LG G5 review

Smartphones are enjoying a mid-life crisis at the moment: the trouble is they’re all too good.

If anyone can walk into a phone store and pick up a fantastic handset at random, then how is one device meant to stand out above the fray? Sure, you can make a better phone than last year’s model with the best screen, the most powerful processor and the longest battery life, but that’s all a bit boring. Isn’t it? Splashing out on a second-hand Porsche never cured male-pattern baldness and jazzing up a camera sensor won’t fundamentally change how a smartphone looks or works.

That’s why LG’s G5 has undergone a full-on metaphorical hair transplant. Compared to its chief rival – Samsung’s Galaxy S7 – the G5 is pretty much identical on first impressions. Both devices can make calls, send texts and indulge your narcissism via the magic of social media.

Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find the two devices are radically different. That’s because LG’s new flagship phone is modular, allowing you to swap out its parts for improved ones, such as a bigger battery, physical camera controls and Bang & Olufsen audio tech. Now that’s what we call innovation.

So much so that it’s easy to get carried away with what the G5 is capable of: the ability to customise a phone so that it’s even more suited to you. Amazing stuff, but what about the here and now? All that tech wizardry counts for nothing if the G5 isn’t much cop to start off with. No pressure then. We’re only talking about reinventing the smartphone as we know it.

PULL UP TO THE BUMPER

Considering its revolutionary potential, the LG G5 is a thoroughly unassuming phone. In a world stuffed full of aluminium unibody handsets, the LG G5 is simply another aluminium unibody handset. One that’s lacking the ‘wow factor’ of Samsung’s bourgeois glass and metal offerings.
If it weren’t for its dual camera sensor, the G5 could easily pass for last year’s Nexus 6P in an identity parade. Both phones have svelte backsides with a quick-sharp fingerprint scanner – even when you’ve got wet fingers – slapped in the middle of them. Sure, the LG’s scanner also passes for a power button, but you get the drift.
There's really nothing wrong with it looks-wise, but it's also fair to say that aesthetics aren't the G5's biggest selling point. After all, its greatest design feature is a button that’ll allow you to rip out its bottom.
Seriously: press down on its lower left-hand edge and you’ll be able to detach the handset’s rear end from its display. Why? So you can lock in LG’s new modular widgets, of course. Until you own one of these gizmos, this mechanism mainly serves as both a crumb magnet and the thing that makes the G5 impossible to waterproof. You see, there’s a very slight gap between the phone’s posterior and the rest of its body that’s prone to collecting any debris you happen to be carrying in your pockets.

Don’t panic - there’s little chance of actually damaging your G5 like this unless you use it in an apocalyptic downpour, and once you get the phone in your hand you’ll be reassured of its quality. At 159g this handset is as light as you’d want it to be, while its curved back is a delight to clasp on to. The G5 sits impeccably well between your fingers and with a thickness of 7.7 mm, it’s ever so slightly thinner than the Samsung Galaxy S7.

So, while the G5 may not exactly be a stunner, I’d happily sign up to live with it for two years. And compared to the LG G4’s cheap leather look, it’s pretty much the Mona Lisa.

SEEN IT ALL G4

While you can quibble with the G5’s design, its 5.3-inch screen is downright pristine. Not radically new, but still just as good as the Galaxy S7’s. That’s partly because the two phones share a 1440 x 2560 pixels resolution and feature almost the same panels as their predecessors. In the case of the G5, that means the IPS LCD screen from 2015’s LG G4.

Wondering why both LG and Samsung are basically treading water with their smartphone screen tech? It’s so you don’t end up owning a phone that conks out at half past lunchtime. Bumping up the G5’s screen to a 4K resolution would prove a huge drain on battery life for the sake of being able to stream a handful of Netflix shows in Ultra-high-definition. Plus, it’s not as though you can spot any of the 554 pixels-per-inch the G5 gives you in the first place.

Marvel’s Daredevil looks suitably vicious on this screen, with flecks of rain and fire leaping out at you from Hell’s Kitchen, while footage from Barcelona’s Champions League tonking of Arsenal was equally brutal. Elsewhere, text is crystal clear and easy to read. As is the case with pretty much every smartphone nowadays, the LG’s colours are a little oversaturated so that app icons ping off the screen and even the most humdrum Instagram video takes on a blockbuster sheen.

That you can’t tone down these colours to achieve some more natural shades and contrast is a little irritating, but no great dealbreaker. Most of the time, you’ll appreciate the G5’s bold and vibrant ethos.

AN ALWAYS-ON TURN OFF

What’s more frustrating about this phone is its always-on display, which snatches defeat from the jaws of victory in a thoroughly face-palming manner.

You see, the benefit of an always-on display is meant to be that you can always see the time and a series of notifications on your phone, even when it’s locked. As someone who doesn’t wear a watch and tends to leave their phone lying on an office desk for most of the day, this is a slight but genuinely helpful feature. It means I no longer need to squint at my laptop screen to find out if I’m late again for yet another meeting.

