Until a little while ago, Nexus and premium were two words that didn’t go hand in hand in the world of smartphones. Enter the Nexus Huawei 6P. The P stands for premium. The Nexus series was primarily appreciated because of Vanilla, the stock Android software experience it brought forward, but little else. Now, Vanilla is complimented by a creamy topping of exception hardware with a cherry on top: the camera.
Let’s first talk about what everyone likes the most about a Nexus — the stock android experience. This time branded Marshmallow, it is the sixth iteration of the OS — and everything Lollipop should have been. Doze, Now on Tap and notification permissions are its most distinctive features. Marshmallow is clean, fast, and gels beautifully with the power-packed hardware.
The hardware on the 6P is what changes the game altogether. No one really cared enough for a Nexus to have a premium build or raging internals since this range was merely meant to showcase the Android OS and little else. But I’m guessing after seeing the amount of Nexus 5’s out there, Google decided it was time for a change. The Nexus 6P is beautiful, big and sleek, with a 5.7-inch, 2,560x1,440 AMOLED display with a gorgeous 518 PPI density. The 6P is a fast and responsive phone backed up by a Snapdragon 810 chipset and 3GB RAM. A sizeable 3,450mAh battery gives you a whole day’s worth of juice, and if that’s not enough you’ve got fast charging on a type-C USB port. The fingerprint reader on the back is just phenomenal. Just like Huawei’s Mate S’s reader, it is responsive and quick. The phone comes in 32/64/128GB variants with no expandable memory. Finally, the camera. With 12 megapixels, laser autofocus and dual flash, it’s the thing that make me happiest about this phone — a good responsive camera that takes neat pictures and is useful even in low light conditions.
I’ll be honest. I’ve never been a massive Nexus fan. When I first got the phone, I was very blah about it. Vanilla android has never been something that fascinated me outside the realm of development. The 6P changed all that. By matching a clean OS with brilliant hardware, Huawei and Google have created one of the best devices of 2015.
