The new Google Nexus 5 has been out for about a month now and, like many others I suspect, I am wondering whether I should buy one. As usual, for me, it would be a sim-free purchase so I’d have to find the cash up front. That said though, the Nexus 5 is really cheap for what the phone offers. £340 (Google play store 23/11/13 with 2 weeks delivery) for a phone offering this level of tech is surely the biggest bargain going! It would be the cheapest premium smartphone I’ve ever bought. My current smartphone, the HTC One, is now about five months old. That’s not very old for most people but I’m a technologist. I always have to experience the cutting edge so now I’m wondering – which is the better phone of the two and should I swap?

One of the first things I look at is the OS. The Nexus 5 has Android 4.4 aka kitkat and the HTC One won’t receive an update to that OS until next January. Kitkat offers a new dock, a fresher appearance, more integrated Google Now experience, more accessible voice activations, and wireless charging. From what I’ve read the changes are quite subtle but impressive. The HTC One, of course, has HTC’s OS overlay, Sense version 5 which, I would say, is a benefit. However, I have owned plenty of previous Nexus phones with the stock Android experience and been perfectly happy so I am not too worried about losing Sense. I guess I’ll be able to test Kitkat pretty soon when the Nexus 7 is updated – check back here for an update when that happens.

So, what about the hardware? The first thing that I looked for when the specs were first released was, how big is it? It seems that, these days, smartphone manufacturers think that humans are evolving into beings with huge hands! They must think we all look like Kenny Everett! After using the HTC One all this time I’m used to a big phone but, surely, they won’t make them any bigger than that? Disappointment! The Nexus 5 is even bigger. Only a little bit bigger but bigger all the same (nearly half a millimeter taller and a full millimeter wider). It is thinner though, by nearly a full millimeter, that’s a bonus.

Kenny Everett (image from BBC News)

In terms of the screen, it is a bit bigger (5 inches compared to 4.7) which is good given the overall size of the phone. Both have exactly the same resolution which means the ppi is slightly lower on the Nexus 5 compared to the HTC One. I don’t expect that to make any difference whatsoever given that you can’t see individual pixels on the HTC One. Also, I don’t expect the difference between display technologies to make any real difference either (HTC One has an s-LCD 3 display whereas the Nexus 5 has an ips LCD one).

The camera is an important consideration for me because I never carry a dedicated camera anymore and haven’t done for two years. The HTC One’s camera is really very good and I don’t miss the fairly low pixel resolution. In a way, I almost now think that boosting the filesize by having more megapixels would be a negative thing. So, the Nexus 5 would need to provide considerably better picture quality than the HTC One and, from what I’ve been reading, that’s not the case. The Nexus 5 also sacrifices 1080p video shooting for 720p (I’m not sure if the huge filesizes created when shooting video in 1080p makes it worthwhile and so I stick to 720p on my HTC One) .

The processor power is surely a major benefit though. The Nexus 5 has a whopping 2.3GHz quad core Krait 400 processor at its disposal. The HTC One’s 1.7 GHz quad core Krait 300 never stutters anyway but I would expect this boost should be very welcome. But, is that at the expense of battery life I wonder?

Neither offer memory expansion via microsd card slots but both are available with 32GB of RAM built in. It’s always nice to have expandable storage but, if I’m honest, I never really miss it and my current phone doesn’t even have any music stored on it. I prefer, instead, to stream it from deezer or my squeezeserver.

So they’re both pretty much on par. I guess I need to pick one up and see if I get any fuzzy feelings from handling one! One other thing that might sway me though – I very much respect what PCPro magazine have to say and, in their latest issue, they report that the Nexus 5 has just knocked the HTC One off their A-list!

Do you have a Nexus 5 or HTC One and, if so, what do you think?