And unlike on the Galaxy S7, the G5’s always-on tech shows notifications for loads of apps such as Facebook, Slack and WhatsApp, rather than just first-party offerings – meaning it’s theoretically better than what Samsung has to offer. At least, it would be if its on-screen clock wasn’t so infuriatingly dim and small.

How small? Imagine what would happen if Danny DeVito downed the Drink Me potion fromAlice In Wonderland. That’s how small.

The Galaxy S7’s OLED display does a significantly better job than this LCD effort, and you have to assume that’s because of its ability to light up individual pixels as it pleases. In contrast, the G5’s panel has to use every pixel, even just to show a black and white clock.

Until LG issues a software update to enlarge the clock, there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll need to pick up the G5 every time I go to check it, which is no good at all. That’s why I’ve just turned off the always-on mode to save on its (admittedly small) 0.8% battery drain per hour. Shame.

SEEING DOUBL

If it’s cutting-edge tech you’re looking for from the G5, then its dual-lens camera is by far the most original thing this device has to offer. Just as Trotsky would be nothing without Lenin, the idea behind this insurrectionary tech is that combining 16MP and 8MP cameras will offer you much better photos.

How? The 16MP sensor has a 75° field of view, while the 8MP sensor with a whopping 135° FOV lens – that’s a wider cone of vision than your own eyes. Combined, the effect is supposed to be like having a digital SLR or CSC and a couple of lenses all the time, without any weight to lug around. So in the same way that Mario and Luigi are best utilised as a duo, the G5 gives you the choice of taking wide-angle shots to fit in an impressive amount of scenery, or opting for a more detailed close up.

Apple’s iPhone 7 is heavily rumoured to feature the same concept, but LG has snuck in there with a first. And that counts for something.

WIDE-ANGLE WIZARDRY

Whether you’re trying to squeeze your jostling family into a group photo or just want to capture as much scenery as possible in a holiday snap, there are plenty of times when the G5’s dual camera can come in handy. That makes a welcome change from the camera innovations we've seen in many smartphones over the year, where effort was expended on a gimmick you’d use once and never again. We're looking at you, HTC M8 Re-focus Feature.

If there's a trade-off to the G5’s pictorial trickery, it's that sweeping daytime shots have been prioritised over low-light imagery. At night, especially when there are lots of bright street lights and signage about, photos tend to take on a washed-out hue, while there’s noticeably more graininess in shots than those taken on the Galaxy S7 in similar conditions.

To be clear, the G5’s low-light pictures are still A-OK. The combination of an f/1.8 lens that captures a good amount of light, quickfire laser autofocusing carried over from the LG G4, and optical image stabilisation for avoiding camera shake and longer exposures in dim conditions, means that most photos are more than good enough for Facebook. And when you do use the G5 in less testing conditions, there’s a lot to like there too – both for standard shots and selfies.

Colours are bright and natural, without the artificial levels of contrast you’ll find in the Galaxy S7’s photos. Zoom into a close-up snap and you’ll also find a pleasant amount of colour and detail. Leap into the G5’s excellent ‘Manual’ mode and experienced camera sorts will be able to eke out even more subtleties via the ability to alter ISO, focusing, white balance and pretty much anything you fancy. As per the G4, there’s even the ability to shoot in Raw and further amend your snaps in Photoshop.

So to boil that all down, the LG G5 aces both daytime and wide-angle shots, while the Galaxy S7 is similarly great when there’s plenty of light to play with and a jot better when it’s at a premium. I’d say low-light shots are slightly more important on the whole, but if you’re heading to the Niagara Falls next month and want to capture its grandeur in full, it’s the G5 you should be taking along with you for the trip.

SPEED DEMON

There’s no doubting this LG’s processing prowess either. Powered by the latest Snapdragon 820 chip and 4GB of RAM, it rips through most tasks with the same efficiency that saw Oliver Cromwell overthrow the English aristocracy. You can expect to see this same configuration in many a flagship smartphone this year, and with good reason: it’s very, very fast.

Zipping across the likes of Chrome, WhatsApp and Twitter won’t cause the LG G5 to break a sweat. It’s been built to scythe through such multi-tasking demands like a pitchfork through the night sky. Even when you really try and test it with a graphically intense game such asAsphalt 8, this phone won’t relent with a drop in frame rate. Crucially, given the Snapdragon 810’s notorious overheating issues, I didn’t feel the G5 get at all toasty when given a thorough workout.

Whether you’re a messaging obsessive or an avid mobile gamer, the G5 has you covered. Is it the most powerful phone you can buy? Not according to our Geekbench 3 benchmarks, at least.

With a score of 5331 for multi-core performance, this LG is technically slower than the Galaxy (6461), while still being speedier than any of last year’s flagships. And I say ‘technically’, because we’re pretty much at the point where speed has reached a virtual parity in processor chips. Buying a slow phone takes some effort these days and, given the majority of Android apps are built to work with as many devices as possible, even a middling handset can handle the best of what Google’s Play Store has to offer.

