Maybe "popularity" is the wrong word, but lately I have been seeing several of my Facebook friends mention the Nexus 5, and anyone that owns the thing absolutely loves it. In my case, the only other Android phones I had owned in the past were the Motorola Droid X and Droid Bionic. I've never owned a Samsung, so I don't know how it stacks up. The Droid X was fun because it was my first touch screen smart phone, and then the Droid Bionic was a big step up from there; however, they were both pretty clunky and slow. They would hesitate, freeze, and crash on a regular basis. Having the "pure Android" experience on my Nexus devices has been a great experience. My Droid Bionic had LTE (when it worked) which allowed it to download pretty quickly, especially with Verizon's network. When I switched to the Nexus 4 it was really nice to get rid of Motorola's clunky additions to the OS, including apps that couldn't be removed. Like Blockbuster. They went out of business and I still couldn't uninstall their stupid app! Despite the data connection on the Nexus 4 being limited to HSPA+, the phone was an overall better performer than the Droid Bionic. Now that I have a Nexus 5 and access to LTE once again, it's been even nicer. Plus the CPU in the N5 is even faster than that of N4.
Of course the lighter design of KitKat is probably helping with all of this. I'd be curious to know if running KitKat on a Droid Bionic would have improved it's speed. The Motorola website shows they are not going beyond JellyBean 4.1.2, which is the update I received before I sold mine. Therefore we'll probably never know. It seems like most of the ROM's that can be installed are buggy, so that would make an apples to apples comparison pretty difficult to do.
Another Nexus exclusive is the Photosphere function on the camera. This is supposed to be part of the OS, but apparently other Android phones only include panorama mode. Last spring I went to Europe, right before I bought my Nexus 4. It would have been really fun to take pictures in Amsterdam and Cologne with the Photosphere setting. The panoramas I took were pretty cool, but getting a Photosphere picture from inside of a cathedral would have been amazing!
The biggest advantage of the Nexus phones is the price. Getting a blazing fast phone for $400 without a contract is a phenomenal deal. Google is really doing everyone a solid, especially people who break their phone before the contract is done and don't want to be stuck with it for months (or years).
If you have stumbled onto my blog because you are thinking about a Nexus phone, I say go for it. But if you do order the Nexus 5 specifically, I recommend that you also order a cheap case from eBay because the Nexus 5 is slippery and I dropped mine several times during my first week of ownership. It's only $400, but it's still $400 that I don't want to have to spend twice!
