Google Nexus 6P review: the Android all-rounder we’ve been waiting for

Written in accordance with our Reddit-inspired review policy. With thanks to Google for the handset.

We were tremendously excited by the announcement that Huawei were manufacturing the Nexus 6P, the larger and more high-end of the two current Nexii (the P stands for Premium). Huawei are a massive Chinese manufacturer making superb phones like the Honor 7, and its 6P (successor to the Motorola Nexus 6) has more flagship-level specs than its LG-made sibling the Nexus 5X. We had our fingers crossed that Google and Huawei would turn out to be a dream team in the Android world, and we weren’t far wrong.

Here’s our in-depth Google Nexus 6P review, after a month of daily use.

1. The handset

• 159.3mm x 77.8mm x 7.3mm
• 178g
• Colours: Aluminium, Graphite and Frost (there’s also Gold, but not in the UK at the time of writing)
• Fingerprint sensor
• USB type C

Size-wise, the 6P isn’t for everyone. It’s a bit of a beast because of that 5.7-inch screen - which means people who like to put their phone in a pocket or use it with one hand are going to struggle. It’s not impossible, but this is definitely a phablet. If that puts you off, you might want to check out the smaller (but also lower-spec) Nexus 5X. Google apparently intentionally made this one a little smaller than its predecessor, the 6-inch Nexus 6, but it’s still quite tricky to use single-handed.

The handset is made from anodised aluminium, which makes it quite cold and slippery to hold - I feel a lot more comfortable with it in a case (mine is this Android-tastic number). Most of the phone is fairly slim, but the visor (or ‘hump’ as fans are calling it) at the top sticks out a little further - and as we said in our hands-on, it reminds us of Bender from Futurama. The reason it’s a whole strip and not just a circular protrusion is that the Nexus 6 famously spun around when you used it on a table, and the Google/Huawei team wanted to avoid that this time.

You’ll find the standard headphone jack on the top left edge of the phone, power and volume rocker on the right, and a single nano-SIM tray on the left edge (no dual-SIM or microSD here). In the centre of the bottom edge is the USB type C charging port (apparently this single detail took three months of negotiations with the design team). USB C is cool, and it’s obviously the future - but as with the OnePlus Two and Lumia 950 XL, we’re still finding it a bit of a pain when 99% of our chargers and cables are the old standard. This, obviously, is not the 6P’s fault.

What is the phone’s fault is that it includes a notification LED that’s turned off by default. You have to activate it in Settings > Sound & Notification. This is because the ambient display (which shows notifications in black and white to use next to no power) is supposed to stand in for it, but I haven’t found that useful. The ambient display switches on not just for notifications but also for movement (you can’t split the two in settings), so it comes on all the time if you’re walking around with the phone in hand. Annoying.

Even once you’ve switched the LED back on, it only works for notifications, not charging. There are apps claiming to get around this but results vary and some require root access.

One of the features Google talked about a lot at the launch was the fingerprint sensor:

Known as Nexus Imprint, the sensor can remember up to 5 fingerprints and it works really, really well. After the frustrating experience we had on the OnePlus Two, this is refreshing. You place your finger on the recessed circle on the back of the phone (the surrounding ring helps you find it without looking), the pad vibrates and the phone unlocks instantly.

2. The speakers

The Nexus 6P has two front-facing speakers, which is always a good design decision. Speakers on the rear or bottom edge of a phone are much easier to muffle with your hand, whereas these are still strong when you put the phone down on a sofa or other sound-dampening surface.

They go impressively loud but do sound a little thin - we’ve heard better. That said, they’re not half bad - about what we’d expect for this price point.

3. The screen

• 5.7 inches
• WQHD AMOLED (2560 x 1440, 518 pixels per inch)
• Gorilla Glass 4
• Fingerprint and smudge-resistant coating

The display on the Nexus 6P is bright, sharp and responsive. Some users have reported tints or excessive warmth on their display panel but that hasn’t been the case on ours, which reproduces colours faithfully and has viewing angles as wide as they come.

However, while the screen is magnificent in isolation, it does unsurprisingly pale next to the curved screens on the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge(+) and BlackBerry Priv. A flat screen is never going to hold a candle to those stunning double-curves. However, comparing with the flat Galaxy S6, there’s very little difference - and there’s a good reason for that. The screen in the Nexus 6P is made by Samsung, and it’s the same one used in the Note 5 - although confusingly, it’s a less-good version. Essentially, screens vary in quality, and Samsung creamed off the best ones for the Note 5, selling the less-perfect (but still excellent) ones to Huawei for the 6P. This is a process known as binning, and it happens all the time with processors.

While the Nexus 6P screen is coated with Gorilla Glass 4, it’s still scratchable: in fact, we’ve managed to accidentally put a scratch in both the 6P and the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ despite being pretty careful with both. Not loving Gorilla Glass 4, if we’re honest.

4. The hardware

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 v2.1 octa-core processor (4x 1.55 GHz, 4x 2.0 GHz)
• 3GB RAM

One of the saddest things about the 6P is that it has NFC and a fingerprint sensor just begging to be used for Android Pay, but we still don’t have it in the UK. “Ask Google,” says every manufacturer. “Ask again later,” says Google, like a techy Magic 8 Ball.

Also disappointing, at times at least, is the performance on this phone - and I’m as surprised about this as anyone. The 6P seems to suffer from random slowdowns that I can’t attribute to anything in particular - sometimes it just gets sluggish. As we’ll see in the camera section, this often leads to the camera app hanging or not opening at all, and Bluetooth? Holy moly. I actually had to stop listening to music on my wireless headphones because it was making the phone so slow, and the sound kept randomly cutting out. We’re told the Nexus 5X suffers from the same issue - Google are apparently working on it.

To be fair, the majority of the time the phone performs well and zips along nicely. Intensive games run well and multi-tasking is usually seamless. It only seems to be a problem a small percentage of the time, but as we all know, random problems seem so much more frequent when they involve lag.

5. The software

• Android 6.0 Marshmallow
• Stock Android

Ahhh, stock Android. This makes us happy. While the adjustments manufacturers make to Android sometimes improve the experience, more often than not, they make it worse. The Nexus line is designed to show off Android the way it was supposed to be, so you won’t be surprised to hear that it runs beautifully on the Nexus 6P (teething problems aside).