 🎵 Welcome to my unboxing and review of the Nexus 5. It's my actual first pure Android experience, and after three weeks, I guess it's pretty nice, but I don't really see what all the fuss is about per se. I don't mind since, and TouchWiz, with the battery issues aside, really isn't that bad, especially for non-power users. So I'm going to kick this off in my usual way with the stuff that other people already told you. So first of all, there's no SD expansion, the phone's available in 16 or 32 gig configurations, and that's it, but other than that, the hardware is absolutely exceptional for $350. It's got a 2.3 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor and very capable Adreno 330 GPU. The 5-inch 1080p screen is beautiful with good but not amazing viewing angles, and it has all the best wireless functionality, including AC Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and Qi wireless charging, which works well with the official pad, yay, and even works well with a cheap one that Brandon got on eBay, so that's great. The physical overview of the device is pretty simple. It's extremely light for its size, which I quite liked once I got used to it, but I did find it a shade too big for me. The Moto X is about perfect for my small hands, but people with medium-sized hands will be very comfortable with this. My device is a white one, which with its glossy edge that I found slippery and smoother non-soft touch rear finish is in my mind inferior to the black one. Just don't tell that to the extremists. The top has a 3.5mm jack, tasteful joke, done now. The bottom has a speaker grill for the one speaker and a dummy one that actually has a microphone behind it, and the side has a volume rocker and a stealthy SIM tray and lock button on the left and right sides respectively. I like this positioning, but I'd like it more if the buttons were a little harder to press accidentally. The volume buttons are easy to mash during video playback, and I would often find myself accidentally adjusting volume when going for the lock button and vice versa. On the back, we find the much maligned camera as well as a flash, and both LG and Nexus branding, and on the front, we find the screen. It's very, very good. Maybe subjectively not quite my favorite, but it's extremely good. It's 1080p, which is a stunning 445 pixels per inch at this screen size, and the viewing angles are solid with vibrant, but not over saturated colors, white whites and black blacks. There was one thing that irked me a little bit, and whether it's motion blur, sort of a smoothing effect kind of thing, or just a phenomenally slow panel, I did find that when objects were moving across it, there was a bit of a distracting motion blur. However, if I had to choose between good viewing angles and good color or good speed, I will take the former every time, so it's one of my favorite screens so far. I had no issues with touchscreen accuracy, and the touchscreen interface was not very visible, even on extremely uniform backgrounds. Haptic feedback feels a little bit loose, and it's definitely below average. Tough to come from the Xperia Z1, but your mileage may vary with that one. And the last thing about the screen is I think the auto brightness was a bit of a missed opportunity. It just doesn't go down low enough in complete darkness. I can manually override it, but it seems like this should be a relatively simple fix in software. Boot up time on the device is slow, but if that's to make it faster during actual use, then I'm all for it. I rarely reboot my phone anyway, normally, although my experience may be a bit unusual, but I've actually had the Nexus 5 crash about half a dozen times on me in the last three weeks, so KitKat definitely feels a bit rough around the edges for me, but I'm sure that'll change in time, but I'll take that trade off for slower boot time, for faster performance, for sure. Now, there's lots of discussion online about the camera. For my use, it's okay, I guess. It's definitely better with the 4.4.2 update, but there's still no 4K or slow-mo or anything. The reality of it is I'm not a power photographer, though, so since no one complained my cheesy Instagram pictures were worse than usual, I'm good. The UI of the app really does need some work, though. I appreciate simple design, and swiping to the right to access the gallery instead of having a dedicated button is natural and looks very clean, but I found it cumbersome to have to switch modes to record video or take pictures rather than just having two dedicated buttons. Optical image stabilization worked very well and was very noticeable, and the autofocus is vastly improved in the 4.4.2 update, but I still wish that clicking anywhere on the screen while taking video would manually focus on that particular object rather than just snapping a picture of it. Once more, UI complaint about the camera. Fewer buttons is not always better. So let's talk about battery life now. As far as that's concerned, I think some people were expecting more than a $350 device can deliver. The Nexus 5 has a pretty mediocre 2300 mAh battery, but it's also got some clever background power saving and resource management features enabled by Android 4.4 that really help it deliver solid performance in everyday scenarios, I thought. The reality of it is if you hammer the phone with heavy use like gaming, then its battery will drain like any other phone with the same hardware, and the one with the most mAh wins. In my real world use, I sometimes had 30 to 40% at the end of the day, and as a somewhat heavy non-gaming user, I'm quite happy with that. Enabling ART or Android runtime, which increases the storage space taken by your apps, but makes them faster to launch and easier to run, has also been reported to improve battery life significantly. The only caveat here is that it also reduces app compatibility, including breaking WhatsApp. With that said, Edzel, one of my staff, was able to find a recompiling workaround that got WhatsApp working and loves ART. But your mileage may vary. The phone never got uncomfortably warm for me, except on my initial boot when it installed a bajillion apps, so that was great. Speaking of all the apps though, iOS has had this functionality for years, so I don't understand why I can't fully uninstall apps directly from the home screens. If you're going to have a terrible app tray with no support for folders, search, or other sorting methods, please don't make me navigate through it to manage my apps. I have a lot of apps on my phone. Sony's and HTC's app trays are much better. I guess you just really want people to stop using the app tray and start using home screens the way that you intended for them to. Touche, Google. And no support for basic toggles like portable hotspot, flashlight, or auto-rotate? What the f***, Google? This is supposed to be the future. Even iOS has swiping up to turn the flashlight on. Okay, well, fine. Thank goodness it's Android, so it's at least flexible. I