Google has continued its association with LG and this year also launched new Nexus 5X made by South Korean giant, which is renowned for its famous range of G series of smartphones. Google has also come out with Nexus 6P made by Huawei, which is very high-end smartphone and is quite expensive compared to LG Nexus 5X because of its high-end features and form factor.
Design
The new LG Nexus 5X design has been borrowed from LG Nexus 5, which is simple piece of soft plastic. In this age of metal and glass covered smartphones, LG has not adopted the metal and glass combination in its new Nexus device and made it with fine and refined plastic, which does not look cheap at all. It is made entirely of high quality plastic with rounded corners and the rear of the device has a matte finish, which gives it good look, prevent fingerprints and also provide easy grip. This device may not look premium but still is attractive and being of high-end plastic used, it is lightweight and weighs just 130 grams. It can be easily tugged in your pockets and you can easily operate it with one hand as it has compact display of 5.2 inches.
The Nexus logo and LG branding, which is painted, has been provided on the back and the rear camera protrudes a little bit but that does not make much difference as we have seen such bulging camera even on high-end Samsung Galaxy S6 also.
The power button and the volume rocker are placed on the right side which are very easy to press. The SIM card slot has been provided on the top left side and a microphone and front camera on the top. The headphone jack and the USB Type-C port is placed at the downside. The USB Type-C port is the new standard adopted by many vendors and LG has followed the new trend in its latest iteration. But the only drawback is that the that the cable coming with the box is USB Type-C on both ends, and you must remembe always to keep handy the supplied charger and cable for charging the device.
The device comes with a single front-facing speaker at the bottom chin, which provides good sound. The call quality of this phone is also fine and we did not face any issue even in basements.
Display
The Nexus 5X sports a 5.2-inch IPS LCD display, with a Full HD resolution having a pixel density of 424 pixels per inch. This size of the display is ideal for your work and watching content provided you are not fan of big size screen. The display is quite sharp and it has very good viewing angles and reproduces natural colors. You will enjoy your streamed content and watching Youtube content on this screen. The text appears crisp on the screen and while browsing various websites, we enjoyed the reading content on the screen as well. Like any other high-end smartphones, which do not provide good reading experience in direct sunlight, this phone also has same issue but you can still manage with the highest level of brightness.
Performance
The LG Nexus 5X is driven by a hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor, clocked at 1.82 GHz compared to Snapdragon 800 which powered the earlier Nexus 5. It comes with an Adreno 418 GPU, 2GB of RAM and 16GB or 32GB of internal storage, which is not extendable. Since the internal storage is not extendable, we suggest to buy the 32GB variant and 2GB of RAM is quite sufficient for normal usage but had LG provided 3GB then it would have been one more plus points in favour of this device.
Coincidentally, this is the same processsor, which LG has used on its flagship device, LG G4 and performance of new Nexus 5X is very fast and it runs like a breaze. While using the Nexus 5X, we observed that there are no issues as far as running of apps and switching between the apps is concerned. This phone handles multi-tasking smoothly and you can play resourceful games on this phone without any lag or hiccups.
Fingerprint Sensor
One of the highlights of LG Nexus 5X is its fingerprint scanner on the back, which Google calls Nexus Imprint. The scanner is located on the reverse of the smartphone behind the rear camera. This has been placed at very appropriate place where your index finger can reach easily. The fingerprint scanner responds very fast and you can wake up and unlock the device simultaneously by single tap which is very accurate. Moreover, it is very easy process to setup and you are required to complete 5 taps to register a fingerprint.
The other beauty of the fingerprint scanner is that it is very easy to use and faster in recognising compared to premium Samsung Galaxy S6 which I have been using for over six months now. You can touch the scanner from any direction of your finger and it will still recognise it. This fingerprint scanner responds very fast and my experience is that it takes less than half a second to act.
Battery
The LG Nexus 5X gets its juice from 2700mAh (embedded) battery, which is good enough to last full day with an average use. But if you are using the phone heavily like playing too many games, surfing a lot and frequent visitors to your social networking sites and turning to Youtube very often in the day then you are advised to keep a power charger handy. The saving grace for this phone is that it comes with Doze feature introduced in Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS, which detects when your phone is not being used actively and will take it to sleep mode so that the battery consumption could be curtailed. This phone does not come with wireless charging but the provision of fast charging is there and this phone easily gets charged to full from 0 in approximately 90 minutes.
Camera
Google Nexus smartphones were criticised for not equipped with the good quality cameras and this time Google has addressed this issue very carefully. This time both the LG Nexus 5X and Huawei Nexus 6P provide the enhanced and almost the same camera experience.
The Nexus 5X has the same 12.3MP rear camera with 1.55µm sensor and f/2.0 aperture , which has also been provided on the more expensive Huawei Nexus 6P. This camera does not have optical image stabilisation (OIS), which is quite useful feature for clicking images in low-light. But Google has compensated the absence of OIS with 1.55um pixels, which is capable of capturing more lights than those smartphones cameras having OIS. The Sony IMX377 sensor provided on LG Nexus 5X is quite impressive and you can record slow motion video at 120 fps, which is quite interesting feature of this camera.The other high-points of Nexus 5X camera is its IR laser-assisted autofocus and its capability to shoot 4K video at 30fps. It also houses a 5MP front shooter with f/2.2 aperture which is quite good for the selfies.
We clicked few images and found the results looking very good on the phone. The clicked images appeared sharp, crisp and came with detailed contrast. The few samples captured in daylight and in the dark are reproduced below:
Images clicked in the night:
Marshmallow OS
Google Nexus devices are popular for clean, true and latest Android experience. Google has taken this plus points forward by introducing LG Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P with the latest Android Marshmallow 6.0 OS out of the box. Moreover, the owners of the latest Nexus devices will have the advantage to get the latest updates first and this is the reason that many users adopt Nexus devices for pure Android experience and to avoid unnecessary bloatwares. Compared to other vendors, which do not update their phones easily or do not do at all despite their tall claims at the time of launch, Google does not disappoint its users and hence one of the best reasons for grabbing this device.
Although there are not dramatic changes in the Google OS from Lollipop to Marshmallow but still many useful features have been added in the latest 6.0 OS version, which enrich the experience of LG Nexus 5X. And some of these features are Doze, battery saving feature; upgraded Google Now for accessing the feature within applications by holding down the home button; new charging speed indicator, new window animations, improved notifications, faster app search etc.
Verdict
If you are planning to buy no-non sense phone and do not care much about metal and glass and can definitely consider LG Nexus 5X which comes with very improved camera features, provide true Android experience and also with assurance of timely updates. Its Fingerprint scanner is the best among the leagues and its processor does not heat up the way other devices get heated up having Snapdragon processors. The only drawback we can point out for the sake of pointing out is its plastic body, non expandable internal storage and Singel SIM support. We would advise you to opt for 32GB variant.
LG Nexus 5X was launched in India two months ago at Rs. 31,900 for 16GB and Rs. 35,900 for 32GB variants, which we opined that it is on little bit higher side keeping in view of today’s landscape. Similar phones with minor differences in specifications such as Moto X Play and Moto X Style, which also provide almost the pure Android experience are available at less prices. But of late, LG Nexus 5X is now available at reduced price of Rs. 23,000 for 16GB and Rs. 31,000 for 32GB variants, which make them good buy at these prices.
