Google Nexus 6P Review

Huawei's Nexus 6P was the first Nexus that felt like a flagship rather than a bargain. An aluminium body, front-facing stereo speakers, a 5.7-inch quad-HD Samsung AMOLED and the Nexus Imprint fingerprint reader on the back, as fast as the iPhone 6s reader in the same year, came to $499 for 32GB. It shipped Android 6.0 Marshmallow, with Doze standby that got the 3450mAh battery comfortably through a day, Now on Tap and the new runtime permissions.

The 12.3-megapixel Sony IMX377 sensor with 1.55-micron pixels was the first Nexus camera anyone chose on purpose, excellent in low light and undermined only by a slow camera app and no optical stabilisation. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 was the throttling chip of 2015, and even the revised v2.1 ran warm under sustained load, though the phone was quick in daily use. It was also among the first phones with USB-C.

Then it aged badly. From 2016 a growing number of 6Ps began shutting down at 30 or 40 percent charge, and a separate fault put phones into an endless boot loop that no factory reset could cure. Google and Huawei settled a class action in 2019 for $9.75 million, up to $400 per owner. The aluminium bent under modest force too. Software support ended at Android 8.1 in December 2017, with security patches into late 2018. It was the best Nexus for about eighteen months, which is exactly how long a lot of them lasted.