[Nexus 6P Real Life Review] jlgevo:
My experince is different

If i could rate my phone on a 5 star scale i would give it a 2 out of 5.

Now may of you seem to love this phone, but i can honestly say I do not.

My expectations for this phone where probably way to high. My phone before this was the HTC one M8 which so far is my all time favorite. It had great battery, fit perfectly in my hand and sounded amazing.The nexus 6p has some good and bad qualities so let me start off with hardware.

The good:

+Screen is pretty good for a smartphone i might say it is a 4 out of 5. current galaxy and iphones win out by a strong margin.

+Feels decent in the hand, the sides of the device really make me happy , they are perfect for holding on to the phone,

+The power button. wow a textured power button. i love having this, feels great to use. i wish all phones had textured buttons. like that. i wish cases had them too.

+USB type C I love the connector and can hardly look back. I do not think I will ever buy a phone with micro usb ever again!

+Charging the phone, On average my 6p phones have charged 1% a minute. which made me realize that I should not charge my phone over night instead hope that doze works (more on that later) and charge it in the morning while i am getting ready for the day.

+Fingerprint reader: If you scan your fingerprint properly, with multiple angles of each finger, it works almost flawlessly. It is certainly a great feature to have. I would say it works 90% of the time and it is most definitely fast. This was my first phone with a scanner and I have to say the placement of the sensor is perfect. As i mentioned when you set up the scanner make sure you scan your finger at multiple angles, otherwise it won't work very well. i learned the hard way. Again this being my first phone with a fingerprint reader, I made the mistake the first time of only scanning my finger prints in at one angle, head on. I learned my lesson. I do wish i could scan in more than 5 fingers. so that i could add in use for other people. and perhaps more of my own fingers. not that i plan on loosing any but a the saying goes "there is safety in numbers".

The bad:

-Speakers sound decent at best. they are great for music but fall well short of "ok" when watching videos that focus more on talking. now i find this strange. but when watching say a youtube video tat reviews a product with the speakers, they sound tinny and a bit muddy. now i have experienced this on 2 nexus 6p, n my first 6p i got that was part of the numerous issues i was having, but it carried over to the replaced device. I will talk more about my bad 6p near the end.

-Headphone jack, I am a music nut, I have several hi-fi headphones and ear buds; i love listening to music. now this too was something that happened on my old 6p that i had hoped would be related to having a bad 6p but again it carried over. frequently the headphone jack clips audio at any volume, i am rather perplexed by this issue. i would say this issue comes about for me once out of every four uses of the headphone jack. so what it sounds like is like a cross between interference and clipping. I feel like it is a noise reminiscent of old recordings and can easily be hidden in music because it fallows the track and kind of clips the audio at certain points. honestly it is hard to explain because it is not a common occurrence and the only way to replicate it is to play music for maybe an hour before it shows its ugly head. they only way I can distinguish the issue is by switching tracks and hearing it continue. I admit that even my ears get tricked in to thinking that maybe the artist added the noise to the track for flare. but when it plays on a track i am more familiar with, it becomes very evident and annoying. I should also point out that the highest volume level on the phone is sub par, and the worst i have ever had on a flagship-esque device. but it is still usable it certainly does not stack up to an iphone or an HTC one. Again this issue is something that happened on both of my 6ps.

-Battery life: ok so when i read that this phone had a huge-ish battery I started drooling over the phone. But in actuality that big battery is in the phone to power the screen. this is my first 1440p screen and while the screen is decent, it drains the battery like none other. i usually get 3 to 3 and a half hours of screen on time. I wish this big battery was on a 1080p display. I can only blame marketers and consumers for the unnecessary 1440p display on such a small device. but that is just me. I do not play games on my phone nor do I spend much time watching videos on the phone because it is a small device and the sound quality is lackluster.

So lets talk software.

Pros:

+Pure nexus: having been on the Samsung/Verizon boat once having a nexus device is great, frequent updates, latest android os; what is not to love?

+Doze, while i feel that my experience with doze is a little different than what may youtube reviewers reported, i still love it. I feel that YouTubers are not thorough in their reviews and mostly regurgitate spec sheets to save time. Most reviews i have watched or read say doze is great and when you wake up only 2% of you battery will be depleted. I disagree. I have never had such luck but I have come close. for example last night. i cleared all the recent apps and put my phone down at 22% before heading off to bead. I woke up 6 hours later and it was down to 18%. 4% lose not bad right? well if it was consistent, i would agree. but the night before, I put it down, after clearing recent apps at 55% and woke up 7 hours later with 42%. Now the oddest one; during my first test of doze when I noted battery life 25% and cleared my recent apps and put my phone on my desk before bed i woke up and the phone was dead. strange right? well the good news is that it has not happened again so i was most likely a fluke. I would also like to pint out that doze uses more battery when you have an alarm set on your phone. during the semester, my phone consistently used 10-15% overnight versus now when I am on my winter break.

