 Frankly, I wasn't sure where to begin with the Google Nexus 6, so I decided to shake things up and start at the end. When I'm reviewing a phone, I put my personal SIM card, the only one I have, in and I leave it there for at least a couple weeks while I get a feel for what it's really like to use the device as a daily driver. I believe this gives every phone a chance to win me over and become my new day-to-day. And the conclusion for me on this one is that it squandered that chance. On the subject of driving though, by the time you guys see this, my team and I will already be at CES 2015. So don't miss any of the awesome content that's coming your way. As far as hardware specs are concerned, the Nexus 6 is a worthy follow-up to the Nexus 5, improving on it in almost every conceivable way. The quad-core Snapdragon processor is now an 805 and clocked 15% faster with 3 gigs of RAM and 32 or 64 gigs of non-upgradable storage to go with it. The Adreno 420 GPU is in the neighborhood of 40% faster and good thing because the AMOLED screen has 76% more pixels with a massive 2560x1440 resolution. The battery gets bumped to 3220 mAh. The rear camera weighs in at a respectable 13 megapixels for stills with up to 4K 30fps video recording support. And you get a fancy-pants ring flash for more even shadows for close-ups. Oh yeah, you also get a Schmexie Nano-coating for the body that Harris from ITTechWorld.com found kept the phone from being killed even while completely submerged in water. Onto the body then, I guess. The solid and very premium-feeling aluminum body of mine is wrapped front and back in a Dbrand vinyl skin that gives the back a pleasing leather look and feel and makes the front look an awful lot like a white note too. Although many other finishes are available. At the back of the phone is the main camera with its ring flash. Moving down, we find a little dimple that would have a Motorola logo, a cutout in my skin for the Nexus logo, and a noise cancellation microphone. It should be noted though that the Nexus 6 does not feature the same quad mic array as the Moto X 2014, unfortunately. Around the edges of the phone we find micro USB, nothing on the left, a nano-SIM tray and headphone jack in my preferred position on the top, and on the right, the lock button and volume rocker. And these are awful. I think I'm batting about $500 for hitting whichever button I'm aiming for, thanks to them being extremely close together and way too easy to press with Google-rollers, I'm not really sure who to blame here so I'll go with both, genius idea to help you differentiate between them being a subtle texture to the lock button. I know I harp on this a lot, but for crying out loud manufacturers, the volume and lock are often the only physical buttons you're giving us on a phone. Surely that means you understand that they're important and we might want to use them. Which brings us around to the front. The Nexus 6's Gorilla Glass 3 covered 5.96 inch display features phenomenally fine image quality, vibrant colors, and wicked contrast making Android L's new visual design and really anything else look absolutely gorgeous. My only complaint about the screen is that just like the Droid Turbo, it has a noticeable green shimmer at some mostly very extreme angles, but it doesn't bother me day to day. The size of the screen lands this phone solidly in phablet territory, and while as someone with small hands, my feelings about these devices, that they're ridiculously large and difficult to handle, shouldn't be a surprise, but I have to give Google credit for being clever enough to at least give it a curved shape, you know, like a hand. So in spite of its significantly larger screen size, I actually find it much easier to hold on to than the iPhone 6 Plus. I also have to give them credit for front facing speakers. You could have the best speakers in the world, but if they're playing in the house next to you, they're still going to sound like muffled farts. While the Nexus 6 is both loud and clear enough for content enjoyment in a moving car, which is my standard benchmark and it actually sounds overall pretty freaking good for a phone. Battery life was also pretty freaking good, and I regularly had 40 to 50% left at the end of the day. The large high resolution display will negatively impact battery life, but Android Lollipop comes with some efficiency improvements, and AMOLED screens can be much more efficient than LCDs when a lot of the screen is black, lighting only the pixels that are needed. So you can use the handy motion activated ambient display feature that displays notifications when they come in, or if you move the device, basically guilt free. And very heavy users can rejoice because the battery charges both quickly with Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0, and conveniently with Qi wireless charging in theory. I found correctly aligning the phone for wireless charging was actually pretty hit or miss on my car dock, but your mileage may vary. Camera time. I have very mixed impressions of the camera on the Nexus 6. The hardware seems great with dynamic range right up there with the iPhone 6 with shockingly little detail lost in the branches of the trees and in the sunny houses in the background here, but our flower subject is not as well exposed. Under studio lighting, it takes awesome sharp images of my subject, albeit without a very pleasing out of focus effect in the background, and auto white balance was handled better than any of the other Android phones that I checked out in my test suite. You can actually download these test shots in the link in the video description. But on the other hand, the scenario