ANDROID AS STANDARD

Still, with all that power to hand the last thing you want from the LG G5 is for its UX 5.0 user interface to prove a drag. Slapped on top of the superb Android 6.0 Marshmallow, it's slick and customisable enough in most cases, but we did experience a few clanging moments when it frustrated us.

Most prominently, UX 5.0 doesn’t feature an app drawer as standard. Anyone who takes a Fagin-esque approach to the Google Play Store – nabbing anything that looks half-decent – will appreciate why this is a big deal. It means your hoard of tiny icons are scattered across a litany of homescreens, rather than being available through one big, scrollable list. You can restore the app drawer by default if you select the EasyHome screen layout in Settings, but the more advanced Home setup ignores it. So that’s no good.

You’re best off switching to the free Google Now Launcher instead, as that fixes the issue instantly. What's more, it will also (largely) do away with the LG’s tabbed approach to the Settings menu. Here, options are grouped under General, Display, Networks and the like, which sounds like a useful idea. In practice, it can elongate the process of searching for a specific option when you don’t know what tab it might fall under.

In the grand scheme of OS annoyances, I’m nitpicking here. LG’s UX 5.0 is good enough that most folks can get on with it straight out of the box, while its dialler and texting apps are also pretty handy too – especially if you don't mind their widget-like tendency to hang around on your homescreen. Certainly, there’s no great difference between them and Google’s own efforts.

STORAGE KING

Better still, UX 5.0 doesn’t take up much of the G5’s 32GB of internal storage. Even with my multitude of apps installed on it, I still had 18.5GB remaining after setting up the phone – that’s 2.5GB more storage than you’ll get from an entry-level 16GB iPhone 6s and a couple more GB than I got from the Galaxy S7. Impressive stuff, especially considering you can add an extra 2TB to this handset via microSD support.

Filling up your phone with such a huge quantity of apps, photos and (totally not torrented) video will mean it resembles less of a prize fighter and more of a washed up Rocky Balboa, but it’s good to have the option. Certainly, storage is one kingdom where the LG G5 reigns supreme over its flagship competition.

ALL-DAY BATTERY LIFE

Battery life is one area where it does fall behind the astounding pace set by Samsung’s Galaxy S7, if only by a smidgen.

With a 2800mAh capacity, the G5 actually has less charge to hand than last year’s 3000mAh G4, and it lags behind the Galaxy S7 by the same amount. Not that it should prove much of a problem in reality: in our time with it so far we comfortably managed to get a long day’s worth of usage from the phone before feeling compelled to recharge it. That meant grabbing it on our way to the office at 9am, testing its video, gaming and camera capabilities, and then heading on to a gig (Savages, since you ask) before getting home at midnight. Few phones can withstand that kind of duress, so credit to LG’s handset for showing the necessary resolve.

If you do get caught short, then bear in mind that the G5 supports fast charging via its USB-C port and can fully restore itself in just over an hour, with 50% charge in half that time. Despite this, LG isn't offering a free charger with its new flagship, just a USB-C cable. So you'll have to cough up yourself to take advantage of this tech.

THE MODULES: LG CAM PLUS

"But what about the G5’s ingenious new camera ‘Friend’ with an added 1100mAh battery?" I hear you cry. Know-it-alls.

Well, we've now tried it - and we've given the sound-improving Hi-Fi Plus module a thorough testing too. And the results are mixed.

Let's start with the Cam Plus, because it's by far the most mainstream of the two.

It certainly promises a lot. If you asked people what are the two most important factors in choosing a new phone, many would reply 'camera' and 'battery life'. The Cam Plus promises to improve both, giving it an extra 1200mAh of battery, plus a proper grip and dedicated controls for the camera.

Unfortunately, it doesn't deliver on that promise. Yes, you get the battery life, but its camera-improving abilities are average at best: the grip isn't grippy - a bit of a problem, you feel - and the buttons are too small to be genuinely useful. We'd prefer a simple extra battery, frankly.

THE MODULES: LG HI-FI PLUS WITH B&O PLAY

The Hi-Fi Plus fares rather better.

This is very much a one-trick-pony, existing solely to improve the sound of your G5 by giving it a top-spec (for a phone) DAC - that's digital-to-analogue-converter, for the non-hi-fi buffs among you. And for the most part, it works very well.

It's certainly easy to use: you just remove the G5's bottom and clip the Hi-Fi Plus on its place. You'll see a new option appear in Settings, allowing you to control the left/right balance, but otherwise there's nothing for you to do - except sit back and put some tunes on. Do so and you'll be treated to a major audio upgrade: cleaner, more detailed, more spacious.

The Hi-Fi Plus can also be used as a standalone DAC when hooked up to your laptop or another device, but it's here that we encountered our only real gripe with it - while it did have a minor positive effect on sound quality, a bug meant that we could only listen to music at high or low volumes.

Still, that's not the Hi-Fi Plus' primary reason to exist, so we'd still say that if you're a big music fan who owns the G5 and doesn't mind paying the rather steep price of £150, you won't regret it.

