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What is difference between a nexus and non-nexus mobile phone?

C

chattingrahul

Lurker
What is difference between a nexus and non-nexus mobile phone? Please consider either SONY XPERIA Z1 OR HTC ONE as non-nexus device while comparing.
 
A Nexus is specified by Google and farmed out to whoever for manufacture, a non-Nexus isn't ;-)

I suspect the real question is about the firmware, in which case a Nexus is delivered with only a "vanilla" (plain, core) Android system plus normal Google apps. All others will have whatever the manufacturer decides to stick on top of the core Android system, often resulting in a completely different look and feel. There's no standard (apart from Nexus) as the modifications vary hugely from maker to maker.
 
A Nexus phone has pure Android on it. No skins, no carrier bloat. And it usually gets version updates before any branded phones do.

Does that make it better? That depends on how far you're going with your phone. Rooting and running apps on it? Probably not. There are faster phones than the current best Nexus. Digging into the kernel, writing ROMs and using the Linux portion of the phone as a Linux computer? Nexus is easier, because it doesn't have problems in that regard (like the current Samsung/AT&T/Verizon welding job).
 
John Bean said:
A Nexus is specified by Google and farmed out to whoever for manufacture, a non-Nexus isn't ;-)

I suspect the real question is about the firmware, in which case a Nexus is delivered with only a "vanilla" (plain, core) Android system plus normal Google apps. All others will have whatever the manufacturer decides to stick on top of the core Android system, often resulting in a completely different look and feel. There's no standard (apart from Nexus) as the modifications vary hugely from maker to maker.
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As you said, manufacturers change the look n feel of the device; do they disbale some of the core features of pure android which might be enable on Nexus?
 
chattingrahul said:
As you said, manufacturers change the look n feel of the device; do they disbale some of the core features of pure android which might be enable on Nexus?
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I know in the past they disabled Google Wallet's Tap to Pay feature. KitKat is slowly starting to change that.
 
jhawkkw said:
I know in the past they disabled Google Wallet's Tap to Pay feature. KitKat is slowly starting to change that.
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Could you please suggest any manufacturer who tweaks android very little in their mobile phones? Which non nexus device will give almost Vanilla (except UI tweaks) experience?
Could you please suggest some handset (with 2 GB ram) to buy which will be good looking, better camera and music?
 
Motorola Moto X is the closest I can think of though I'm not sure of the RAM
Another option is buying a high end phone and putting a custom rom on it
 
Check into Google Play Editions, available for some phones such as Galaxy S5, HTC One, HTC M8, etc. Not Nexus phones in the strict sense, but unlocked, vanilla Android and no bloatware. Very close to a Nexus.
 
Crashdamage said:
Check into Google Play Editions, available for some phones such as Galaxy S5, HTC One, HTC M8, etc. Not Nexus phones in the strict sense, but unlocked, vanilla Android and no bloatware. Very close to a Nexus.
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But IIRC only available in the USA? Not sure where the OP is based.

Of course where there is a Google Play edition you can probably get a custom ROM based on it (lots for the HTC One - don't know about the dual SIM version, which is a little different).
 
Hadron said:
But IIRC only available in the USA? Not sure where the OP is based.

Of course where there is a Google Play edition you can probably get a custom ROM based on it (lots for the HTC One - don't know about the dual SIM version, which is a little different).
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This is correct, US only. A quick good search of the HTC One model number given by the OP reveals it's the dual sim variant which would certainly be non-US.
 
jhawkkw said:
This is correct, US only. A quick good search of the HTC One model number given by the OP reveals it's the dual sim variant which would certainly be non-US.
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It's dual-SIM and dual-mode, CDMA & GSM. It's available here, and I'm sure it's primarily intended for Asia. Same for most dual-SIMs.
 
If the OP needs a dual SIM phone, he can't use a "Nexus" device. Mostly it's OEMs who add the infrastructure for dual SIM capability.

There MIGHT be custom ROMs for dual SIM phones, although a bit unlikely I'd think.
 
Nexus has a bunch of Google services and apps pre-installed. However, there are only a few Google services on non-nexus phones, like Xiaomi 2S.
 
PodoGelbert said:
Nexus has a bunch of Google services and apps pre-installed. However, there are only a few Google services on non-nexus phones, like Xiaomi 2S.
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Thats an exception rather than the norm, as a number of chinese handsets do not get the playstore or other services.

For most of the rest of the world, the nexus devices and non-nexus devices ship with the same google services
 
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