where I use my phone most, close and medium range shots without ideal lighting had the Nexus 6's camera performing about as well as the potato camera on my iPhone 4, with auto focus completely crapping the bed in some cases. I know that some people are wetting themselves over the new camera API that should allow RAW shooting and lots of other goodies with alternate camera apps, but I don't give a toss about RAW, and frankly, providing better tools to third party developers while admirable, is not an excuse for the abysmal included camera app. It's slow to launch, slow to take pictures, infuriating to navigate. I mean, why does the settings cog only appear when I swipe from the left? Why are there four menu items here when none of them contain anything, and all the good stuff is in one of the menus anyway? Just put them all in the same place. And why do the photo and video modes, both of which should just be accessible at the same time like Sony does it, remember which camera they were using last time, rather than purely changing modes and changing cameras independently? I've never seen this before, and it's really unintuitive. And it completely lacks features that are taken for granted in high-end phones these days. There's no burst picture mode, no time lapse, no slow-mo, not even 60fps. I mean, okay, it's got 4K video capture, but it drops frames all over the place anyway. I mean, I know I'm ragging on the camera a lot here, but this is a $600-plus flagship-grade device. We always gave Nexus phones a free pass to have sucky cameras, because we were still getting a great deal. But this one has the hardware, so it appears that Google is just sitting on ass waiting for someone else to fix it for them, so I gotta call them out on it. And the ranting actually doesn't end here. Under the hood, Android 5.0 seems awesome. The NFC-based setup wizard and quick logging into accounts was great. It's got more robust notification management, including separate rules for high-priority applications that can be toggled in seconds. The more efficient ART runtime is now mandatory. User and limited access accounts are now supported, and security has been beefed up for business users. But I have never been so excited for the handset vendors to put their own finishing touches on a Google OS. I tend to give software bugs a bit of a pass in my reviews, because I'm usually reviewing the device very close to launch, and in good faith, I believe that by the time many people watch my video, the little glitches will have been sorted out anyway, so I don't want to waste time on them. But for crying out loud, Google, this is THE launch device for Lollipop, and you still can't get Wi-Fi working reliably? Are you serious? I mean, iOS 8 is still bugged on a couple of the apps that I like to use, but I can forgive that stuff. Wi-Fi just cutting out and requiring a device reboot to fix it every time? Seriously? And my frustrations with the Nexus 6 don't end here. I mean, here are some more in no particular order. The multitasking Rolodex interface is MUCH more natural to use than KitKat's default design, but the icon for it is atrocious. I mean, good luck explaining this one to your mother. The lock screen displays only a few more recent notifications, and to access the rest, you have to swipe down rather than up? What? The old Google Calendar's month view sucked, but instead of improving it, they've removed it entirely on phones now? Thanks for nothing. And the haptic feedback is among the worst I've ever encountered, and makes it feel like the device is falling apart. The stock keyboard took a sharp turn at artsy-fartsy junction, presumably for the sake of making its design more material, and now has no dividing lines between characters. And I mean, where the heck is the restart button? Some Android devices have it, but for some reason it's become unpopular with the cool kids. I mean, I guess I probably have Apple to thank for this rubbish, but at least in their defense, in my 4 plus years of using various iPhones, I've needed to do fewer restarts to fix Wi-Fi connectivity than I have in two weeks with the Nexus 6. So it feels like the least Google could have done was make it a bit more convenient for me. So since I did the conclusion at the beginning of this video, I don't really have much to say other than I don't think the Nexus 6 is worth your $650. I think there are better options out there. And other than that, well, thank you to dbrand for providing me with the Nexus 6 that I used to make this video, and asking in return only that we point out that they carry an incredibly wide variety of precision cut vinyl skins for tablets, phones, game consoles, and other electronics to give them a unique look and feel at a reasonable price. Also, I've noticed that dbrand now carries Gorilla Glass screen protectors that are only marginally thicker than their vinyl wraps, making for a smoother transition when swiping your finger over your phone than ever before, and keeping pretty much your whole device protected from incidental scuffs and scratches. So thanks again to dbrand, and thanks to you guys for watching. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment if you completely disagree with my assessment of the Nexus 6, and if you think I'm just biased against big phones because I have small hands, which has no implications for other parts of my body, also check out the link in the video description if you want to support us to make more videos just like this one. You can give us a cool t-shirt, or you can, no, you can have a cool t-shirt like this one. You give us money, we give you a t-shirt. 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