I am going to start by saying it is a low priced phone, priced at the lower points of its spec sheet versus the competition, but it does have sacrifices.

When I look at a phone, apart from its user experience, it needs to take a decent photo and have above average sound from its loudspeaker and also from the headphone jack. It also must look like I spent several hundred pounds on it. The iPhone achieves this hands down. It also must have apps and services to enhance the user experience. Again, the iPhone achieves this with ease. So along comes Google, and launches the Nexus 5.

And the first statement from anyone’s mouth is it so cheap and such great value. It has a 5 inch 1080p screen, 2gb ram etc etc. So what if it has the latest and greatest. What are the benefits is what matters. I’m not saying Google hasn’t achieved a great mid market phone that more people can afford, since they have. But if you look overseas to China, other companies are producing android phones with similar hardware specs and at similar or lower price points. What they are not providing is android 4.4 and future upgrades instantly. So the difference between a £299 Nexus 5 and £500 iPhone looks massive on paper. But let’s not kid ourselves. The iPhone looks more upmarket, looks more stylish and has a better camera and sound quality. It like driving a Fiat to work or a Ferrari. Both will get you from A to B, but one might put a bigger smile on your face.

So are you the Fiat or the Ferrari?

But going back to the Nexus 5. This is Google’s answer to the current mid priced phones. It also makes companies that sell higher price phones be on guard as to what they might need to do next to outshine Google’s £299 smartphone. If all you do is share photos to social media websites, then the Nexus 5 camera is perfect. And again makes it a tough one to ignore.

Google released the Nexus 5 via its own Play Store for a low price of £299 for the 16gb and £339 for the 32gb model. The 8mp camera with optical image stabilisation has been heavily promoted along with Google Now and Google Search being tightly integrated into the handset.

Over the weekend there has been plenty written, tweeted and camera samples posted. It seems that the whole phone is now one large Google Search machine. This is great if you like Google and being honest when integrated into Google Now becomes an interesting proposition. The camera whilst not being super awesome is still above average and for the majority of people will be fine.

If I hadn’t just bought an iPhone 5S and iPad Air and didn’t have close friends and family also on iOS, I would buy the Nexus 5 without blinking an eye. It represents good value and backed up by Google’s services and excellent voice search, search, Google+ photo enhancements and more.

Google is now selling the Nexus 5 16gb for £299 and the 32gb for £339 in the UK Play Store.

The specs are as leaked –

-Android™ 4.4 (KitKat®)
-Screen 4.95″ 1920×1080 display (445 ppi), Full HD IPS ,Corning® Gorilla® Glass 3
-Camera 1.3MP front facing, 8MP rear facing with Optical Image Stabilization
-Size, 69.17 x 137.84 x 8.59 mm
-Weight 4.59 oz (130 g)
-Battery 2,300 mAH
-Talk time up to 17 hours*, Standby time up to 300 hours*, Internet time up to 8.5 hours on Wi-Fi, up to 7 hours on LTE*
Wireless Charging built-in
Audio Output
Built-in speaker
3.5mm stereo audio connector
CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon™ 800, 2.3GHz GPU Adreno 330, 450MHz

There are some early first impressions published over the internet and the verdict so far it is not on par with the build quality of the iPhone 5S or HTC One. It is plasticly, the camera is not as good as it looks on paper. It has an aperture of f/2.5 which is not cutting edge sadly. As a comparison the HTC One is f/2.0, Samsung S4 f/2.4 and the iPhone 5S f/2.2.

But it does represent a lot of phone for your money. You could buy this phone outright and then get a sim only contract.

So who is looking forward to theirs being delivered?

The Nexus 5 will be released later but the above image was copied from Sprint’s website after it was shown by accident and subsequently removed.

So next question. Are you getting one?

Over the weekend, Twitter account evleaks leaked the latest photo render of the new Nexus 5.

With all these leaks of the device, it is now only a matter of 3 days before it is officially available from the Google Play store.

Above is a high quality press render of the Nexus 5 which is soon to be announced by Google. No surprises on the hardware front, but details of the full package on offer cannot come quick enough.

Update – Google by accident put the N5 up on the Play Store. $349 for the 16gb version. Looks like a bargain already.

This is rather amusing. The Google android 4.3 camera app offered a new interface as shown below.

Look carefully at the last icon on the right which switches between front and rear cameras.

Yep, it is the Nexus 5 image and it’s been there all the time!