Month: March 2015

I know a thing or two about com­pro­mise — I bought a Nexus 5 a few months ago. It’s not the phone I want, but it’ll do. For now.

It’s been years since I bought some­thing that was­n’t the lat­est and great­est Nexus mod­el, but this time I think it was the right call. Like oth­er Android fans, I await­ed the announce­ment of the Nexus 6 with every bit as much excite­ment as the entire world does when it’s new-iPhone-time. (Yes, this is a thing peo­ple actu­al­ly do for Nexus devices.)

I found myself utter­ly under­whelmed by Nexus 6. Price, size, bor­ing, etc. But I knew I need­ed a new phone, so I imme­di­ate­ly ordered the fan-favorite Nexus 5.

It’s fast. My Galaxy Nexus — a phone from 2011 — did­n’t seem that slow, even towards the end, but I’m blown away at how flu­id­ly this thing runs just about every­thing. (That’s prob­a­bly the extra RAM talk­ing.) Anoth­er RAM-based plus is that it’s awe­some to switch between apps — and even brows­er tabs — with­out my see­ing per­sis­tent back­ground process­es dying and restart­ing. I could have avoid­ed this frus­tra­tion by sim­ply doing less with my device, but why would I?

Hav­ing 32 GB of stor­age should­n’t be such a big deal in 2015, but after deal­ing with two phones that maxed out at 16-ridiculous-gigabytes, it feels amaz­ing to not have to think about space, at least for now. Of course it’s still only 32 GB, so I’m not sig­nif­i­cant­ly chang­ing the way I use the device to make use of the extra space.

Ick: I find it a lit­tle hard to believe that I own a phone with a not-user-swappable bat­tery.¹ After all, I thought that I object to these on prin­ci­ple. In the end, sigh, the Nexus plus­es won out over the oth­er devices I con­sid­ered. But I feel as if the device comes with a built-in expi­ra­tion date.

Speak­ing of pow­er, I did­n’t expect to pick up a wire­less Qi charg­er for this phone, but I did. (Um, two, actu­al­ly — cheap ones.) I love it. Wire­less charg­ing is not only the future of mobile devices, but for those on the Android side of the prover­bial aisle, it’s the present.

Well, no shit there’s no phys­i­cal key­board. I imme­di­ate­ly missed hav­ing one when I got my first candybar-style device in 2010. You’re get­ting on well with tap­ping, swip­ing, voice, auto­cor­rect, what­ev­er? That’s won­der­ful and I’m so hap­py for you. I miss hav­ing a real key­board no less today than I did four years ago.

Months after its gen­er­al avail­abil­i­ty, I’m still con­tin­u­ing to hold off on apply­ing the Nexus 5 Lol­lipop upgrade. The same UI flash that got Apple-enamored design blog­gers sali­vat­ing actu­al­ly sad­dens me. Exact­ly why is prob­a­bly worth a ded­i­cat­ed post, but after months of using Lol­lipop on sec­ondary devices, I still can’t see myself putting it on my pri­ma­ry phone (read: the only device that mat­ters to me).

Nexus 5 feels like more of a stop­gap than any­thing else… at least it was pret­ty inex­pen­sive. It’s clear that the world isn’t turn­ing back to the good stuff from the past (top want: badass Sidekick-style slid­er) but there is hope for the future — Nexus 5 just needs to last me until Project Ara is a thing I can actu­al­ly use.

Some­one will make an Ara key­board mod­ule. I can feel it in my hands now.

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1. I know. There are dis­as­sem­bly guides that show you how to crack open the phone and replace the bat­tery. But that is not the same as hav­ing a tru­ly remov­able bat­tery. For one thing, I can’t just casu­al­ly car­ry a sec­ond bat­tery to pop in for an instant top-up. And also, I imag­ine this com­pli­cat­ing fac­tor lim­its the mar­ket demand for replace­ment bat­ter­ies, which I fear will lim­it the bat­tery sup­ply when, down the road, the day comes that I final­ly need a replace­ment. Sealed phones are a shit­ty, dis­re­spect­ful design deci­sion by which this dude can­not abide.[↩]