LG G5 VERDICT

The scale of the LG G5’s ambition is breathtaking. It’s the first of a new kind of smartphone and – if the modular concept works – you can expect Apple, Samsung and the rest to spend the next couple of years scrambling to catch up with this handset.

Still, we’re not in the business of giving points for potential, and of the two modules we've so far tested only one - the relatively niche Hi-Fi Plus - is worth investigating. We're hoping that more will follow, and that third-party manufacturers will get in on the act too, but until that happens the G5 needs to be able to stand on its own merits.

Fortunately, it does: if you walk into a phone shop and nab yourself a G5, then you'll have a fabulous handset that's better than most of what's available out there. It doesn't leave the competition eating its dust, but that says more about how great smartphones are right now than this LG. A supreme screen, lightning-fast processor and novel camera are no longer enough to make any mobile the best by far. To spearhead the mobile vanguard, you have to either be a near-on perfect product such as the Galaxy S7 or offer something new entirely.

So the LG G5 has gone for the latter option, while still being an awesome phone to begin with. It’s a big, ballsy move, and one that we hope pays off in the long run. Technology is meant to inspire you and the G5 does that in spades.

TECH SPECS 

Dimensions

149.4 x 73.9 x 7.7 mm

Weight

159g

Screen size & resolution

5.3 inches, 1440 x 2560 pixels

Processor

Qualcomm Snapdragon 820

GPU

Adreno 530

RAM

4GB

Storage

32GB (w/ 2TB microSD support)

Primary camera

16 MP (f/1.8) & 8 MP (f/2.4)

Selfie camera

8 MP, f/2.0

Extras

Fingerprint scanner

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Apple iPhone 6s Plus review

When Apple’s first phablet dropped last year, it basically turned out to be a big iPhone.

Although Samsung’s Note series had shown you could do a lot of things differently with an ample display, the iPhone 6 Plus simply offered you more of the same. More battery life, more pixels in its 5.5-inch screen and more aluminium to hold on to. It was fine, but a little boring – like a bumper-sized pack of lightly salted crisps.

One year on, you might be wondering whether the iPhone 6s Plus has found its own identity. The advent of 3D Touch and 4K video seem to offer it a coming-of-age moment. One that arrives without the need to spend Saturday in high school detention or head to the woods in search of a dead body.

Then again, with a near-identical design to its predecessor and no stylus in sight, is the iPhone 6s Plus just the 6s after a growth spurt? Allow us to size it up for you.

TAP THAT TOUCH ID

As with the iPhone 6s, Touch ID on this monster phone is blazingly fast. And that's a very good thing given its sometimes unwieldy size. You don't want to drop your brand new dink-free iPhone 6s Plus while attempting to type in your passcode now, do you?

Even if your hands are too dry or too clammy, the sensitivity on the fingerprint sensor has been improved. The Touch ID of old would have prompted us to try again countless times before we finally gave up and entered our passcode manually.

This Touch ID waved us through in the time we took to press the Home button to wake the phone. Who even needs passcodes anymore?

OIS IS A KILLER CAMERA FEATURE

Following suit with the 6s, the iPhone 6s Plus’ camera has finally been upgraded to offer 12-megapixels instead of the paltry 8 you may have been used to. It also features a pleasingly wide ƒ/2.2 aperture that means your photos look more intricate Hieronymus Bosch than smudgy Van Gogh.

Using the 6s Plus’ camera is like having a sharpening filter applied to all your photos. Your eyes will lap up all that glorious detail, which is only made better by the generous screen.

Nevertheless, both the LG G4 and Galaxy S6 are still better-specced for photos. The G4 has a 16MP sensor with a wider f/1.8 lens for capturing more light in dim conditions, while the Galaxy S6 has a 16MP sensor with a f/1.9 aperture. Both phones also feature optical image stabilisation (OIS).

As with screen quality and battery life, photography is an area where the iPhone 6s Plus fares much better than the iPhone 6s and this is largely thanks to OIS. By compensating for camera shake, this feature ensures your photos and videos won’t look like they’ve been shot by someone walking on a trampoline of Jell-o.

This tech compensates for some motion blur, keeping lines sharp, but don’t expect it to save you in really tricky weather conditions. When shooting video on San Francisco’s waterfront, the wind was so strong that our phone kept shaking and the footage looked pretty shonky. OIS is great, but you’ll still need a pair of steady hands to create National Geographic-worthy footage.

INTRODUCING… GIFS

The iPhone 6s Plus also introduces Apple’s neat new Live Photos feature, which inserts 1.5 seconds of footage before and after your still snap. You’ll want to hold your phone in place before and after hitting that trigger, otherwise it will just be a hot mess of movement.

For those who truly love themselves, Live Photos also works on the FaceTime camera and you can use these selfies as your wallpaper. With a press and hold, they’ll start to move before your eyes. For the provided Live Wallpapers. the harder you press on them, the quicker they unfurl on your screen. Take your finger off and it rewinds itself. It’s almost like poking your finger into a time warp.

