MOUNTAIN VIEW—Today we were invited up to Google Headquarters to get a very brief sneak preview of the Nexus 6 and 9.

While the two devices mark a bit of a departure from Google's past flagships, the strategy of the Nexus line is still the same: the devices were always Google's way of "showing the way forward" for Android OEMs. For this generation, though, the company has moved on from the lower-priced flagships and onto more "premium" devices.

With the higher-end models comes a higher price tag: $649 unlocked for the Nexus 6, and $399 for the Nexus 9. The price of the Nexus 6 has seen the most discussion after the $350 price tag of the Nexus 5, but consider the Nexus 6's closest competitor: the 5.7-inch Note 4 goes for about $840 unlocked.

The Nexus 6

We'll start with the Nexus 6. Yes, the phone they code-named "Shamu" is very large. The massive 6-inch device is even wider than the Note 4, so it's not going to be for everyone. The Nexus 5 is still for sale, though!

Like the Note series before it, Google is pushing to design a product that is more of an Internet browsing device than a smartphone. We only got to play with the devices for about 15 minutes, so we'll have to see how we feel about the size once we get one in for review.

Over the years, we've had the "that's way too big" conversation a million times with Android phones. At first 4.7-inch devices were considered huge, then 5.3-inches, 5.5-inches, and 5.7-inches all became the new "too big" size. As anyone with a big phone will tell you though, spend some time with a large device and the "it's too big" feeling quickly fades, and everything else becomes "too small."

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

There isn't a lot of enlightening things we can say about the Nexus 6. If you've seen a 2014 Moto X, you're 99 percent of the way there. Every line, mark, and button is in about the same spot on both devices; it's just bigger. The main difference (other than the size) is the back, which has a giant "Nexus" wordmark emblazoned across it.

Like on the Nexus 5, the back material is slightly different depending on the color. We got to play with the white Nexus 6, which had a stiff plastic back with an extremely light soft-touch treatment. The soft-touch coating just enough to give the Nexus 6 a matte finish, which looks and feels great. Like on the Moto X, frame is aluminum and the device has a curved back.

The Motorola "button" on the back has been toned down so it is now just an indent made out of the back material, which is more like the 2013 Moto X. It also helps the back of the device look a little less busy.

The speakers have been upgraded from the 2014 Moto X, and are now full stereo speakers. The Moto X has two speaker grills but only one media speaker. The grills stick out a bit from the screen, like the Moto X, which should protect the screen while flipped face down.

The internals of the Nexus 6 are pretty much top-of-the-line: a 2.7Ghz Snapdragon 805, an Adreno 420 GPU, 32 or 64 GB of storage, a 13MP OIS rear camera, 2MP front camera, 3220mAh battery, wireless charging, and of course, that huge 5.96” 2560x1440 AMOLED display.

The most important part of the Nexus 6 is the software it runs: Android 5.0, Lollipop. While we would have loved to dive into some of the Google apps that were present on this device, Google asked that we not open or photograph the apps—those will have to wait until release. The unfinished build didn't have too much more in it than the latest developer preview, but there were a few Nexus specific features we got to try out.

The first was a new "ambient" notification mode, which works a lot like ambient mode on an Android Wear device. When a notification comes in and the screen is off, a darkened, black-and-white version of the lock screen turns on (which shows notifications in Lollipop), giving the user an instant way to see what the incoming notification is. The 2014 Moto X does something similar with a custom lockscreen, but it's a much nicer and easier to understand feature when it's just a darkened version of the normal lock screen. This as-it-arrives feature is the only way to view the darkened lockscreen—Moto X's hand-waving feature didn't make it to the Nexus 6.

The Nexus 6 also has always-on voice recognition, which again is a feature Motorola pioneered on the Moto X, but executed better since it is now part of the OS. Like the Moto X, Google and Motorola included special low-power hardware in the Nexus 6 to detect the "Ok Google" hotword even when the screen is off. Lollipop now has support for this baked in, and OEMs can choose to use the main SoC or a special low-power chip to make it work. The process is a lot faster and more responsive than the Moto X's version, which needed to use a separate "Moto Voice" app to detect the hotword, turn the phone on, and fire up Google Search.

Google is making a big deal out of the 13MP camera with optical image stabilization, saying that it hopes to be in the top 2-3 smartphone cameras out there. We'll have to wait for a full review to put it through its paces, but the few shots we took in our demo area looked great. It'll be a nice upgrade over the Nexus 5 camera if nothing else.

The Nexus 9

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

The more interesting hardware is the Nexus 9, the first tablet HTC has built in several years. We're not sure why the company stopped, because this is one of the nicest Android tablets we've ever used. The 4:3 device has an all-glass front and an aluminum frame, and the same hard matte plastic back as the Nexus 6. While it's not as thin as an iPad Air 2 (7.9mm versus 6.1mm), it is 12 grams lighter, which is the more important stat for a tablet.

Finding the power button on these nondescript rectangular tablets is often a challenge, but thankfully Google has added our favorite feature to the Nexus 9: double-tap to wake. Just pick up the Nexus 9, tap twice on the screen, and it turns on. It's one of the nicest OEM features you can have on a device, and we wish Google would have built it into the Nexus 6, too.

The internals of the Nexus 9 are the most interesting part of it. It will be the first Android device with 64-bit hardware and software, thanks to Lollipop and the 2.3-GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra K1 SoC. The Nexus 9 has a 8.9-inch 2048x1536 IPS LCD, a"desktop class" Kepler GPU, 2GB of RAM, 16 or 32GB of storage, an 8MP rear camera, 1.6MP front camera, and a 6700mAh battery. Naturally we can't wait to benchmark it.

Like the Nexus 6, the Nexus 9 has stereo front-facing speakers, which are great for the tablet's primary function as a media consumption device. As far as productivity goes, we're not sure, since Google wasn't yet ready to show off the keyboard accessory.

We'd love to go into more detail on both devices, but with only a few minutes of time between the two of them, we only got a small sneak peek. We'll dive deeper into both devices (and Android 5.0 especially) once we get some review units.