Pick up the new Nexus 6, and its screen comes to life in anticipation. The phones—a joint effort from Motorola and Google—senses that you're handling it, and its display lights up. Staying in a dim and monochrome ambient mode, it shows your most important notifications in a clean stack, with the most urgent stuff on top. Tap one of those notifications, and everything suddenly turns colorful. A little ripple rolls out, just for a fraction of a second, from the spot on the screen where you placed your finger, and the notification expands to stand out from the others in the group. It's both very pretty, and very useful.
This is the newest embodiment of Google's mobiles operating system, androids 5.0 (aka Lollipop). It's not just about presenting something gorgeous. It's also been redesigned to be more helpful. The phones anticipates your needs and gets out in front of them, surfacing information before you request it. Not only has the skin of the operating system been juiced for this purpose, but the individual apps too. Calendar and Gmail have been updated, along with many of the key apps, to help you manage the constant flow of information that's always piping into your device.
But the greatest thing about this phones is the way it handles notifications. They are organized well from the get go, and also delightfully customizable. Imagine you see a Gmail notification that says "11 New Messages." Drag your finger down a bit on the card, and it expands to show you the subject line of each message. Or if there's only one message, you can drag down to see the first few sentences, and then opt to delete and move on, or reply, which opens up the app. Or instead, if you hold the notification card down when it appears because it annoys you, you'll see an an option to click and get info—where you can block notifications from the app entirely, or (conversely) set them as priority notifications.
This special attention being paid to notifications is a current trend in mobiles OS interaction design, and Google is a leader here. Increasingly, the notifications screen on our handset is becoming the interface—a primary way of consuming information and talking to the apps on the phones. But Lollipop recognizes that you want different levels of interaction with these notifications at different times, so it offers three modes: all, priority, and none.
All and none are exactly what they sound like, but priority notifications are fantastic. You can, for example, set them so that only calendar reminders and texts or phones calls from your starred contacts break through. Or, you can add Twitter and Facebook notifications to the mix. (Which sounds terrible, but whatever.) The point is you can set up priority notifications mode to be as strict or loose of a gatekeeper as you want.
Material Design is visually stunning. Little animations, like the ripple effect when you touch something on screen or the way info cards expand outward, not only delight, but also give you cues about the actions you are taking.The phones is self-organizing too. It tries to determine which things you care about most, and raise those to the top. Incoming emails appear above a notification telling you about new stories in The New York Times, for example. The operating system is riddled with these kind of features, designed to get you in and out, so you don't spend all day staring into your phones.
Yet if you are one of those people who willingly spends a lot of time staring at your phones screen, this one will reward you. Not only has every corner of androids been gussied up to reflect the higher visual standard of Google's new Material Design principles, but the display on the handset itself is gorgeous. This is where Nexus devices—each generation of which is designed to showcase the new androids version running on it—truly shine. Overall, Material Design is visually stunning. Little animations, like the ripple effect when you touch something on screen or the way info cards expand outward, not only delight, but also give you cues about the actions you are taking. It's just great to look at.
Photos and video look wonderful. I was genuinely surprised at the level of difference between the Nexus 6 and the iphoness 6 Plus, which also has an amazing display but looked a little overbright and washed out by comparison. The Nexus 6 just invites you to dive in and live in its rich hues.
Similarly, the dual front side speakers are boss. I don't generally condone playing audio right from your phones's speakers–it's annoying for you and more so for everyone else–but this actually makes a passable little outdoor sound system. Don't get me wrong, it still has a certain Motel 6 clock radio quality to it, but it's completely listenable.
If you are privacy-minded, there are some nice features for you too. You can set certain notifications to keep their details secret when the phones is locked–SMS messages, for example. You can pin an app to the screen so that someone can use that app (say, Netflix) and nothing else without knowing your unlock code. (I used this pretty effectively as child-proofing.) You can set it to remain unlocked in the presence of certain devices like a smart watch, a headset, or even your car. A multi-user mode lets you set up a guest account to give someone else access to your device and even operating system, but not your data. All of these are thoughtful and useful, and I enjoyed all of them.