Sure, it’s nothing groundbreaking but it’s one of the many small details on the 6s Plus that will raise a smile. We found ourselves demonstrating it to people to explain what Live Photos are about, and also tapping it whenever we were bored. Just bear in mind that Live Photos take up twice the space of a normal photo so proceed with caution.

4K VIDEO KILLED THE HD STAR

You still really need loads of natural light to make 4K really pop. Footage we shot in the dusky light of the shady Muir Woods was a little grainier than we’d have liked, but where sunlight is abundant, 4K sparkled like Edward Cullen. Literally. Just check out our video of Sausalito’s waterfront and look at that light glinting off the water.

From gossamer spider web threads to bubbles, it did a brilliant job of capturing what’s barely there. It’s like going back to previously perfect eyesight before it was ruined by too much computer use. 4K requires minimal effort and turns out maximum results so we won’t be surprised if it becomes your default video recording resolution.

We don’t think we can go back to to 1080p, let alone 720p, which is bad news for our storage. 4K will munch right through your precious GB - a minute of 4K averages 375MB - so don’t go too crazy. Otherwise you’ll find yourself having to sacrifice apps to make space for an extremely detailed video of a snail gliding across the picnic table.

STORAGE WARS

This phablet doesn’t come cheap, as with all Apple products. The 16GB costs £619, the 64GB £699, and the 128GB - a princely £789. The 32GB Galaxy Note 5 costs around the price of the 16GB iPhone 6s Plus in the US while the 32GB version of the LG G4 rings in at £525 for the more expensive leather-backed version if you need a little perspective.

Either way, the 6s Plus is an expensive piece of kit which makes its 16GB entry-level storage even more disappointing. It’s not hard to figure out why Apple has skimped on offering a 32GB model as standard, a 16GB device is cheaper to make and will push more people towards a 64GB 6s Plus. Still, none of those benefits apply to you: the consumer. Given Apple’s obsession with customer satisfaction scores, its intransigence on storage is totally perplexing.

You’ll soon fill up 16GB on a 6s Plus with music, apps, photos and video. It just doesn’t offer enough space for the modern day smartphone user. If you don’t mind coughing up the cash, we’d recommend that you steer clear of the entry-level 6s Plus and get a 64GB or 128GB handset that can make the most of its features.

IPHONE 6S PLUS VERDICT

No matter what people say, size matters. And because of its sheer screen size, the iPhone 6s Plus does tremendously well at showcasing some of Apple’s new hardware features. It’s particularly good for 3D Touch, and has a great screen for showing off those 12Mp photos and 4K video you can now shoot. Perhaps best of all, it enough battery life to see you through a day and then the morning afterwards.

Is the 6s Plus the better iPhone of the two? Only if your hands can handle its generous curves. If not, you’ll find it cumbersome to operate quickly which defeats the purpose of having those fab photo features. Also, the iPhone 6s is the faster phone by a clear margin.

When it comes to the league of giants, the iPhone 6s Plus is actually one of the smaller phablets around. In terms of screen quality, storage, battery life and sheer power it doesn’t offer as much as the Samsung Galaxy Edge+, Note 5 and many other flagship handsets. 

Smart with a good eye for camera work, the iPhone 6s Plus still puts the ‘fab’ in phablet. Only just though. 

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Google Nexus 6P review

Android isn’t an elitist system. But it still has a pure-breed strain. We’re talking about the Nexus family, the official ambassadors of Google’s mobile republic. Phones like the Nexus 6P aren’t made in Google labs by Google robots, though.

The Nexus 6P is made by Huawei, which has clawed its way up from making budget phones, often for other companies, to produce this. And it is one of the lead Android phones, regardless of brand.

After the Nexus 6, which not everyone loves, the Nexus 6P sees the series get back on track. Starting at £449 it’s a bit cheaper than the ‘intended’ prices of the other flagships, and really aces a lot of phone side attractions as well as the main events, like the speakers, battery, fingerprint scanner and selfie camera.

It’s one of the best all-round phones money can buy.

THE COOL, HARD STUFF

Huawei used to make pretty awkward-looking phones. Like a teenage boy trying to grow out his hair, there were some questionable moments in its design history. Before it starting coming up with stunners like the Mate S. The Nexus 6P is perhaps not quite as much a beauty as that phone, but it’s certainly smart-looking.

The Nexus 6P has a slim aluminium body and ours features a dark grey finish that takes the edge off the often-sparkly look of anodised aluminium. There’s a little raised lip at the top, a phone-wide bar covered by glass that makes the 6P appear a bit less of a stunner than something like the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. However, we’ll take it. It lets the rest of the body stay a trim 7.3mm thick.

Phones don’t get points just for being slim, but a giant-screen phone like this needs to lose bulk wherever it can. One of the big problems with the original Nexus 6 is that the thing just feels huge.

