Well when I got this thing I thought it was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, a Google Nexus phone, with stock standard Android, a lot of available updates from Google, great spec and performance etc. Great hardware, well made quality product. Such a shame about the software though.
Unfortunately over time I have grown to hate the Nexus 5X because of some glaring design bugs in the version of Android shipped with it that Google have failed to remedy. In a respect that is what you get dealing with the likes of Google, Apple. Microsoft and the other majors like Facebook these days. These companies are so big and powerful they can just trample all over their customers by ignoring complaints and failing to fix issues. Because of the experience I will never pay more than $400 for a phone ever again. As it happens this one was just over $400 but Google is screwing their customers big time by charging Iphone-like prices for it’s replacement the Pixel. Well I could choose from the Nokia or Moto models this time, probably go for Moto because our family debacle over the reissued 3310 has convinced me Nokia is not much or any better than some of these other outfits.
So here are my pet hates about the Nexus 5X and why (apart from the huge price) I do not believe anyone should buy a Pixel as I doubt Android will be any better on it, it’s not going to be a different interface than on the Nexus. About the only good thing about the Nexus is getting the regular Android updates. But one day Google will stop sending them, or else the battery will go down, and then it’s time to throw the thing away and buy a new one. And my guess is that will happen by the end of this year.
Here are my pet hates about the Nexus 5X:
- The Do Not Disturb feature is extremely poorly designed as you have to click a Done button to save changes to the settings. If you forget to do this then the default is the timer doesn’t click in to turn the phone back on after a certain time. So, because of a poorly designed user interface that is different from every other part of the phone (and from other Google products like Chrome) I have on many occasions accidentally left the phone on silent for days at a time without realising it.
- there is no way (unlike my old Nokia dumbphones) that you can put in a catch all timer to turn off DND after a certain time frame, just in case you forget. I have a timer that puts on DND automatically at night so that only phone calls and alarms work. But if DND is already one, this doesn’t turn it off at the end of the timer period, even though it would normally if the DND function was previously off.
- On one occasion when the phone was set to total silence, an alarm went off on the clock and the phone sounded the alarm even though it was set to total silence.
- Sometimes even when you use the fingerprint sensor the phone makes you put the pin number in.
- If you restart the phone, when it comes back up, it will not start Android until you enter the Pin number. This is totally unlike every other phone I have ever had, where the phone comes back up to the lock screen. Again I have been caught out many times by this, not realising that Android had not started and therefore no calls or messages could be received.
- There is no SD card slot, so you are stuck with the 32 GB of internal memory. I would rather use that for apps and have an SD card for music and pictures so I don’t have to worry about using all the internal memory.
- Even with the sophistication of Android there can be some app that for some reason is hogging all the CPU usage to 100% even when the thing is allegedly on standby in your pocket, and with it sucking your battery dry in a matter of hours, this has caused the phone to go dead without warning on occasions.
- It uses a USB-C cable which means I had to buy extra cables and can’t rely on being able to connect a regular charger or computer cable to it.
- The battery drains very quickly if you are taking a lot of photos for example, there have been times I was using the camera to take photos of a whole lot of different things and the battery ran down really quickly so I had to switch to a separate camera.
- There are next to no accessories available for it. Although admittedly that is true of nearly any phone that isn’t an Iphone or a Galaxy S, and buying it from someone other than Vodafone doesn’t help.
- Contacts is a disaster, it keeps losing contacts especially new ones. I now expect to be doing a lot of contact editing in Gmail as I have many duplicates and old contacts as well as attempting to fix up this contact loss issue. It may be the contact sync on Thunderbird is causing some issues but it never created any problems before.
I have to admit that with the above and various glaring standout problems in that list that have made the phone unavailable for days at a time that I haven’t noticed, because at home I can use PCs to do most of the stuff I would use the phone for apart from calls or texts, it has been a less than happy experience with this phone and I would think twice about buying another one again for sure.
UPDATE: Issues 1 and 2 were overcome by installing an app (Auto Do Not Disturb) which makes the whole experience much smoother and easier. The contacts issue has not been completely resolved but I did discover that there was an all contacts view which makes the whole experience easier, although there doesn’t seem to be any way to make it the default. But at the moment I am coping with using the phone every day as I expect it to have some more years of life left in it yet.