The camera is also strong, with the 12 megapixel shooter providing a simple design with a swipe between stills and video, and a few extra modes of each.
In the stills mode, you’ll find a lens blur mode, panorama, and Google’s less-used StreetView-inspired “photo sphere” mode, while video delivers footage captured in 720p HD, 1080p Full HD, or 4K Ultra HD.
Images look decent as well, with some pretty responsive laser autofocus working to get you the focus you need quickly, and if you need to open the camera in a heartbeat, double tapping the home button at the side of the phone helps tremendously.
Interestingly, we couldn’t find a burst mode on this camera, so if you’re hoping to grab as much as you can, switch to video mode, as holding the camera button down on the Nexus 5X just doesn’t seem to do anything.
At least your selfies will look good, though offering up a 5 megapixel camera for the odd picture of yourself, catering to Full HD video conferencing over Google Hangouts if you need it or can afford the bandwidth.
Battery life is also ok, though we’d probably call it average, lasting a day between charges.
Regardless of if we had Bluetooth switched off and worked with wireless headphones or did the opposite and relied on accessories without cables, a total of one day of life appeared to be pretty consistent, with us surfing the web, making phone calls, texting, emailing, taking photos, listening to music, and generally using the mobile.
Just make sure to turn the phone off every few days, because in our tests, we found that if you’ve been running the phone for a couple of days, you may find that it slows down when you least expect it, coming to a complete halt and generally feeling like a dog.
We’re not normally up at 2am, but after midnight on Halloween after being in use for a good three or four days straight, the Nexus 5X became unbearable slow, so much that only a phone restart was able to fix it. Fortunately, that was the fix — because turning it off and on again fixes 95% of most problems in the tech support world — but it’s rather curious it happened at all.
No microSD card doesn’t help the Nexus 5X either, something that a Google has been doing in its own branded phones, but yet is allowed in other Android devices.
It’s not that we’re against a lack of upgradeable storage, either. Apple’s phones have persisted with the upgrade-less design for ages and it has been fine for that company, with Samsung beginning to join in on the fun this year, much to our surprise. It’s more that the Nexus 5X only arrives in 16 and 32GB versions, with this fact surprising us.
Simply put, 16GB isn’t much, and for a company that has previously pushed out some pretty solid deals for people to get their hooks into Android, 16GB seems like a mistake, when it could have just as easily been 32 and 64.
The price doesn’t help this, and two years after Google practically twisted people’s arms with the best value phone of the year, the mid-range Nexus returns for a price that feels more like it approaches the high-end than the mid-range.
