It is a win win situation for both Google and Huawei to introduce Huawei Nexus 6P flagship smartphone. This is the first time that Google has taken on board Huawei of China to come out with its Nexus smartphone and that too a premium one! According to research firm IDC, Huawei is the world’s third largest smartphone maker (by units shipped), but Huawei is still not popular in many markets. After the arrival of Huawei Nexus 6P, the perception about the company will change dramatically and Huawei will have the advantage to promote its own branded smartphones such as Mate series and Honor series more aggressively, which otherwise have also been receiveing rave reviews wherever they have been introduced.
Huawei Nexus 6P launched today in India alongwith LG Nexus 5X is the successsor of last year’s Nexus 6 made by Motorola. The Nexus 6 was not as successful as normally a Nexus smartphone is expected to be.The main reason for unpopularity of Motorola Nexus 6 was its huge display size of 6 inch, which was not well-received. Google has therefore reduced the screen size in new Nexus 6P, which has 5.7 inch display.
Besides display, Huawei Nexus 6P comes with improved specifications and design. We have the opportunity to spend few minutes on this device and would like to share our first hand impressions with you.
The Huawei Nexus 6P gives you preimum look and feel as it has an all-metal chasis. This is the first Nexus smartphone to don a metallic unibody. The LG Nexus 5X launched with this device still has plastic body. The Nexus 6 was criticised for being too heavy and therefore Google has got new Nexus 6P made which is lighter by 6 grams from its predecssor. Being a phablet and bigger display, this is still heavy device having weight of 178 grams and thicknesss of 7.3mm compared to 10.1mm thickness of Nexus 6, which was a flop device. The Huawei Nexus 6P will not fit in your pocket easily and even single hand operation is litttle bit difficult.
On the right side of the device, Huawei has put textured power button, which looks quite good and volume rocker is also on the right side of the device. On the left side is the slot for SIM and new USB Type-C port introduced for the first time on Honor 6P and LG Nexus 5X is placed at the bottom of the phone.
On the back of the device, there is a black bar running across the upper part of the device, which houses the camera in the right side and fingerprint sensor is at considerable distance from the black bar.
The Nexus 6P flaunts a 5.7-inch Quad HD AMOLED display with a pixel density of 515 with Gorilla Glass 4 for protection and avoiding scratches. We have tested the display and it reproduces bright, crisp and detailed colors. Inside the demo zone, we could see sharp images on it. In our opinion, it will work very fine even in sunlight although we could not test it in the open.
Huawei has put a very powerful processor in Nexus 6P to give you trouble free performance without any lag or stutter. It is powered by an octa-core 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor paired with 3GB of RAM and an Adreno 430 GPU. This combination is more than enough to play heavy duty games and switch between the apps. We used the device for few minutes and it worked like a breeze. No complaint anticipated in longer usage. This phone comes in two variants of 32GB and 64GB internal storage, which can not be further expanded.
Of late battery performance has been the niggling issue of even flagship devices and Google + Huawei have resolved this problem by packing the Nexus 6P with a huge 3450mAh battery which comess with quick charging technology and with this feature, it can provide 7 hours of charge in 10 minutes.
The Huawei Nexus 6P has the same 12.3MP rear camera with 1.55µm sensor and f/2.0 aperture , which has also been provided on the less expensive LG Nexus 5X. This camera too does not have optical image stabilisation (OIS), which is quite useful feature for clicking images in low-light. But Google claims that it has compensated the absence of OIS with 1.55um pixels, which is capable of capturing more lights than those smartphones cameras having OIS. We clicked few images and found the results looking good on the phone. The clicked images appeared sharp, crisp and came with detailed contrast.
The other high-points of Nexus 6P camera is its IR laser-assisted autofocus and its capability to shoot 4K video and high-frame-rate slow-motion videos at 240fps. It also houses an 8MP front shooter with f/2.2 aperture which produces good results for the selfies. Apparently, both the rear and front cameras have very good features and Google has come a long way to improve upon this aspect. We can comment further about camera capabilites when we have the chance to use the device for longer duration.
Google has added fingerprint sensor on both the new Nexus devices, which of late has become almost a standard feature for a smartphone. On Nexus 6P, fingerprint sensor has been placed below the black bar on the rear of the device. This fingerprint sensor or Nexus Imprint as Google calls it for waking and unlocking your device with a single tap. As claimed by Google, we can also vouch that fingerprint scanner is quite fast and easily reads your fingerprint in a fraction of second. We played with this feature for sometimes and found it to be quite impressive and instant recognisable feature. We did not face any problem while using it and it worked faster than claimed speed.
On the software front, Google Nexus devices score a lot as these devices run the latest stock Android OS and gets updates at the first instance and without any hiccup. Huawei Nexus 6P also runs Android Marshmallow 6.0 OS which have many new added features such as Google Now on Tap, faster access to voice action, fast scroll and search, better battery management, charging speed indicator and run-time permissions to name a few.
Final Words
From the design, hardware and software perspectives, the Huawei Nexus 6P is an ideal device for those who do not like bloatwares and do not mind carrying a little bit heavy and large device. This device is capable of fulfilling all your requirements of breezy performance, clicking good images and reading comfortably, enjoying your videos and movies and not worrying about security of your device.
The Huawei Nexus 6P has the capacity to give sleepless nights to many competitive high-end smartphones launched recently or upcoming premium devices in this month in India including new iPhone 6S and Plus variants. This festival season in India,we are going to see lot of competition for the high-end segment and Huawei Nexus 6P has the full potential to race ahead of its competition.
