Internals and performance

Note that for all reviews following our Galaxy Note 3 review, we have been running un-boosted versions of all of our standard benchmarks. To prevent OEMs from gaming our results, we won't report how the apps have been altered here.

This section written by Andrew Cunningham.

The Nexus 5 uses a chip we've already seen in a couple of other phones and tablets so far: Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800, specifically the 2.26GHz version (advertised as 2.3GHz) that showed up in LG's G2 and Samsung's Galaxy Note 3. Its other specs are also in line with those high-end phones. It packs 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM, 16 or 32GB of non-expandable internal storage, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi with theoretical connectivity speeds of up to 433Mbps. It also brings LTE back to the Nexus line—the Nexus 4 included some partial (and completely unsupported) LTE support, but the Nexus 5 has an LTE-capable modem baked into the Snapdragon 800 SoC, a Qualcomm WTR1605L LTE transceiver, and the antenna hardware that the phone needs to actually connect to your carrier's network (unless you're on Verizon, in which case you're still out in the cold).

The Nexus 4 and its Snapdragon S4 Pro was a big step up in performance over the Galaxy Nexus' OMAP4 SoC, adding two extra CPU cores, a faster CPU architecture, and a much beefier GPU. The transition from Nexus 4 to Nexus 5 is more evolutionary. You've got the same number of CPU cores, though they're clocked faster than last year's 1.5GHz chip. The CPU and GPU architectures are also similar—the 800's Krait 400 CPU architecture and 450MHz Adreno 330 GPU are faster than the S4's Krait 200 and 400MHz Adreno 320 GPU, but they're closely related.

The upshot is that going from a Nexus 4 to a Nexus 5 is a relatively mild generational upgrade. The new phone feels fast, but that doesn't mean the Nexus 4 feels slow. The Nexus phones have fallen into a pretty stable and predictable upgrade schedule, and as with phones from other manufacturers and ecosystems, you'll almost always get the most bang for your buck if you buy a high-end phone when it's new and then trade it in for a new high-end phone two-or-so years later.

Compared to contemporary handsets, the Nexus 5 performs about as you'd expect it to in our standard suite of benchmarks. It's actually a little faster in our CPU tests than some other Snapdragon 800 phones, whether this is because of optimizations in Android 4.4 or because of the trademark Nexus lack-of-cruft is hard to say. Compared to the Nexus 4 running Android 4.3, you're looking at a performance improvement that's generally between 40 and 50 percent in Geekbench and closer to 100 percent in the browser tests. While running these tests, we ran into a few small irregularities that suggest that the Nexus 5 throttles its CPU aggressively, just as the Nexus 4 did—we'll be digging deeper and exploring in a separate article.

A Nexus 4 with a 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 and an Adreno 320 GPU

A 2013 Nexus 7 with a 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 and an Adreno 320 GPU (remember, the Nexus 7's S4 is actually a downclocked Snapdragon 600)

A Samsung Galaxy Note 3 with a 2.26GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 and an Adreno 330 GPU

A Samsung Galaxy S 4 (the TouchWiz version) with a 1.9GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 and an Adreno 320 GPU

An Apple iPhone 5S with a 1.3GHz Apple A7 SoC















Here's what we've compared our Nexus 5 to in our CPU and GPU tests:

Moving to the GPU, the Nexus 5's Snapdragon 800 performs more-or-less identically to the one in LG's G2, and it's a bit slower than the one in the Galaxy Note 3. Compared to the Nexus 4, we're looking at a speed improvement of about 33 percent (see the Offscreen scores, which run all the tests at 1080p on every phone). Note that because of the Nexus 5's higher-resolution 1080p display, framerates in actual games will stay about the same as they were on the Nexus 4 (see the Onscreen scores, which render the tests at the displays' native resolutions).









Storage speeds are a little more interesting. Our 32GB Nexus 5 was a nice upgrade over our 8GB Nexus 4 in both reads and writes when working with slightly larger 256KB chunks of data. When working with smaller 4KB chunks of data, read speeds stay about the same, and write speeds get a little lower, on the order of about 25 percent. Both fall well short of what Samsung is shipping in the Note 3—Samsung does tend to lead in mobile storage performance, perhaps because of its experience making and selling NAND and SSDs. It's also a bit short of what we saw LG use in its own G2.

The 2012 Nexus 7 showed us what could happen to an otherwise capable tablet that suffered from slow storage speeds. We don't think anyone will experience unbearable slowness related to the Nexus 5's storage (it's usually as good as or better than the storage in the 2013 Nexus 7), but it's worth noting that LG and Google aren't always on the high-end of the charts.





Finally, let's talk Wi-Fi performance. Here, the Nexus 5 takes a big step up, trading the 72Mbps 802.11n of the Nexus 4 for a much faster 433Mbps 802.11ac adapter. We ran the iPerf network performance testing tool on a few of our phones to get an idea of how LG and Google's implementation holds up.

The Nexus 5 comes in a bit under the Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S 4 when it comes to 802.11ac speeds, but the phone is still much faster than the Nexus 4 or other 802.11n devices like the iPhone 5S. As is usually the case, phones and their small antennas usually lose speed more rapidly as you move away from the access point than larger items like tablets or laptops do.

Battery life

Our battery test involves loading webpages every 15 seconds over Wi-Fi while the screen stays on the entire time at 50 percent brightness. The Nexus 5 managed 6.67 hours, which is just above the 6.2 hours the Nexus 4 scored. While it's not fair to compare it to really big phones like the G2 or Note 3, the Galaxy S 4 is also a 5-inch phone, and that managed 8.7 hours. The decision to cut the G2's battery from 3000mAh to 2300mAh really hurts here.

You might see reports of "inconsistent" battery life, with some people getting upwards of 16 hours, while others kill the battery in about six. The reason for this is the Nexus 5's very good standby power usage. I left the phone off the charger at night, and after about eight hours, the battery only dropped 15 percent. So if you work all day and don't touch your phone, you shouldn't clock out with a dead battery, which was an all-too-common occurrence for Nexus 4 owners.

You really can't beat the price or the software

Price is what really sets the Nexus 5 apart—you're getting the same internals as every other flagship, but at half the cost. Couple that with minimalistic good looks, decent build quality, and the latest version of Android, and you've got a real winner. The two things you're really sacrificing to get to that low price are the battery life and the camera. Fixing the battery isn't rocket science—they needed to include a bigger one—but Google needs to take a long, hard look at what it's doing with its cameras. If Google wants to build all of these products around pictures, they should figure out how to ship a smartphone with a world-class camera, even if that means raising the price a bit.

KitKat and stock Android are the big selling points here. You're getting the pure, unadulterated version of Android without the ugly skins that OEMs feel compelled to waste resources on. If history is any indication, the Nexus 5 will see great software support from Google. It should be one of the first devices updated to the next version of Android, and it should see support for around 18 months.

The biggest disappointment is that Motorola completely outdid Google on the voice recognition front. The Nexus 5 is supposed to be the best of Google, but we longingly look at that other Google phone, the Moto X, and wish the Nexus 5 was equally as capable.

The good

It's half the price of everything that competes with it.

The gorgeous 445ppi display has bright, accurate colors.

Mature, all-black good looks without any "faux" nonsense. Real care was put into things like the contrasting matte/glossy materials and round earpiece.

The Snapdragon 800 SoC, LTE connectivity, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi are all nice speed upgrades from last year.

KitKat is fast, sleek, helpful, and pretty.

The bad

Unspectacular battery life. You can kill the phone in six hours, but it will happily sit in a pocket all day without draining much.

So-so storage speeds.

The ugly