I wasn’t impressed by last year Nexus 6, and I’m not impressed by this year’s Nexus 5X and 6P either. The first one was an expensive super-phone (in every sense), and the new phones are not cheap either (at least not outside the US) and they aren’t specially different from the proposals from the traditional Google partners.
Vlad Savov makes a good argument trying to explain what possibly could have motivated Google to launch this products. There were valid reasons originally:
The original Nexus One in 2010 was Google’s first effort at selling its own phones directly to consumers, and was thus the boldest attempt the United States had yet seen of circumventing the market dominance of mobile carriers. The Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus then served as valuable references for the best of Android at a time when Google’s hardware partners were aggravating their users with awful Android skins and long delays on delivering updates. Since then, the Nexus 4 and the Nexus 5 — especially the Nexus 5 — have raised our expectations for what we can get from a good Android phone on a budget
That’s exactly right. Since then, though, the reasons are different, and as Savov points out, it seems Google makes this smartphones just because it can.
It seems Google partners aren’t happy with the situation. Motorola’s Moto X Pure is a good example of a device that should get promoted by Google, and not rivalled by your partner. Maybe Google just use Nexus as ads, like Savov explains, but if that’s the idea, I really don’t see the benefit.
Google should concentrate on making Nexus as the best examples of what a good, affordable device can do with the newest version of Android. That’s it. Let makers make.