By slimming down the frame and reducing the screen size a bit, the Nexus 6P is far more manageable. I found its size makes both hands gravitate towards the screen rather than just the one, but it’s not the thumb workout the Nexus 6 is. It’s more a Samsung Galaxy Note 5-a-like. You’ll need to treat it pretty nice, though. After accidentally keeping it in a pocket with my keys for about 45 seconds, it had already scraped off some of the outer dark finish. Oops.

This is just the nature of dark-coloured aluminium devices, though. So if you don’t fancy treating your Nexus 6P like a newborn you might want to consider the lighter silver and Frost white versions. All three look great.

PACKING IT IN

Back to the good stuff: Huawei has handily bunged all the on-body buttons on the side, right where your thumb lands naturally, and the rear fingerprint scanner gives plenty of room for the front-facing stereo speakers. It’s a pretty successful case of phone Tetris.

While the finger scanner is part of the new Nexus Imprint team, it actually feels just like the one on the Huawei Mate S. It’s fast, it’s accurate and it works even when the phone screen is off.

Good fingerprint scanners have gone from being a rarity to the norm among top-end phones, but this is among the best. It seems to be able to deal with wet fingers far better than most too. Being on the back, the Nexus 6P wants you to use your index finger rather than your thumb. But you can train the little guy to recognise up to five fingers. Just like other finger scanner phones, then.

The speakers are just as worth noticing. The Nexus 6P has two front-facing speakers for a proper stereo effect while you play a game or watch a bit of Netflix. It’s a decent-sounding duo.

I put the Nexus 6P next to the BoomSound speakers of the HTC M8S and found the 6P is just as loud, just lacking a bit of the mid-range padding that makes HTC’s phone speakers so special. Google says the ‘P’ in the name stands for premium, and it’s pretty clear there are no half measures in this phone. This stands with the screen too.

THE SAMSUNG FACTOR

The Nexus 6P has a Samsung-made Super AMOLED screen of 2,560 x 1440 pixels. It’s probably a very similar panel to what we saw in the Galaxy Note 5. Very big, very sharp, bright and with immense contrast, it’s a terrific screen.

Colour fidelity has been improved a smidge since the oversaturated Nexus 6, however to my eyes it still looks like the screen is a touch hot. It’s similar to what you get in the LG G4 and the ‘adaptive display’ mode of Samsung’s phones. It’s out to show off what OLEDs can do.

You don’t get the option of extreme accuracy that Samsung provides in the Note 5. Some of Huawei’s IPS LCD screens have a slightly more natural tone too.

Still, this is generally a great screen. It makes the phone a great little media and gaming machine. But no, there’s no Force Touch pressure sensitive nonsense going on here. With no support for it baked into Android 6.0 Marshmallow, Apple has a clear lead on innovating the way we prod our phones. There’s no Galaxy Note-style stylus either.

Media hoarders also need to note that the Nexus 6P memory is non-expandable just like every other Nexus device. However, sensible pricing makes even the 128GB version pretty attractive. You’ll pay £449 for the 32GB version I’m using here, £499 for the 64GB and £579 for the 128GB. That makes it the most affordable 128GB phone to date. Nice.

It’s quality memory too, with read speeds of 170MB/s and writes of 107MB/s making it way faster than most memory cards.

Those on a budget should look at the Nexus 5X too, but the 6P is still a bit of a bargain compared to the iPhone 6s Plus. Apple’s big boy starts at £599 for the paltry 16GB version and rockets up to £789. There’s a refreshing fairness to Google’s prices, don’t you think?

You also need to consider that the Nexus 5X is actually well under £100 cheaper. The 32GB Nexus 5X costs £379, the 32GB Nexus 6P £70 extra at £449. The lower-end model only seems dramatically cheaper because it comes in a 16GB flavour. Both are good deals.

TASTY ANDROID SWEETS

The other bit you have to love about a Nexus phone is its use of totally bloat-free software. The Nexus 6P is here to show off Android 6.0 Marshmallow, and there’s zero Huawei influence in the software. That’s a good job when a lot of people really don’t like Huawei’s Emotion UI software.

Marshmallow looks a fair bit like good old Lollipop, but messes with the apps menu so that it’s a single vertical scroll rather than a series of pages. You can actually get this look without a Marshmallow device, as the Google Now look is actually separate from the core software these days and has already been injected with Marshmallow goo.

The bits exclusive to Marshmallow phones like the Nexus 6P include things like Google Now on Tap, a turbo-charging of the Android digital assistant that lets it scan whatever’s on the phone screen and fling related info cards your way as part of a display overlay. You can do it at any time, while you’re using any old app.

All you have to do is long-press on the Home soft key. It works particularly well for bands, restaurants, famous people and films. Anything that might be a trivia subject in a quiz, basically.

P FOR PERFORMANCE?

What I’m currently appreciating the most about the Nexus 6P software, though, is how fast everything feels. The Nexus 6 with Android 5.0 felt a bit like a step down in gears after the ultra-snappy Android 4.4, but this latest version combines the liquid feel of Lollipop with the responsiveness of KitKat. Although it’s actually closer to the feel of Windows phone if you ask me. The way everything scrolls by at 1000 miles an hour has been pilfered right out of Microsoft’s labs.

