Nexus 6 review: the best performing Android phone on the market but suffers from poor display calibration and relatively short battery life
The Nexus 6 Review — When consumers think of Google's Nexus devices, they think about the promise of receiving the latest updates for Android essentially as soon as they release.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's sixth Nexus arrived as its biggest yet: the October reveal of a Motorola-built 5.9-inch QHD device with a Snapdragon 805 and 15-minute turbo charging framed it as a statement phablet rather than a value play. AnandTech's verdict lands one day after CNET's parallel take, which praised the same display and processor while flagging how unwieldy the phone is — together establishing the consensus that raw performance is no longer the Nexus line's weak point.
First-order effects
- Buyers choosing on speed get a clear answer — reviewers rate it the best-performing Android phone on the market — but must accept two concrete compromises: poorly calibrated colors on that Quad HD panel and battery life that trails rivals despite the 3200mAh+ cell promised at launch (the October spec reveal).
- For Google and Motorola, the review validates the leap to flagship-class silicon but undercuts the pitch that bigger hardware alone justifies the Nexus program's move upmarket from its traditional mid-range pricing.
Second-order effects
- The identified gaps map directly onto what the next generation fixes: within a year, Google shifts manufacturing to Huawei, whose Nexus 6P adds a strong camera, accurate fingerprint reader, and USB Type-C — suggesting the 6's shortcomings became the design brief for its successor.
- CNET's 'unwieldy' critique plus AnandTech's battery findings put pressure on the phablet category to prove large screens don't have to mean worse endurance, a bar the Snapdragon 810-era 6P was later judged against for price-performance.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward the end of Nexus-as-cheap-developer-phone: if each generation trades the update-first promise for premium hardware built by rotating partners (Motorola, then Huawei), the program structurally converges with the very OEM flagships it was created to undercut.
- It also foreshadows the review-cycle dynamic where Google's own hardware is judged against a two-year cadence problem — visible later when the Nexus 5X was faulted because its SoC gains belied the gap since prior releases — raising the question of whether annual partner flagships can keep the line competitive.
The trend: The Nexus 6 marks the pivot point where Google's reference Android evolved from an affordable developer device into a partner-built flagship, trading its value proposition for performance parity with Samsung-class hardware.