ocaholic - LG Nexus 5 Review - Smartphones

LG Nexus 5 Review

Published by Marc Büchel on 18.12.13

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Design / Build Quality

We have already addressed that LG chose to create an entirely new case for the Nexus 5. The back as well as the edges received a rubberized coating, which makes the phone very grippy, I found this phone to be more stable in my hand, and I was much more confident walking around with it whilst typing than I would be with something like a hard plastic or metal backed phone. Other than the obvious grip benefits, it also gives the phone a nice soft touch, and is generally comfortable to hold. On the back of the device, there is NEXUS indented into the body in large letters. This is quite hard to miss, we think Google/LG wanted people to know this was a Nexus device - maybe. Overall the manufacturing quality is great and there is absolutely nothing to complain about. There are no gaps and even when you bend and squeeze phone you won’t hear the materials squeak.

Camera

One area that could seem strange with the Nexus 5 and it's apparent high end status, is it's camera. Sporting only 8 megapixels when phones like the Galaxy Note 3, Sony Xperia Z and even LG's own G2 all sport 13 megapixel shooters. This may seem like a drawback to many, but the Nexus 5 has something special up it's sleeve; Optical Image Stabilization. The camera features a 2 axis gyro that helps produce sharper crisper photos. Overall image quality is excellent when compared to any other 8 Megapixel camera. In good lighting, this phone doesn't fail to disappoint. Unfortunately, even OIS cannot produce completely blur free photos when there isn't enough light. When the lighting is turned down, the ISO goes up, this produces image noise, and it appears that the camera software has some kind of diffuser filter, which produces a slight blur to pictures instead of just a picture with a lot of noise. Using the flash shows some improvement and would be recommended in low light conditions. One last note to the camera and phone performance in general, the camera is very fast to start up and is ready to use in less than a second.