So today is a weird combination of things. Its Halloween, which means Ive got a bowl of mini Kit Kats by the door for later (yes, actual Kit Kats, which feels extra dumb given the other thing thats happening today), and its also the day Google finally flipped the switch on the Nexus 5.
I'd been refreshing the Play Store devices page since about 9:45 this morning like a crazy person. No reason to rush, really, its not like they were going to sell out in the first hour, but old habits from waiting on Galaxy Nexus stock back in 2011 die hard. Listing went live a little after 10 my time. $349 for the 16GB model, $399 for 32GB, both unlocked, no contract, works on T-Mobile and AT&T bands here in the US. I ordered the 32GB in black before I'd even finished reading the spec sheet, which probably says something about brand loyalty doing more work than rational judgment.
For what its worth, the phone itself sounds genuinely good on paper. LG builds it (same as last year, though nobody talks about that), 4.95 inch 1080p screen, Snapdragon 800, and it ships running Android 4.4 KitKat out of the box, which is the first time we're actually seeing KitKat on real hardware instead of just the candy-bar branding stunt Google pulled back in September. I still think naming an OS version after a chocolate bar is a bit much, but nobody asked me.
My current phone is the original Galaxy Nexus, and its been showing its age for a while now. Battery life that was mediocre new is pretty rough two years in, and Samsung/Google stopped bothering with timely updates on it a while back. So this isnt exactly an impulse buy, more like a phone that finally arrived right when I needed an excuse. Still annoyed Verizon customers dont get a real Nexus option this generation, incidentally. My buddy Dave's been complaining about that for a week now and honestly he's got a point, Big Red locks people into their own janky software builds and calls it a feature.
Small tangent, not really related to phones, but it's been bugging me. Adobe put out an update this week saying the breach they disclosed back at the start of October was way bigger than the 2.9 million accounts they first admitted to. Now theyre saying its more like 38 million. Thirty eight million. I had a Creative Cloud trial account I signed up for and never canceled, and I'm fairly sure I used a password on it that I've reused elsewhere, because of course I did, because I'm apparently incapable of learning this lesson even after writing about password reuse on this very blog at least twice before. Spent twenty minutes this afternoon in LastPass changing things instead of doing literally anything productive. Anyway.
Back to the phone thing. Whats interesting to me isnt really the hardware, its the pricing. $349 unlocked for something with genuinely flagship specs is the kind of number that makes carrier contract pricing look even more absurd than usual. I know people who'll pay $199 on a two year contract for an iPhone and feel like theyre getting a deal, when the actual cost gets buried in the monthly bill for two years straight. Nexus 5 doesnt play that game, you just pay for the phone. I like that a lot more than I probably should.
No idea yet if the estimated shipping date holds. Play Store said "1-2 business days" when I checked out but Ive seen those estimates slip before, so I'm not holding my breath. Doorbell's already rung twice for trick-or-treaters while I've been writing this, so I should probably go deal with that instead of refreshing my order status page every four minutes like its going to change anything.
Will do an actual review once it shows up. For now, back to candy duty.