Cons:

-There are just a few minor gripes i have with this phone. software wise. first my least favorite, only 1 wallpaper. this must be a nexus thing. my other android phones that I have owned, all have allowed for a different lock screen wallpaper, so joining team nexus was a bit of a disappointment in that regard. yes i could root the phone and add this feature but I feel it should be there in the first place.

-My second issue is the Icon size, with the stock google now launcher, they are massive. which made me download nova launcher within an hour of getting the device.

-No unread counts, is my next gripe. I spent some time with an iphone and the one thing i miss is not knowing how may unread messages or missed calls I have from the home screen. Yes the notification tray has most of that information there but it cane be easily swiped way and forgotten. frankly i like to have a clean notification trey. It gets cluttered fast. I am just surprised that google has never added unread tokens to android. good thing nova saves the day here too.

The camera and app only lets me record a certain amount of video footage before stopping the recording. I wish I could change a setting that allowed me to record as much as I wanted in a given video. I am not a huge camera user, but I needed it for one of my classes so that a friend could record me while i did my speeches. I needed the footage to evaluate my performances for class. Silly I know but it was embarrassing when he would tell me afterwards that it shut off again 2/3 of the way through the speech. The camera really heats up the phone. My first phone actually was scalding hot after the first time my friend recorded me he did not notice because he held the edges to record but when i touched the back I dropped the phone on my desk because it was so hot. Now on my second phone I switched to open camera as my camera app because it allows me to change the recording limit. I have tested recording on the new phone and it does not get quite as hot but it still does cause issues with the phone. both times after having a speech recorded for me on the 6p and getting the phone back; my phones had issues with functioning afterward. I assume it was because of the heat that was generated. What happens after the phone heats up is that it becomes almost inoperable and very sluggish. yes this is part hardware but I figured I would talk about the camera as a singular issue.

The bad Phone:

I got my 6p through project Fi so when I started compiling a list of issues regarding my phone i started talking to the project Fi support team which is great by the way. i first reported issues with the headphone jack and call quality complaints that i had gotten to them and they said if the issues persisted to call them back. so 2 weeks later I called back with this list:

which is also what i posted on XDA before:

"issue 1, Sometime while listening to music on my phone; it starts to sort of clip the audio. It happens randomly with any music (possibly any sounds) using the headphone jack. this is not a consequence of volume nor a consequence of source. the only cure is time. I have tried rebooting the phone and clearing ram, nothing helps. I have tried lowering the volume, switching sources such as my saved spotify music, google play music , youtube, youtube music. I also have tried different headphones, speakers and even different cars. the issue remains the same. my only conclusion is that is a software bug because of the inconsistency. any ideas?

Issue 2, Boot time. I just timed my boot time on my rooted 6p. it is 2:05. is it just me or is that hella long for a new phone?

Issue 3, Lag outs and lock ups. My phone frequently will lag out or lock up causing he phone to be unusable until i clear the ram, the odd thing is that i am no where near 3gb of ram used. usually around the low 2's. any solutions?

Issue 4, Using the camera to record video. Yesterday i had a friend record my speech in class, when i got my phone back,My phone had locked up after i left the camera app and the back was incredibly hot. he recorded me in 1080p. I do not imagine there is a solution. just thought i would post the issue."

I think that pretty much covers my 6P experience. My conclusion after using this phone for a while now is that Huawei is not yet capable of producing "premium" or "flagship" phones. With the numerous hardware issues that I have encountered, I doubt I will ever buy from them again. Also with my new phone some other issues have come up. Upon first getting the new phone I noticed one thing right off the bat; the glass panel covering the camera flexes and is loose near the headphone jack. Once i got the new phone, literally the first thing I did was check the "tolerance" of the glass panel. After reading a few reports about it spontaneously cracking on other phones, I figured I might as well see if there was a difference between the two 6p phones had before me. and there was. thankfully the glass has not cracked yet, but that one simple test is discouraging to say the least. Also a new issue arose with the new phone after about a day of using it. Bluetooth connectivity is now very spotty. my asus zenwatch 2 droops connection frequently and randomly. i am snot sure why. the watch can be on the same wrist as the hand that is holding the phone and loose connection. This was not an issue at all with the last phone, in fact I could leave my phone in my bedroom go in to the kitchen and stick my hand in the fridge and still be connected. The leas me back to Huawei not being a great manufacture, I have had to replace my samsung phones at one point or another due to dropping them and I the user experience remained the same between handsets. I still am a bit salty though about dropping my phone 2 and a half feet and killing the digitizer. I digress.

Sorry for the long post/rant. but I wanted to share my experience so far with the Nexus 6p. Thanks for reading!

---------- Post added at 05:35 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:33 PM ----------

yeah the M8 was the best phone overall that I have ever had. The only downsides where that the rear camera sucked and the led indicator only had a 2 colors if I recall correctly. lightflow was a no go.