Google Nexus 5

For the past two years I've been using a Nexus 5, which I never really liked (should have gotten the LG G2 instead) because of the average build and camera quality. Then Google bricked it with the 5.1.1 update, so while waiting for the replacement to arrive I got a cheap Lumia 535 that I'm loving so far. Fast forward one week, Nexus 5 replacement arrives, and updating to the latest version bricks it again (this time a soft brick :) Having realized that Google is apparently packed with morons I'll stick with Windows Phone for a while. Looking forward to the upcoming Lumia 940 or the successor of the Lumia 1020.

I bought a new Nexus 5 about ~6 months after reveal to supersede my aging iphone 4 that was 4 years old at that point. At the beginning I was super excited about the very good performance, just after less than 6 months the performance started to become sluggish, battery life was noticeably worse and while with my iphone 4 I had probably 4 reboots or freezes in 4 years, in 6 months with the nexus 5 I had many more such problems. The worst was a loop boot after 1 year and something that killed my battery from 80% to 0 very quickly and, very luckily, after it was dead it didn't continue loop booting. It happened to me another one or two times if I recall correctly. The phone was 100% stock, I never flashed anything at all, I just performed the android updates. Arrived at the point of having a quite strong desire to throw it against the wall pretty much every day, I sold it to my friend's father when it was 1 year and 8 months old. I begged my friend to thoroughly test it before getting it and I gave him a really good price and he was very happy with the performance (I still can't fathom how in the world it is possible...). After 8 - 10 months his father could not use it anymore because it won't charge. After that awful experience I would rather get a kick in my genitalia than an android phone.

It’s not that easy. I switched to iPhone mainly because of Android phone makers’ abysmal update policies. Heck, I had a Nexus 5 and it was “killed” merely 1.5 years after I bought it. Because newer Android required newer graphics drivers and Qualcomm said “no”. Supposedly things are better now, but are they really? My iPhone 7 was my daily driver for 5 years and was only retired because I got an offer that was too good to pass up. And then there’s also the degrading storage on many Android phones. They just become sooooo slow. My iPhone 7 is slow now, too. After 7 years, not after 3.

I have a OnePlus 5T, which I got when it was brand new, so that's coming on two years. It replaced my previous phone because it was unusable (apparently a deliberate tactic to stop the battery suddenly running out of juice). I would like one of the Linux phones when they come out later this year, but I guess the this will remain in use after that. I would love a phone with a better, intelligent camera app, but I don't want to replace the phone "just because". My previous phone was an iPhone 6. I'm pretty sure it was around March when I got it, and it was the topend phone at the time, so I guess it was March 2015. So that was perhaps 2.5 years; this jives with my recollection of it being out of contract, but not hugely so. But my wife kept using it till May this year because I accidentally left it near her when her phone broke, and she thought it was fine even though to me it was unusable. Perhaps you can call that about 4 years of use. Before that, I had a Nexus 5. I don't think it lasted particularly wrong. I got it on my birthday, which makes it July 2014. So I presumably replaced it within a year. I think I was unhappy withe the phone for its whole life; in particular, I had been planning to try an iPhone so I don't know why I bought a Nexus. Its battery life was awful. Once the screen broke, and its replacement cost was a massive proportion of its purchase price, I decided to try an iPhone. But my wife used it after hers got stolen till it completely broke apart sometime

I managed to get 2 pixel devices in a row that have known issues of just dying. My CC company refunded one of them. :/ I also had a Nexus 5 (boot looped of course).

How do you assess that? I'd imagine it would be more along the lines of is the phone frictionless to use? This is just an anecdote but I owned every Google Nexus phone they made up to Nexus 5. A series of bugs caused priceless videos to get ruined and I decided to try iPhone after that. I didn't realize just how much I unconsciously hated using the Nexus phone and that contributed to me not actually adopting smartphone software until I got the iPhone. When the phone and the OS were a burden it led to the phone being avoided. I dont know which was better. I appreciate the battery life, camera and general stability but I hate the new addictions to social media it has caused.

> The deal breaker: Despite staying on official ROMs, Google broke audio in video recording such that all my vacation videos with a special friend ended up with garbled audio. For me it was also the Nexus 5. It just lost many of my photos, of our firstborn child. Unrecoverable. Gone. And so was I from the Android-platform.

I left Android at the Nexus 5 after years of buying every Nexus phone. The deal breaker: Despite staying on official ROMs, Google broke audio in video recording such that all my vacation videos with a special friend ended up with garbled audio. My mistake for trusting Google updates right before my trip. You'd think for their reference phone they would test a primary feature like video recording for regressions? Apparently not. My friend at the time had an iPhone 5, I noticed her phone worked without issue while my Nexus 5 was constantly draining its battery. I finally bought an Apple device and 11 years later never looked back. Finally said goodbye to Windows & Linux as well. I presume this is how many Apple conversions happen. Back when Pixel came out I used to argue with a friend because it supposedly had a better camera: I'd always point out that the Pixel phone has its own Wikipedia article describing all its issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_(1st_generation)#Issues Its been like 12 years since the G1? They are still playing games till this day. Give it a rest already.

