Nexus 6P review: best use of Snapdragon 810, camera is among the best, hits sweet-spot for price-performance in US, but expensive in other regions
The Google Nexus 6P Review — As we have come to know, Google has opted to simultaneously release two Nexus smartphone devices this year.
Context & Ripple Effects
AnandTech's verdict closes out a review cycle that began in October, when Ars Technica called the 5X and 6P true flagships that left all other Android devices as second-class citizens and The Verge flagged the Huawei-built 6P for its uncommon USB Type-C port and slow photo processing alongside its great camera.
What AnandTech adds to that picture is specificity: this is framed as the best-executed implementation of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 — a chip whose other phone implementations clearly underperformed it — paired with one of the best cameras on any Android device. The catch is geographic: the same hardware reads as a price-performance sweet spot in the US and as expensive everywhere else.
First-order effects
- Huawei exits its first Nexus manufacturing run with its brand attached to the year's most credible Android flagship, while Google gets a reference device that finally showcases what the Snapdragon 810 can do when implemented well.
- US buyers get an unambiguous recommendation at a defensible price; buyers in other regions face the identical hardware at a premium, pushing the value case toward the cheaper Nexus 5X instead.
Second-order effects
- Competing Android flagships are now measured against a bar reviewers have set at 'second class citizens' — Samsung, LG, and Motorola enter their next refresh cycles needing camera and fingerprint-sensor parity just to be considered, not to lead.
- The 5X's mixed showing — solid GPU but an SoC and NAND that AnandTech found needed work after a two-year gap — splits Google's lineup into a halo device and a value device, forcing regional pricing decisions rather than one global pitch.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Nexus program functions less as a developer reference and more as Google's de facto flagship line — a trajectory the coverage itself extends years later with the Pixel 7a inheriting the same midrange-flagship framing — tightening Google's control over how Android hardware is judged.
- Persistent regional price gaps on otherwise-identical hardware point toward tiered launch strategies becoming standard, with the US treated as the reference market and other regions priced as secondary.
The trend: Google is using its Nexus program to define the Android flagship benchmark itself, shifting from neutral reference device to the standard against which every rival handset is scored.