Whether that’ll be true of bargain basement £50 phones running Android 6.0 or not, the Nexus 6P certainly feels extremely nippy. That’s with it using hardware we’re already very familiar with. Power-wise it doesn’t outdo any of this year’s top flagships.

The Nexus 6P has a 2GHz Snapdragon 810 octa-core CPU with 3GB of DDR4 RAM. In Geekbench 3 that gets you 4424 points, very similar to the results from the HTC One M9and Sony Xperia Z5. The Samsung Galaxy S6 and its brothers still significantly outperform the 6P in benchmarks.

Still, every game I tried runs like a dream on the Nexus 6P, and as you can see from the images of my apps library here, I’ve been trying a lot. Under pressure the Nexus 6P does get a bit warm, but I found the Xperia Z5 to be significantly worse. 10 minutes of playing a demanding 3D game like Goat Simulator does cause the back to heat up a bit, and thanks to the aluminium casing this does work its way down the whole back in time. However, it’s only really when pushing the processor and using the mobile internet connection at the same time that the heating-up factor becomes really obvious.

Google says the 6P uses the ‘latest’ version 2.1 of the Snapdragon 810, but it’s ultimately still not as efficient as the Exynos chipset of the Galaxy S6 or the Apple A9 of the iPhone 6S. It’s what Google and Huawei have to work with right now, short of jumping in bed with MediaTek and its X20 CPU, which we’re yet to get our hands on.

AN IPHONE-STYLE CAMERA

The CPU may be familiar, but the Nexus 6P has a totally different camera to the other top Android phones. Rather than piling on the megapixels, it uses a large but mid-resolution 12.3-megapixel sensor on the back, paired up with a two-tone flash.

Google’s idea is to bring down the resolution so that the sensor pixels are a bit larger. Each measures 1.55nm rather than the usual 1.1nm, giving them more area on which they can harvest light. It’s the same thing the iPhone 6S does, basically, but to an even greater extent. And it’s also what HTC was banging on about with its UltraPixels back with the HTC One and One M8.

Continuing the Nexus 6P trend of picking all the best bits from all the mobile component makers, it’s a Sony IMX377 sensor.

So, is it any good? Yes, there are just a few ‘buts’.

CAMERA SMARTS

The Nexus 6P camera software isn’t as smart as the best out there, but if you know the tips and tricks to get ahead it can take great, consistent photos.

The main issue is metering, judging how ‘bright’ to make a photo. Where cameras like the iPhone 6S and Samsung Galaxy S6 always use a pretty intelligent approach to exposure, the Nexus 6P reverts to spot metering as soon as you pick a subject. As a result it’s dead easy to make your images look quite under or over-exposed just by using touch focusing.

One way to get over this is to use the HDR+ mode. This is Google’s take on high dynamic range photography. As well as taking over the exposure metering, it works pretty well in maxing out dynamic range while keeping a natural look too.

It’s just a bit slower than normal photo shooting, and using both HDR and non-HDR modes feels fast. The only major issue I’ve found is that you can only take a burst of three HDR shots in a row before the Nexus 6P actually stops you from taking any more images.

Most of the processing in the Nexus 6P’s HDR shots is done after shooting, and it takes a solid five seconds per shot. There is an Auto HDR mode, designed to switch over to HDR shooting when it’s needed. A good example if when you’re shooting right into the sun, or papping a sunset.

However, it’s nowhere near as good as the Auto HDR modes Samsung and LG use these days. It just doesn’t seem to do all that much a lot of the time, where rivals use a degree of dynamic range optimisation in every single shot. As has always been the case for the Nexus series, the camera app lets the side down a bit.

Google has made some improvements, though, such as putting HDR and flash controls right up at the top level of the camera app. It’s getting somewhere, just not fast. Other than those little tweaks, the camera app feels much as it has been for the past few years, with a pull-out tab that lets you use gimmicky modes like Photo Sphere and Lens Blur, where the camera tries to blur out the background of your shots. With mixed results.

SUPREMO SENSOR PIXELS

I have a lot of respect for what Google has done with the camera hardware, though. Even if it does amount to copying Apple’s style. Big as phone makers may claim their camera sensors are these days, they’re still tiny in the wider camera world. And sticking to 12-megapixel resolution has both benefits for noise handling and native dynamic range.

Coming from the crazy-high resolution images of the 23-megapixel Sony Xperia Z5, the Nexus 6P’s shots look a lot cleaner close-up, with low noise in most conditions and not all that much evidence of super-aggressive noise reduction either. This can often make shots look a bit ‘painted’. But here you get pretty neat-looking grain that holds onto a natural look no matter the light conditions.

The level of detail captured is fairly good too, although if you end up using digital zoom half the time you’ll get better results from the LG G4 or Samsung Galaxy S6. I also found that the Nexus 6P tends to be a bit conservative with its exposure metering as standard, although that’s not helped by having to test through one of London’s classic unrelenting grey skies phases: not five minutes of the blue sky the whole time.

