So the Nexus 5 showed up in the Play Store yesterday and I've been staring at my current phone with something like resentment ever since.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it: Google and LG put out a 4.95-inch phone, 1920x1080 screen, Snapdragon 800 chip, running the brand new Android 4.4 KitKat, and priced it at $349 for the 16GB model, $399 for 32GB. No contract. No two-year lock-in with Verizon breathing down your neck. You buy it outright and it works fine on T-Mobile or AT&T (Verizon's a whole separate mess, dont get me started).
I want to sit with that price for a second because I dont think its sunk in for people yet. The iPhone 5s off contract is $649 for the base 16GB model. The Nexus 5 is basically the same class of hardware, minus Apple's app store polish and iOS being iOS, for almost half the money. Thats not a small gap. Thats rent-in-some-cities money.
I tried to buy one around 3pm yesterday and the checkout kept timing out. Wasnt shocked, the same thing happened with the Nexus 4 launch last year and that one turned into a whole saga with restocking that dragged on for weeks. I refreshed the page probably nine times before it actually went through, and Im pretty sure at one point the listing itself vanished and came back, like somebody at Google fat-fingered the publish button a few hours early and then panicked. Maybe I imagined that part. Hard to tell with these launches, everybody's screenshotting everything in a panic and half of it turns out to be nothing.
KitKat, as a name, still throws me a little. I know the whole story, Googles dessert naming thing ran out of good letters after Jelly Bean and someone floated it as a joke and Nestle apparently said yes almost immediately. Fine, its a fun bit of marketing. But I keep almost typing Key Lime Pie out of habit because thats what every rumor site called it for months, and now Ive got to retrain my brain for a candy bar. Small complaint, I know.
The bigger thing that actually matters here, if you strip away the fun branding, is that KitKat is supposedly built to run properly on phones with only 512MB of RAM. Thats the real headline for me, more than the flagship device itself honestly. Google's been getting hammered for years about fragmentation, about how last years midrange phone chokes on this years OS update, and if this genuinely runs smooth on cheap hardware it changes what a budget Android phone can be in places where $349 is still a fortune, let alone $649.
No removable battery on the Nexus 5, no SD card slot. Ill complain about that because I complain about it on every phone, every single launch, and yes I know nobody at Google reads this blog and changes their mind because of it. I still carry a spare battery for my current phone in my bag and Im a little annoyed I wont get to do that anymore. Cloud backup is great until youre on a train with no signal and two hundred photos you want off your phone.
Mine's supposedly shipping in "1-2 weeks" according to the confirmation email, which in Google-launch-speak usually means three. Ill believe it when its actually in my hand and not a second before. In the meantime my current phone, which has been perfectly fine this whole time, suddenly feels like a brick Im carrying around out of spite.
Also, briefly, unrelated: Twitter's still doing its whole IPO roadshow thing this week, pricing isnt even set yet as far as I can tell, and every tech site Ive opened in the last few days has some breathless post about what the stock might open at. I dont have an opinion on the stock, I dont invest in stuff I dont understand and Wall Street math is squarely in that bucket for me. Im mostly just tired of the word "unicorn" getting used unironically in headlines. Anyway. Back to being annoyed about my phone.