re: Nexus 6

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"lag" that is supposedly due to the default encryption

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That worried me, too, so one of the first things I did was unlock the bootloader and disable encryption using Wugfresh's Toolkit. So, I honestly can't tell you if the slower i/o would've actually been an issue, because it was so easy to just disable it. It's been that way ever since (bought mine in November), and it's working great.

Apparently, the recently released Android 5.1 drastically improves encrypted performance.



5.1 Encrypted:


5.1 Unencrypted:

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battery life

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There's so many variables here that anecdotal evidence of battery life is not really useful. People run different programs/widgets on their phones, use different brightness settings, varying cellular strength plays a role, and people still on 5.0.x might be running some xposed modules contributing battery drain. And of course there are all the custom ROMs and kernels and the countless GPU and CPU tweaks. I hate that people use someone else's Screen On Time as a benchmark comparison for their own. My screen time browsing the web is going to have a far less impact on battery than screen time playing Dead Trigger or Fruit Ninja. If I'm doing hardware-intensive stuff like that, I might get to 20% battery with 2 and a half hours of total screen on time, while tomorrow I might browse TD all day and hit 5-6 hrs of screen on time. Reviewers call this inconsistent, while to me it's just the way batteries work.

I have no idea how the N6's battery ranks among other Android phones, but the important thing to me is that it not only easily gets me through a typical day, but would also not be the end of the world if I forgot to charge it before going to bed. Basically, the battery life is good enough that it's not a concern that's been on my radar. It's also worth mentioning that I have an Exchange account on my phone set to push e-mails as soon as they hit the server, and I get a steady flow of work e-mails throughout the day, which impacts battery life. I do use Greenify, but it's mostly to stop Facebook service from running in the background and using 100mb of memory like an a-hole.

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slow camera.

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Without a doubt true. From what I've read, this seems to be typical of Android phones, and the camera speed is often compared to the much-faster iPhone (I can vouch for this, because even my iPhone 4s camera was faster.) However, it does take a damn good photo (arguably better than my 3-year-old sony point and shoot when comparing auto modes). Action shots are not a problem out in the sun, and still shots are not a problem in low light. But it's definitely not the ideal camera for trying to catch a still shot of your baby's first steps in typical indoor lighting. There are several camera apps out there with more sophisticated controls that improve the speed in various lighting conditions, but I find myself using the default Google camera app 99% of the time.