The big benefit of the Nexus 6P’s larger camera sensor pixels is that it can snap the camera that bit faster compared to something like the Galaxy S6 when not working with good light. In fairly ropey but not flat-out dark light where, say, the iPhone 6S Plus might use a 1/9 second exposure, the Nexus 6P uses 1/24.

So what? It’s the Nexus 6P’s excuse for not fitting in optical image stabilisation, making it that bit easier to take low-light shots that aren’t totally blurry. While in certain conditions it’ll slow the shutter down all the way to 1/10 second, requiring a very steady hand, this is a camera that’s pretty fun to use in just about all conditions. In the end I switched to using the HDR mode 24/7. It’s an easy route to decent photos.

Would I still rather use a Samsung Galaxy S6, though? Yes.

On the video side, you can shoot at up to UHD (4K-ish) resolution, or 1080p with the front camera, and at slo-mo settings of either 150fps or 240fps. The latter one will turn fast action into a slow-motion ballet. It’s a basic on-off mode here, though, rather than allowing the on-the-fly editing look you can get with an iPhone. It’s not actually the rear camera that impressed me the most, though.

SELFIE GOD

The Nexus 6P has without doubt one of the best front cameras ever put into a phone. Its selfies are fantastic, with the sort of detail that lets you check out how your pores are looking, even when you shoot indoors.

White balance and colour fidelity absolutely destroy most of the competition, and while the whole spot metering issue with the front camera still stands, there’s much less need to tap-to-focus. Even though, unlike many front cameras, this one does offer autofocus. Selfies just look natural, no effort required. It’s as if (spoiler warning) Huawei has actually packed a proper camera onto the front of the Nexus 6P.

The one bit you might want to consider is that unlike Huawei’s own phones, the Nexus 6P doesn’t sugar-coat the results with a Beauty mode that pumps up your eyes, thins out your cheeks and wipes out those wrinkles. It’s really going to show you what state your mug is in, for better or worse.

Still, if you want selfies worth printing out, the Nexus 6P is the phone to get. For those who want the numbers, the front camera has an 8-megapixel sensor with an f/2.4 lens. That doesn’t sound standard-setting, but it has oversize sensor pixels just like the rear camera, with 1.4 micron sensor pixels making that extra resolution worthwhile.

BRING ON THE HYDROGEN FUEL CELLS

As someone who ends up with their eyes closed in most portraits, it takes a lot to impress me with a selfie camera: but the Nexus 6P has done it. Battery life, though, is a little more ordinary.

The price of this year’s progress is that even a 3450mAh battery in the Nexus 6P only gets you decent stamina, nowt more. Left to play a 720p video on loop, the phone holds on for 10.5 hours. The phone is in the same league as the LG G4 and HTC One M9 in this respect. Part of this is down to Qualcomm, as chipsets like the Snapdragon 808 and 810 (used here) just aren’t as efficient as the rivals from Samsung and Apple. The Galaxy S6 lasts for 15 hours in the same video test, after all.

In general use, though, I do find that the Nexus 6P’s real-life stamina is better than that of the LG G4. I never found that the level dropped little a stone in quite the same way.

Still, despite the impressive-sounding milliampere count, I found the Note 5 lasts a fair bit longer.

MILITANT USB-C

The Nexus 6P does at least offer pretty fast charging. It’s one of the first phones to use a reversible USB-C port rather than the usual microUSB socket, and it pumps charge through at 5V, 3A. It charges from flat in about two hours. It’s fast, but the voltage-shifting system of the Motorola Moto X Style seems a bit faster still.

There are some convenience issues you need to accept too. First, you can’t use any old microUSB charge cables you might have lying around. Second, you can’t even use the bundled cable in any other USB plugs either as the Nexus 6P uses an infuriatingly forward-thinking double-ended USB-C cable. And, yep that means you can’t charge from your computer either unless you have a USB-C MacBook. It also rules-out being able to drag and drop your photos onto a laptop. Nightmare.

Every shift in how we hook up out gadgets comes with the odd headache. Google could have made the migraine a bit better by not throwing out everything apart from USB-C. We’ll wave goodbye to microUSB without a tear, but there’s nothing too wrong with full-size USB.

GOOGLE NEXUS 6P VERDICT

The Nexus 6P gets the Nexus series back on the rails. It’s a good-value phone that offers good or great results in just about every area.

Camera? Design? Performance? Software? All get a thumbs-up. Stand-outs include the finger scanner and the front camera, which are among the very best available at any price.

While the Note 5 might have the edge in (main) camera and battery life, plus screen accuracy, that the Nexus 6P costs so much less makes it easy to recommend to those out for a large-screen phone.

TECH SPECS 

Screen

5.7in Super AMOLED 2560 x 1440

Software

Android 6.0 Marshmallow

Camera

12.3MP IMX377 rear camera, 8MP front camera

CPU

2GHz Snapdragon 810

GPU

Adreno 430

RAM

3GB DDR4

Storage

32/64/128GB non-expandable

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