I ran Ubuntu Touch briefly on a Nexus 5 as well. IIRC the two issues I had were: 1) calls and MMS not working well. 2) Instead of a normal GNU/Linux OS Ubuntu Touch tried really hard to have an Android style immutable OS. Kind of the worst of both worlds since you have a difficult to work with OS but without the app ecosystem of Android that some people believe makes it worth using. After that I kind of just gave up on the idea that I owned my phone at all and a few years later I gave up carrying smartphones entirely.

> it's not modular or upgradable, it's repairable, which is already great. Well, I was going to observe that I broke my phone recently for the first time out of more than 10 years of having a smartphone. But I remembered that while I didn't break it, my Nexus 5 spontaneously broke and couldn't be fixed, causing me to lose about a year of chat history that I would like to have back. That said, if the parts are replaceable, there is no good reason to prevent you from replacing them with upgrades. That is by far the highest-value use of the ability to replace parts.

It was more to prevent unexpected shutdowns. Which, I'll add, were a problem with Android devices at the time, and the Nexus 5, in particular, had three battery OEMs, one of which would only last a year before being unable to run the device in high demand situations (say, "taking a picture with the flash"). As lithium batteries age, their internal resistance goes up - you can model a battery as a voltage source and a series resistor accurately enough. Over time, that resistance goes up, which means, for a given current, you end up with less voltage "at the output." Most power supplies will compensate by pulling more current to provide the needed power, which will drop the voltage more until you slam into the low voltage protection circuitry that cuts power. The Nexus 5s are the ones I'm most familiar with, and they absolutely had this problem with one of the battery OEMs (the only way to tell which OEM you had was to pull the battery out, they were labeled on the back). The typical symptom was, "The phone shuts down when you try to take a picture," because camera modules are power hungry, the CPU was spinning hard to keep up with rendering the view from the camera (and possibly doing some pre/post frame capture to find the best frame, I don't recall when that showed up), and the flash pulls a LOT of current, very briefly. So everything would simply shut down when you hit the button to take the picture. Apple decided to attempt to limit this problem, and they locked out…

Yup - my Nexus 5 is all sticky and nasty because they made the back out of rubber. What are steering wheels made of? That material seems to last longer, and they exist in much harsher conditions.

I have some seriously bad luck with spicy pillows. I had a nexus 4 and 5 that had their battery swollen. Also an iPhone 6 and a Poco X3 pro. Also, a ZTE z959 and moto E4. I don't want a spicy pillow. I'd rather the phone turn itself off before the battery swells up but ideally it should automatically disconnect the battery and keep running off of the wall unless it is too hot, in which case, it should shut itself off.

Nice to see they haven't changed anything from the Nexus 5 days. I purposely stayed on the official firmware in the hopes that I would have a seamless experience. The day before an epic trip around Europe, I upgraded to the latest version. It broke video recording so that all videos had garbled audio. Ruined priceless memories. Meanwhile my friend's iPhone 5 was operating perfectly fine and wasn't always running out of battery like the Nexus was. After the trip, I had enough and bought a used iPhone. That was the last time I ever considered Android. This also turned me into a die hard Mac user. Can't believe I wasted years of my life trying to make Linux and Windows work when I could have just used a Mac.

> despite a large number of techies using Android I use an iPhone. Not for any philosophical reason. I tried switching to android 3 times over the years since the first iPhone came out. Same plan, same provider, grandfathered in, same house, same spot. Each android phone did not get the same level of cell service in my house as the iPhone. I have side gigs I do contracting for, I have had cases of missing calls where the androids have literally cost me $100's of dollars, phone didn't ring... just a voicemail notification showing up hours later. After the 3rd attempt, last being a nexus 5, I gave up. I'm sorry but I draw a line when a device messes with my income regardless of my ideological stance on open source and not having a windows device or even an Apple laptop in the house for the last 13 years. With that said the Pixel 7 Pro looks nice, and I would love to give it a try but I'll only do that if I have it on a separate dedicated line to try out besides my main one that have had for 20 years. Not sure it's worth the effort at this point.

>If in October 2013 you bought a just released Google Nexus 5, you would have had official updates until December 2016. Wait a second are you sure about that? The last official version released was 6.0.1 which was released in October of 2015. I remember this because the Nexus 5 was the phone that finally sealed the deal for me in leaving the Android ecosystem for good. These "engineers" on the Android team did not QA their software so when I upgraded to 4.4.4, it broke the camera such that every video I recorded had messed up garbled audio. It totally ruined a special eurotrip where I had taken tons of video. I guess it was my mistake for trusting Google enough to update right before the trip started. Anyway seeing that there is a section on Wikipedia devoted to all the hardware/software issues of the Pixel line, I think I made a wise choice to stop wasting my time with this ecosystem. Went to a used iPhone 5S and ended up using that phone for 5 years. Was the best phone I ever owned.