Google has taken the wraps of two new Nexus devices, the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P. While the former is a cheaper mid-level smartphone to be made by LG, the 6P is Android’s new flagship, to be manufactured by Huawei, and both with ship with Android Marshmallow, the latest Android OS.
The Nexus 6P will succeed the Nexus 6 as Google’s new flagship. It sports a large 5.7-inch AMOLED display with WQHD resolution. That’s 2560 x 1440 pixels, and it works out to an impressive pixel density of 518 ppi. Powering it is an octa-core Snapdragon 810 processor, which offers blazing fast speed and 64-bit architecture. The Nexus 6P’s housing is a unibody aluminum design, making it Google’s most premium smartphone ever. Despite all that metal though, it’s still reasonably lightweight at 178 grams. By comparison, Apple’s new iPhone 6s Plus has a smaller 5.5-inch display and it weighs 199 grams.
Other Nexus 6P spec highlights include 3GB of RAM, dual front-facing stereo speakers, a Micro USB Type-C port, a massive 3,450 battery and either 32GB, 64GB or 128GB of storage. At the rear, there’s a 12.3 megapixel shooter, although with no optical image stabilization like the iPhone 6 Plus and 6S Plus. Selfie lovers get a 5 megapixel front camera. Both the Nexus 5X and 6P feature Nexus Imprint fingerprint scanners on the back showing off Marshmallow’s now built-in support for fingerprint sensors.
The new Nexus smartphones will mark the start of the rollout of Google’s next version of Android, which promises to extend battery life, provide more intelligent assistance features and support more advanced hardware features such as motion and voice-recognition co-processors. Marshmallow will also continue Google’s “Material Design” aesthetic – a significant upgrade in design and uniformity across the operating system and applications that better rivals Apple’s iOS running on the company’s iPhones.
Speaking at the launch, Andrei Popescu, an engineering director within Google’s Android team, said: “Marshmallow is our most polished version of Android to date. We’ve really worked hard on making things like the animations super smooth.”
Marshmallow will come to some of Google’s previous Nexus devices, and to other Android devices made by other manufacturers in the next year.
Both the Nexus 5X and 6P are available for preorder from Google’s website now. The 5X is priced at $379 (Rs 31,900 for the 16 GB model, India), and the 6P priced at $499 (Rs 39,999 for the 32GB model, India).
