The Google Nexus 5 is now available for purchase for $349 and up. It’s a 5 inch smartphone built by LG and it features a full HD display, a speedy processor, and Android 4.4 KitKat software.
Google’s newest Nexus has some of the best specs available on an Android smartphone, but it sells for about half the price of a top tier phone from Samsung or HTC… at least if you buy any of those phones unlocked. $349 is still more money than many folks are used to spending up-front for a phone.
But that price doesn’t include any carrier subsidies.
The Nexus 5 features a 4.95 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor, Adreno 330 graphics, 2GB of RAM, and 16Gb to 32GB of built-in storage.
There’s a microUSB port with SlimPort, which means you can use it as a video output, and the phone has dual microphones and ceremic power and volume buttons. The phone has a 1.3MP front-facing camera and an 8MP rear shooter.
The phone features dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and support for GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, and LTE wireless networks.
It has a 2300mAh battery which is said to be good for up to 17 hours of talk time, 300 hous of standby time, and 8.5 hours of internet use.
The phone’s available in black and white, with a 16GB model running $349, and 32GB model selling for $399. It’s available for purchase from the Google Play Store, and should be available soon from Sprint, T-Mobile, Amazon, Best Buy, and Radio Shack.
I still don’t get why Google is so adamant about leaving out upgradeable storage (microSD.) I get the whole cloud ecosystem thing, but most of us do not want to have everything up in the cloud and don’t want to waste our data plans and batteries downloading music and videos that are best stored locally.
Not to mention that if your phone breaks and you either need your data on the cloud or on removable media in order to recover. And those of us with jobs where our employers want secure data are much better served by removable media.
Of course I agree and so do many people, but it doesn’t have to make sense. It’s like Amazon refusing to make an Instant Video app for Android. They’re protecting Kindle Fires, and they’re doing it because they can.
Google only makes Android to push customers into Google services. Android is free to use, after all. Thank goodness they do it at all, because I can’t stand iOS. But they do these anti-consumer things because they can. At least we have the option of the Nexus version of the S4.
They should add it for sure, but I can understand why they are doing it. It’s the old and tried sales technique to push people towards the 32Gb premium model which probably has a profit margin. Whereas the 16GB model is probably sold close to the bone .
The battery argument is a fair one, but data plans? Years ago unlimited plans should have become the norm, they’re available in the UK for amounts equivalent to 20 bucks a month, and have been for maybe 5 years now. Think about the realities of a MicroSD card btw, since they will only ever store a small section of your library there’s gonna be constant reshuffling of data, and you’re gonna have to do that at a computer. It’s generally far less convenient than streaming/automated caching (you’re essentially manually caching with an SD card)