Well...
Here's my take so far:
Pros:
1. Fast! It has a nice responsiveness. I didn't realize how slow my old one had gotten.
2. Big screen welcome! At 6", it is not too terribly far from my 7" kindle. Keyboard size is the biggest benefit for me. I don't know if it is higher resolution or just bigger, but the screen looks better!
3. Great as phone! Sound is good and clear. I found if I rotate the phone at my ear, going more than 1.5 inches above or below my mouth really loses intelligibility at the other end, but if that helps filter out ambient noises, I'm on-board with it.
4. Recording sound quality. I went to a restaurant/pub for some live music and tried the video recorder. Of course the SQ sucks compared to pro recording, but my old Samsung 3 would have been saturated by the volume level and had lots of distortion. The Nexus managed it much better. As a friend said when I sent the clip to him, "surprisingly good!" (I am not mentioning video quality as it was dark and I wasn't going to turn on the light/flash).
5. Battery life. My usage has been light, but I am now at 41% and it has been 30 hours since I charged it.
6. Camera on back. It is excellent. Definitely better than my S3 (which was very good). Front camera seems about normal (maybe not as good as my S3).
Cons (note that I have not yet made time to determine if these are cons because of my own lack knowledge or due to design of the phone):
1) No recurring visual alert for communications. My previous Samsungs had a blue led that would flash periodically to notify me that I had missed a call/text/email. As far as I can tell this phone has no equivalent notification system. I turn it on and then can see the calls that came in while I was away. If I wasn't there when the call came in, I won't know about it unless I go find it. I like that my previous phones would alert me.
2) Size - Not a biggie for me. It still fits in my pocket, etc. However, It sticks farther out of the cubby in my dash and seems like there may be more potential for accidentally dropping it. Look for an indentation or texture on the back of any case you consider. For someone like my daughter who constantly texts, etc as she is walking around the house, I could see her turning and hitting the phone on a door jamb, knocking it out of her hand. One time I bought a thick watch and I was amazed at how many times I knocked the crap out of it after never even scratching my old watch!
3) No mini HDMI output. While I don't know of any phones that offer this, many tablets do. On the other hand you can "cast" it to a device if the device is wireless (sorry, I don't know if this is done via BT, NFC, or WiFi, etc).
4) No SD card storage. Based on my history, I will never use it - the phone I bought has 32GB built-in. However, there is always teh chance that a new application I like will be a memory hog.
5) Battery not intended to be replaced by consumer. Just "Why not?"
General comment:
These larger phones are referred to a phablets for a reason. It is getting into the tablet domain. Depending on what I am up to, I generally carry a 7" tablet with me. I suspect I often won't bother to grab the tablet now that I have this. In that sense (if the added size is not an issue) this works out to one hell of a deal as you are getting a mini-tablet with cellular reception in addition to a phone. 6" is border line of what I would consider large enough to watch a movie on.
Overall, I was surprised with the overall quality. I still have not read the reviews on it to better know the features, but I did read a few introductory captions saying it was equal or better to Apple's large phone.
I am pretty happy with it. If I find a solution to my Con #1, I will be delighted with it.
My phone was sold as brand new, but the factory seal was broken and remade with the transparent adhesive circles they use. I'm not sure if they opened it up to unlock it or if it was an open box return. I will not worry about it since the battery life seems to be fine.
