The
Nexus 6 is the latest flagship Android smartphone from Google that is designed for developers and Android fans who prefer Google's stock iteration of its popular Android operating system. The massive six-inch device is meant to stand as a testament to the Android platform, its capabilities, and where the technology is currently heading. In the other corner, we have Apple's
iPhone 6 Plus, the first "phablet" from Apple, which has famously resisted pushing into this segment in the recent past. Like the Nexus 6, the iPhone 6 Plus represents all that is currently state-of-the-art when it comes to iOS-powered smartphones. The two devices are undoubtedly two of the leading heavyweights in this segment, but which stands tall over the other in a head-to-head fight?
Design and build quality
The Google Nexus 6 has been co-designed and built by former Google-owned subsidiary Motorola Mobility. Under Google's relatively short stewardship, Motorola continued to struggle to sell large volumes of handsets, but it did release one of the most interesting smartphones of 2014, in the original Motorola
Moto X. Although ultimately faced with tepid sales, the Moto X has played a significant role in shaping a number of features that have made their way into the latest version of Android, Android 5.0 "Lollipop." The Nexus 6 builds on the direction that Motorola had taken with the original Moto X -- but it is a much more cohesive and coherent package from a design perspective, and lifts the design aesthetic benchmark for Android devices.
Where the original Moto X featured a neatly styled but very plastic body, the Google Nexus 6 is a much more premium device. It needs to be, of course, given the premium price that Google is charging for it. The Nexus 6 features a stylized aluminum chassis that is thicker at the top, before tapering away to the sides and down to the bottom of the device, where it is much thinner. This makes it much easier to reach down to the bottom of display, while the convex curved back sits nicely in your hand. Although the rear shell is plastic, it is not removable, but feels nice to the touch. The front is all-glass, which covers its huge six-inch OLED display. Overall, it is a very sturdy and well-made design that looks good, and is generally comfortable to use, given its over-sized dimensions.
The iPhone 6 Plus continues with Apple's penchant for using aluminum, a choice that has often helped to distinguish its products as offering a more premium look and feel. The iPhone 6 Plus takes a quite different design tack to the iPhone 5s that it replaces, featuring a much more curvaceous body that feels more comfortable to hold than the squared off and chamfered edges of its predecessor. The way the curved glass seamlessly meets the edges also assists greatly when using left to right swiping gestures, while its overall thinness makes it very comfortable to use, as far as phablets are concerned.
Some early reports of bending put a question mark over the durability of the iPhone 6 Plus; however, Apple quickly put those suggestions to bed, offering journalists an opportunity to visit its testing facilities. Even though aluminum is generally quite strong, the new design of the iPhone 6 Plus makes the glass part of its overall structure. It is not as inherently strong as the design it replaces, but Apple has reinforced its internals with steel and titanium to prevent twisting and flex. In our regular use since launch, we have found the iPhone 6 Plus to be a very sturdy and robust device; one that is built to Apple's usual industry-leading high standards. Compared to the Nexus 6, the iPhone 6 Plus is the easier device to use one-handed, and offers the better overall form factor.
Display
The Nexus 6 has an extra-large, 5.96-inch Super AMOLED display supplied by Samsung. Google, along with its Android partners, have done the most to challenge the conventional wisdom about what makes for an ideal smartphone display size. It's hard to believe that when the iPhone was first introduced in 2007, its 3.5-inch display was considered so large, that people were seriously talking about Apple possibly introducing an iPhone mini. It was only last year that Google introduced the five-inch Nexus 5, which seemed large at the time, so it was a surprise to see it vault straight to a six-inch device for its follow-up. It certainly pushes the absolute boundaries of what you can fit in your pocket, yet still get around for the most part with just one hand.
From a technical standpoint, the Nexus 6 display is cutting-edge, from the perspective of its pixel density and resolution. Its 2560x1440 display packs as many pixels as the original 27-inch iMac into its dimensions, to give it an impressive pixel density of 493ppi. Its viewing angles are very good, with little color shift noticeable, and only a slight change of brightness when viewed from acute angles. As you'd expect with an OLED panel, contrast is also good, with very true blacks.
