Google is slowly inching it's way towards the business end of smartphone sales with it's shrewd and value for money phone and tablet releases. Since the release and subsequent success of it's Nexus phones and tablets, there's only one way for Google smartphone sales - UP ! Nexus 7, Google's 7" tablet was such a massive success that they have released an upgrade over it this past year. Meanwhile the handier 4.7" Nexus 4 was the lowest priced smartphone from any recognized manufacturer that could boast of a whopping 2GB RAM. The initial stocks of both Nexus 4 and 7 were sold out within minutes of going on sale, underlining it's popularity and general appreciaiton.
However. this past Halloween, Google launched a new flagship smartphone, the Nexus 5 - running the latest flavor of Android, KitKat. This phone is aimed at providing a high-performance, affordable phone as an alternative to the similar spec-ed but terribly overpriced Samsung Galaxy S and Note series and the lesser selling but similarly priced HTC One series. The Nexus 5, which is manufactured by LG for Google, sounds comparable in many ways to high-end offerings from Apple, HTC, and Samsung. It features a Snapdragon 800 processor, five-inch display with 1080p resolution, wireless charging, 8MP rear-facing camera and 1.3MP front-facing camera. It weighs about 4.6 ounces. Google claims the battery lasts 8.5 hours on Wi-Fi. Question marks are raised however over it's plastic body and its not as sleek as the iPhone, or the HTC One.
The Nexus 5 runs the “pure” version of Android KitKat. Typically phone manufacturers and wireless carriers customize Android in various ways, changing or limiting its capabilities as well as adding “bloatware” apps that users often don’t want and can’t remove. One advantage of buying the Nexus 5 by Google is that users will receive Android updates as soon as Google releases them. Other manufacturers often release their Android updates with considerable delays.
KitKat offers some performance improvements over Android Jellybean, including adding HDR mode to the basic camera app to automatically improve picture quality (a feature that several other smartphones have offered standard for a while). There are also enhancements for full-screen display, integrated messaging (text, MMS, Google Hangouts, and video chat all in one app), video-screen recording, and more. KitKat is not as big a leap forward for Android as Jellybean was, but it’s still significant. In the bigger picture, KitKat will run on many older Android devices -- which should improve the useful life and user experience for many existing Android users.
What this Nexus revolution has meant for Google is that, it now has a handset base on which it can release exclusive updates of it's Android OS before making the source code available to the others. This way, for any Android fanatic, a Nexus is a must-buy because you're virtually guaranteed earliest OS updates. So, well done Google, the smartphone market is slowly becoming yours !
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