can install power toggles on iOS 7 no matter what I do. I still can't change the layout of my quick toggles, or even lock the device in landscape mode on iPhones or iPods, so I guess at least Google's flavor of intentionally bad design is superior here. Speaking of bad design, another thing I didn't like, multitasking is such a simple thing to do right, and yet no one does it. Yes, 3 and 2 thirds is technically multi, but 9 is definitely better. This scrolling through everything nonsense didn't work well for Windows Vista, and it's really not any better here. I like both OS X's, X-Bows A, and ironically, Chrome for Android's implementations of multitasking better. One positive here, though, is that at least switching between running apps, even games and videos, is really snappy, like, super awesome. Let's move on to Hangouts as your SMS application, which wasn't super awesome. I don't like it. Windows Phone 8 did the whole integrating all your accounts thing much better with the People Hub. It integrated more services, such as LinkedIn, and pooled all the messages together for easy reference. Google, for some phenomenally... I can't figure out why they did this. Some reason ties all your SMS messages into one of your Google accounts, and you need to manually switch between them to see message histories, across services, with the same people. One person can have multiple Google accounts, Google. Please stop treating Google accounts like everyone has just one, and we should all use our real names, and we should all be on Google Plus, and... The day Google lets us have a master Google account that can admin the others is an extremely happy day for me. On top of the inconvenience of not being able to search for things, it's just not ergonomic. The switcher's in the top left corner. I don't care how big your hands are, that's really hard to reach if you're operating the device one-handed. Another small complaint is that clicking the new message icon in the top right doesn't fire up the keyboard right away to search for my contacts. Google, I clicked this because I wanted to message someone who I didn't just message, who was in the most frequently accessed context, the recent context on the very last page. The whole thing just feels very first-attempty, which I guess is natural enough since it is. There's even stupid stuff, like not being able to copy part of a message, like an address, to paste into Google Maps. With all of that aside, it's just software. I'm sure they're going to get it sorted out, but for now, I'd rather use anything else. And once again, thank goodness I'm on Android because I can. My last major complaint about the phone is that whether it's a software or hardware thing, the GPS takes longer than my old iPhone 4 to lock in my position. And if I deviate from the path set out for me compared to my HTC One, it'll take over 10 seconds longer to figure that out and calculate a new path for me. So that was a little bit frustrating. Let's move back to the things I like. The multicolored notification LED with light flow, being able to color change and, you know, change the pattern for different stuff is great. And swiping down from the top for notifications now works without pausing media playback, which is absolutely incredible. It's so convenient to change brightness or see incoming messages while keeping my YouTube video running in the background. Love it. Swiping up from the bottom for Google Now, working all over the phone, is great as well. I mostly use Google Now to set my alarm for the next day and navigate with GPS. But when Google Now supports more voice commands, I will definitely be ready to do lots more other stuff. As a SwiftKey lover, the stock Android keyboard did bother me a little bit at first, but it learned really fast and I love how natural it feels to click on my misspelled words and how many options it gives me to correct them. That's really cool. It took about a week and a half, but now I really like it. I'm still going back to SwiftKey, but it's definitely my second favorite. The thing I find it lacks compared to SwiftKey is the prediction of your next word doesn't seem to learn from your frequent phrases in the same way. Every time I've typed Nexus on this device since I got it, I've followed with a five, but it still suggests one to me. The phone part of this phone also needs some love now because it's really, really good. I love the sticky, preferred primary contacts numbers and the option to be able to change it and lock it in rather than just having it guess all the time. I love dialing by name. It prevents me from having to dig through my contact list. And most importantly, Google Caller ID is awesome. Like, awesome. It picks up on numbers from VoIP lines that my normal caller ID just calls unknown numbers, allowing me to avoid spam calls and calls from my in-laws who have VoIP much more easily. It also populates pictures and info for people and businesses. So privacy concerns aside, I absolutely love it and I think it's great. Call quality is also great aside from the audibility of the speakerphone for me, but the speaker is just quiet in general for calls and for media playback. So if I had to complain about something here, I guess it would be that face rejection might need a little bit of tweaking. I hung up on people a few times, but I'm sure that's a quick fix. All that's left now are final thoughts. If you want the latest vanilla Android experience with stunning performance housed in a device that delivers amazing specs for the price, then go buy one. It's good build quality too. The constant updates are great. I mean, in fact, it's gotten a 4.4.1 and 4.4.2 update already. And this is the perfect product for tinkerers and enthusiasts. With that in mind, I still think I'd recommend something with like TouchWiz to a less tech savvy friend or family member because with Bleeding Edge software comes Bleeding Edge workarounds and tweaks and all that kind of stuff. Speaking of tech savvy workarounds, audible.com. Head over to audible.com slash Linus to work around not having the time to sit down and read Game of Thrones to find out what's going to happen next on the show. You can sign up for their monthly audiobook service and listen to it in the car or on your phone while performing repetitive tasks at work. And the best thing about it is that the first month is absolutely free. So visit audible.com slash Linus to get started now. It's the end of the video time, guys. So the usual thing, like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a comment and let me know from everything you've read or if you have a Nexus 5 already. Tell me your feelings. What is your most favorite and what is your least favorite thing about the Nexus 5? I'm actually very curious to see how your opinions align with what I said in the last 15 minutes or however long this video went on for, and I will definitely be reading them. So thank you. And also don't forget to subscribe. I think we're done here.