My table tennis racket sized phone

I upgraded my Nexus 5 to a Nexus 6 the other day. It is a biiiig phone, and just to show you how big I made a little picture showing all my Android phones so far using the correct relative sizes. It certainly isn’t very far away from a table tennis racket in size now. My Android track record so far goes like this: HTC Magic, HTC Desire HD, Nexus 4, Nexus 5 and now Nexus 6.

my-androids

As shown, this latest step is probably the biggest relative size change in a single go. If the next step would be as big, imagine the size that would require! (While you think about that, I’ve already done the math: the 6 is 159.3 mm tall, 15.5% taller than the 5’s’ 137.9mm, so adding 15.5% to the Nexus 6 ends up at 184 – only 16 mm shorter than a Nexus 7 in portrait mode… I don’t think I could handle that!)

After the initial size shock, I’m enjoying the large size. It is a bit of a clunker to cram down into my left front-side jeans pocket where I’m used to carry around my device. It is still doable, but not as easy as before and it easily get uncomfortable when sitting down. I guess I need to sit less or change my habit somehow.

This largest phone ever ironically switched to the smallest SIM card size so my micro-SIM had to be replaced with a nano-SIM.

Borked upgrade procedure

Not a single non-Google app got installed in my new device in the process. I strongly suspect it was that “touch the back of another device to copy from” thing that broke it because it didn’t work at all – and when it failed, it did not offer me to restore a copy from backup which I later learned it does if I skip the touch-back step. I ended up manually re-installing my additional 100 or so apps…

My daughter then switched from her Nexus 4 to my (by then) clean-wiped 5.  For her, we skipped that broken back-touch process and she got a nice backup from the 4 restored onto the 5. But she got another nasty surprise: basically over half of her contacts were just gone when she opened the contacts app on the 5, so we had to manually go through the contact list on the old device and re-add them into the new one. The way we did (not even do) it in the 90s…

The Android device installation (and data transfer) process is not perfect yet. Although my brother says he did his two upgrades perfectly smoothly…

4 thoughts on “My table tennis racket sized phone”

  1. my phone collection went from 3in, to 4, 5, then now back to 4.
    those 5+ inches are just too big to carry and use when you got a laptop for serious stuff imo. they’re transportable but not really portable.

  2. These restore mechanisms always seem to work best for technophobes. Maybe your brother is one? 😉

  3. When I’ve experienced missing entries in Contacts in the past, the reason has always been that those had been assigned to a different account on the original phone (some phones actually allow you to assign them to a non-backed-up local account too – sort of like putting them on the SIM-card in the 90ies way). This should be indicated in a better way, IMHO.

  4. Interesting that you’re able to fit the Nexus 6 into your pocket. I’m aiming for the Samsung Note 4 which is a little more compact and I’m a little concerned about the pocketability there too.

    Re: the upgrade process. I find it a little annoying to be honest that Google backs up and restores 1) just some of the apps and 2) not the actual app data. If there are privacy concerns, they should at least make this possible to opt into temporarily when switching phones!

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