However, overall, its white balance is a little off, looking slightly yellower than we'd like. It is certainly not on par with Samsung's latest AMOLED panels in terms of its overall viewing quality, which is a shame; but it can be adjusted to better suit your tastes with one of the many utilities you can find on the Google Play Store. Even then, however, color in webpages and photos in particular can look over-saturated, a trait that Samsung has eliminated from its latest AMOLED displays.
The iPhone 6 Plus features the largest display that Apple has yet to build into a smartphone at 5.5 inches, yet it is surprisingly usable one-handed. Although Apple has been rumored to move to AMOLED technology for the upcoming Apple Watch display, it has continued to stick with trusted and true IPS LCD technology for the rest of its Retina displays. In this instance, it is easily the best display that Apple has fitted to a smartphone ever, with its 1080p resolution looking crisp thanks to a still-excellent pixel density of 401ppi. Brightness and contrast are great, while color accuracy and viewing angles are among the best you will see on any device. Between the two displays, we prefer the iPhone 6 Plus display, as it has been properly calibrated out of the box, and does not require any tweaking to look superb.
Performance and technology
The Nexus 6 uses one of the newest quad-core chips from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 805. Its CPU core architecture, however, is fundamentally the same as the 32-bit "Krait" architecture that Qualcomm has been using in its high-end chips for over the past 12 months. For Android fans, this is somewhat disappointing, as the Nexus 9 tablet runs a 64-bit chip, and it leaves Google trailing Apple for potentially up to two years when it comes to having a flagship device running a 64-bit processor.
Qualcomm will have a high-end 64-bit chip on the market soon, in the shape of the octa-core Snapdragon 810, but it wasn't ready in time for launch of the Nexus 6 late last year. Apple's ability to strike special relationships with its partners, including ARM, to get early access to the latest technology has, more than once, given them a unique competitive edge. In this case, Apple also has processor engineers designing specially-customized versions of ARM's basic chips, giving it a further edge as well.
In order to remain competitive with Apple's 64-bit chip designs, Qualcomm has simply been clocking the cores higher, as its fabrication partners move to more advanced manufacturing techniques. As fabrication processes have shrunk the size of the die, this has allowed Qualcomm to speed up its cores -- while staying on top of power consumption, and keeping the thermal dynamic profile suitable for thinner enclosures. Although still 32-bit, the Snapdragon 805 is no slouch, clocked as it is at 2.7GHz and matched with 3GB of RAM. It is also running a fast Adreno 420 GPU, which is one of the fastest mobile GPUs on the market -- ensuring that the Nexus 6 can justifiably carry a "flagship" status.
The iPhone 6 Plus is powered by Apple's second-gen 64-bit A8 processor, building on the market lead it took in 2013 with the launch of the A7 chip. On paper, it doesn't look as though it should be able to compete with the Snapdragon 805 at all, as it is a dual-core design clocked at just 1.4GHz and matched with just 1GB of RAM. However, it has the advantage of the wide processing bandwidth inherent in ARM's 64-bit Cortex-A57 design, which it is based upon. Apple has further optimized this design itself, refining the "Cyclone" core that debuted in the A7 chip so that it is even faster and more power efficient. Coupled with being built using the latest 20nm fabrication process, the A8 chip uses less power while crunching through more lines of code than the competition per clock cycle.
To compare the single- and multi-core performance of the two devices, we ran them both through the cross-platform Geekbench 3 test. As you can see from the chart below, the iPhone 6 Plus scores a single-core result of 1594, and a multi-core score of 2886. By comparison, the Nexus 6 achieves a single-core mark of 1054, and a multi-core score of 3313. The single-core mark is the most telling, and really underscores why Apple was so keen to make the jump to ARM's 64-bit architecture. Most apps run utilizing only one core, and despite running at a much slower clock speed, the Apple A8 chip scorches the Snapdragon 805 in this regard.
Sure, the Snapdragon delivers superior multi-core performance, but this is only the result of running an additional two cores. Even then, the iPhone 6 Plus is still not far off it considering its two-core "handicap," but it is not often that the average user -- or even smartphone power-users -- are going to enjoy the full benefits of multi-core performance. Further, because the A8 is clocked lower, it can run at peak speeds for much more sustained performance when required in single-threaded and multi-threaded tasks, while Qualcomm's 32-bit Snapdragon chips will run hotter much sooner, forcing the chip to throttle down much earlier under similar stress.
