the call details.

One thing I miss in Lollipop is that the battery usage screen seems to have removed the "time on battery" counter which is a bit annoying. This is on a Nexus 7 (2013) with the Lollipop (beta or preview or whatever it's called)

Prior Nexus devices were sold "at cost" (at least, in theory), so they had nowhere to go down. The Nexus 6, on the other hand, appears to be priced out just like every other phone in the world, which implies that there may be some actual profit margin in there which can potentially go down over time.