Nexus 6 hands-on: supersized, even by today's standards, with much improved camera
The Nexus 6: hands-on with Google's phablet — After watching Apple unapologetically release the gigantic iPhone 6 Plus and Samsung release the fourth iteration of its massive Galaxy Note …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's Nexus line had already gone big on paper last week, when the October 15 announcement detailed a 6-inch Quad HD display, Snapdragon 805 chip, 13-megapixel camera, and a turbo charger promising six hours of battery from fifteen minutes plugged in (the Nexus 6 spec reveal). What today's hands-on adds is the judgment call: the hardware reads as supersized even by late-2014 standards, and the much improved camera addresses the gap that separated Nexus phones from the leaders.
The competitive frame was set weeks earlier. Apple broke its own screen-size doctrine with the iPhone 6 Plus, which The Verge found large enough to threaten the iPad mini's role, and AnandTech's October 1 verdict called it the best phablet on the market for buyers willing to go two-handed. Samsung, meanwhile, shipped the fourth iteration of its massive Galaxy Note. The Nexus 6 is Google planting its reference Android device squarely in the segment those two defined.
First-order effects
- Google's Nexus program now competes head-to-head at the top of the size spectrum against the critically favored iPhone 6 Plus and Samsung's Galaxy Note 4, rather than ceding the phablet tier to them while Nexus stayed mid-sized.
- The camera upgrade directly targets the differentiator AnandTech and The Verge used to rank the iPhone 6 Plus above rivals, removing Google's most-cited hardware excuse.
Second-order effects
- A 6-inch Nexus plus the iPhone 6 Plus squeezes the small-tablet tier from below: The Verge's September hands-on already flagged the iPhone 6 Plus as large enough to rival the iPad mini, and each new supersized phone strengthens that substitution case.
- Samsung's Note franchise loses its claim to being the only serious big-screen Android option, forcing its differentiation to shift toward stylus software and carrier deals rather than screen size alone.
Third-order effects
- If every major platform's flagship lands near six inches, 'phablet' stops being a category and becomes the default phone shape, collapsing the phone-versus-small-tablet boundary that tablet makers were already defending in 2014.
- Camera quality consolidates as the primary battleground among otherwise similar large flagships, since display size and silicon have converged across Apple, Samsung, and Google's reference devices.
The trend: Flagship smartphones are converging on six-inch displays, turning camera quality and ecosystem rather than screen size into the deciding factor between Apple, Samsung, and Google's Nexus line.