Unsurprisingly, because of the lower clock cycles, the iPhone 6 Plus also delivers much better battery performance despite having a smaller 2915mAh battery against the 3220mAh in the Nexus 6. In every day use, we found the iPhone 6 Plus battery life easily getting through a full day without a charge, whereas the Nexus 6 still requires overnight charging, or sometimes a top up during the day.
The GPU performance benchmarks make for especially interesting reading, as both devices suffer to some extent from running high pixel density displays. I have previously said that more isn't always more when it comes to pixel density and GPU performance: Daniel Eran Dilger over at
AppleInsider has examined this in some depth from a technical perspective. More pixel to drive means that although the raw performance of a GPU may have increased from one generation to the next, if it ends up driving a mobile display with comparatively high pixel density, it can put a significant dent in overall GPU performance.
Forensic examination by Chipworks has revealed that Apple uses a next-generation PowerVR GX6450 GPU in the A8 SoC that uses a quad-core configuration. It is a much more powerful GPU than the model that features in the superseded iPhone 5s, and offers similar raw performance to the new Adreno 420 GPU utilized in the Nexus 6. However, although the iPhone 6 Plus is the most pixel-dense Retina display that Apple has made (which is great for reading text etc), the iPhone 6 Plus performs less well than the iPhone 5s in on-screen GPU performance in the GFXBench OpenGL GPU benchmark.
The iPhone 6 Plus is also further handicapped by the virtue of the fact that Apple has chosen to have the PowerVR GPU draw to its display at a virtual 2208x1242 resolution before downscaling it back to 1920x1080. This has been done to make it easier for app developers to scale their apps to the new resolution without having to rewrite chunks of code. It highlights the raw power of the GPU in that it is able to do this on-the-fly while still delivering solid performance, but it does drop frame rates as a result. By comparison, the iPhone 6, which runs a 760p display with substantially less pixels to push, offers the better GPU performance of Apple's flagship iPhones.
As you can see from the chart, the Nexus 6 with its super-high pixel density, fares even worse than the iPhone 6 Plus at its native QHD resolution, underscoring the point that you
can have too much of a good thing. While there are benefits to moving over 400ppi from the perspective of eliminating antialiasing effects, Apple has previously explained that a pixel density of over 300ppi is generally sufficient for a crisp mobile display. To say that the shift in Android phones to quad-HD displays is overkill is no exaggeration -- there is no apparent visual benefit to moving to that resolution, except from the point of view of winning the never-ending (and mostly pointless) Android specification wars. It simply chews up GPU clock cycles.
We've included the results for the iPhone 6 and the second-generation
Moto X (2014) for comparison. Of the two, the iPhone 6 results are an excellent baseline as it runs the same GPU as the iPhone 6, although it is pushing fewer pixels rated as it is at 760p. When running natively, it blitzes the GFXBench tests, while when running off-screen at the equivalent of 1080p, it starts to fall back in line with the iPhone 6 Plus. The Moto X runs the older Adreno 330 GPU, but at a native 1080p resolution and suffers in the GFXBench tests accordingly.
Cameras: still photography
If there is one area that the Apple has continually excelled in, it is in the performance of its iPhone cameras from generation to generation. The iPhone 6 Plus is no exception, and ratchets things up another notch or two despite continuing with 8-megapixel images. The new iSight camera sensor features large 1.5ยต pixels with phase detection for much better autofocusing, as well as a large f.2.2 aperture for better low-light performance. Added to this, the iPhone 6 Plus also features optical image stabilization, although this is only active during low-light still photography. Apple's image processing software has always been ahead of its competitors, despite often using similarly sourced optical hardware. Apple has further differentiated itself from the competition this time around by also engineering a custom imaging processor too, which has really helped to minimize noise in the photos that the iPhone 6 Plus is capable of shooting.
The Nexus 6, by comparison, features the best imaging hardware yet seen on a Nexus device, which is what you would expect for device being sold without any generous subsidies as in the recent past. It succumbs somewhat to the Android specification wars by featuring a 13-megapixel main shooter, but it does have a more meaningful larger f2.0 aperture. While this should yield more detailed images that can be more easily cropped without too much loss of image fidelity, it comes at the expense of increased photo file sizes. Although Google hasn't specified the pixel size, the Nexus 6 shooter also includes phase detection autofocus, but also optical image stabilization in all usage scenarios. Its camera app is also much improved, but doesn't feature the added functionality that Apple has introduced through Extensibility, that allows you to access third-party app features from within the main camera app.
As you can see from the unedited photos below, both cameras perform very well in a range of lighting conditions. Interestingly, the when looking at cropped photos from both cameras, we found that is hard to tell the two cameras apart from the perspective of image noise -- you'd expect the lower resolution of the iPhone 6 Plus camera would affect its shots more noticeable, but it appears that Apple's image sensor technology lifts the standard of the iPhone 6 Plus that much. Although the Nexus 6 is a high-quality shooter, and captures more light in low-light situations thanks to its larger aperture, the iPhone 6 Plus images appear more pleasing to the eye. The iPhone 6 Plus is very color accurate, with a greater depth of shades, whereas the Nexus 6 photos look slightly washed out by comparison. Taken on its own, the Nexus 6 camera will more than keep you happy; however, when compared directly with the iPhone 6 Plus camera, it is a little off the pace with a tendency towards overexposure.
iPhone 6 Plus
Nexus 6
iPhone 6 Plus
Nexus 6
iPhone 6 Plus
Nexus 6
Operating System
The Nexus 6 runs Google Android 5.0 "Lollipop," which continues Google's more recent efforts to give the world's most popular mobile operating system much-needed polish, and better overall performance. Google has pursued an almost diametrically-opposed strategy to Apple when it comes to the development of Android, focusing in its first few years on rapidly adding features and functionality at the expense of stability and performance. However, starting with Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich," then Android 4.2 "Jelly Bean" and now Android 5.0 "Lollipop," Google has slowed down the rate of feature additions to concentrate on sorting out the various issues with Android, such as performance lag and system inefficiencies and vulnerabilities. It has left OEMs to add additional functionality to Android, as they will -- and have -- in the interim.
On a technical level, Android 5.0 brings, among other tweaks, an all-new application runtime called ART (Android Runtime) that Google has been testing since Android 4.4 "KitKat," and new 64-bit extensions that will enable Android to take better advantage of the computational power of the first wave of 64-bit mobile processors finally arriving for the platform. While the 32-bit Nexus 6 does not get any benefit from the work Google has put into adding 64-bit support for Lollipop, it does get an up to 4x performance boost from ART, which replaces Google's Dalvik virtual machine for running Android apps (although it is fully backwards-compatible with apps compiled for the old environment). Instead of executing apps in a just-in-time virtual environment, apps appropriately coded for ART are executed in an ahead-of-time native environment, with obvious benefits.
Google has also worked on making Android a much more coherent and consistent user experience from a visual perspective as well. In response to the design unity that Jony Ive has exerted on iOS 7 and iOS 8, Google has introduced a new design language in Android 5.0 that it has called "Material Design." It has developed extensive guidelines for app developers on how to make apps that take advantage of the new design language and associated frameworks, hoping to bring greater consistency to the often disparate Android user experience. In terms of how the operating system now looks and feels, Material Design has made Lollipop a fun a colorful user experience, that also brings with it iOS-style animations to present a much slicker OS overall.
In contrast to Google's rapid feature iterations in the early part of its development cycle, Apple has tended towards a more conservative approach until the past couple of iterations of iOS, in particular. While Android could be quite buggy, iOS has tended to be much more stable and fast. However, feeling the pressure from Android and understanding just how important mobile is to its long-term future, Apple doubled down on the pace of iOS development for the release of iOS 7 and iOS 8 over the past couple of years. Jony Ive, along with Craig Federighi and their respective teams, have made massive strides with iOS design, including feature additions as well as with technical developments that put Apple well ahead of Android in terms of 64-bit support.
In iOS 7, much of the attention was directed towards the sometimes-controversial design overhaul that Apple brought to the iOS user interface in the space of just seven months. Coupled with this, there was a large amount of effort and time invested in extending iOS to support 64-bit computing in what proved to be a factor that put it nearly two years ahead of the competition. While iOS 7 added many features as well, it almost pales in comparison to the strides Apple has made with iOS 8.
Apple called iOS 8 its biggest release to date, and there is no reason to question that claim. It refined and toned down some of the excesses of the iOS 7 UI in response to user feedback, while it also added numerous feature enhancements, as well as a wide range of new frameworks like HealthKit and HomeKit, and APIs that give developers deeper access to the system. Continuity, Handoff and extensibility have also helped to put Apple back on the offensive when it comes to the advancement of mobile computing.
Ecosystem and customer support
When it comes to the ecosystem for Android smartphones, it is much healthier than it is for Android tablets, on the whole. Although developers typically make a lot more money from iOS than they do from Android, Android still garners very similar support from the developer industry. This means that when it comes to apps, users of either Android and iOS are spoilt for choice. Google has also developed an extensive content network for Android on Google Play, while there is also plenty of third-party support for entertainment content as well. While iTunes and the App Store probably still has an overall edge over Google Play in a number of areas, including getting access to exclusive content or debuts, and a deeper general library of content built up since the days of the iPod, Android users aren't complaining about their experience in this regard.
If there is a more marked area of difference between the Nexus 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus user experience, it is in the area of customer support. Buying the Nexus 6 (when it is available) through the Google Play Store is reasonably straightforward. However, if something should go wrong, it can be a painful process to get things sorted out. While Google's phone support is reasonable, you will need to package up your faulty device and get it ready to be picked up by a courier -- which is not always the most convenient thing. Google will immediately send you a replacement device, but it will pre-authorise your credit card for the full amount, pending the successful return of your temporary device. Contrast this with being able to quickly and easily book a time at an Apple Store for a staff member to quickly check your device and hand you a replacement on the spot. Added to this, Apple also offers the option of purchasing AppleCare+ that, for a small fee, will cover you for two device damage incidents for two years.
Conclusion
When it comes to having the very latest, most meaningful, and most useful technology, there is clear evidence to support the iPhone 6 Plus. It offers the best balance of cutting-edge technology and overall performance. This is not to say that the Nexus 6 is does not have a lot going for it -- it does. It will keep Android fans quite happy for the most part, I'm sure. But it is not the better of the two devices, as good as it is.
Moreover, it is surprisingly enough not the better phablet, either. Despite all the experience that Google has had in building a mobile operating system that, when combined with the Samsung phablet hardware in particular, has been responsible for driving the phablet phenomenon -- Apple has built the better phablet. How, I hear some "fandroids" scream? The one thing that sets the Galaxy Note 4 apart as a phablet, is its customization around a stylus -- for better or worse. The Nexus 6 enjoys no such differentiation over the iPhone. At first glance, is is just like the iPhone 6 Plus, in that it is a phablet by virtue of its over 5.5-inch display.
Yet, it is Apple that has actually tweaked iOS to make life easier for getting around a device with a larger display. Apple has introduced two key functions that make using the larger display on the iPhone 6 Plus easier to use one-handed; the first is Reachability, and the second is the swipe-to-go-back gesture. Reachability is enabled by double-tapping the Home button, which drops whatever is at the top of the display down to within easy thumb reach from the Home button. Instead of forcing users to stretch from the software Home button on the Nexus 6 to the top of the display to, for example, enter text into the URL field of a web browser, Apple has made the same action much easier and much more comfortable. Apple has also added an iPad-like ability to turn its phablet into landscape mode -- something that is mysteriously absent from the Nexus 6, which treats its 6-inch palette like a standard portrait mode-only smartphone.
Although I have heard a few Android users griping about missing the Back button when trying out the iPhone 6 Plus, (and despite being tech writers in some instances) it seems that these users have completely overlooked the ability to swipe from anywhere on a screen to go back in iOS, first introduced in iOS 7. In fact, that is what I miss the most when using the larger six-inch display on the Nexus 6; although I imagine Google will eventually rip off this idea, as it is simply so much easier than reaching down the screen for the Back button, or across to the top left of the display for an alternative software button to go back. Both Reachability and the back-swipe feature, however, do not work if the iPhone 6 Plus is in landscape mode.
While Android users can point to the Galaxy Note 4 as potentially being a better phablet than the iPhone 6 Plus, using it will also entail using Samsung's TouchWiz UI, which has its fair share of critics -- not least of which are problems widely cited, including slow updates. As far as stock Android phablets running Android Lollipop goes, it is currently the Nexus 6 or nothing. So while Apple has been slow to move into the phablet space, it has done so with a device that is well proportioned, and yet relatively comfortable to use.
The iPhone 6 Plus is the clear winner in this head-to-head battle.
-Sanjiv Sathiah (@sathinator)
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