• Details
• New device from end of September (used for one month; I’ve owned a N6 for a longer time, but due to a battery problem, Google swapped it for a brand new device; then I swapped to a Nexus 6P)
• Midnight Blue edition
• 64Gb
• 4G and stuff (side note: reception & signal is a million times better than a Nexus 5)
• You do of course receive the Moto TurboPower charger with it
• Bought via Google Play store (comes with warranty, support, etc), original phone bought July 2015, so plenty of warranty left
• No scratches or anything
• Comes with Android 6
• Selling because I own a Nexus 6P
• Price: offer
• 2dehands

Email: yeri+sale@tiete.be

Nexus 9

• Details
• White edition
• 16Gb
• No 3/4G
• bought via Amazon UK, comes with UK charger, in May 2015
• Comes with latest Android (6)
• Pretty much as new. Barely used to be honest.
• Selling because I don't see the point of owning a tablet (I've tried, a Nexus 7, and now this, but nah)
• Available: yesterday :)
• Price: offer

Nexus 6

• Details
• New device from end of September (just over a month old; I've owned a N6 for a longer time, but due to a battery problem, Google swapped it for a brand new device)
• Midnight Blue edition
• 64Gb
• 4G and stuff (side note: reception & signal is a million times better than a Nexus 5)
• You do of course receive the Moto TurboPower charger with it
• Bought via Google Play store (comes with warranty, support, etc), original phone bought July 2015, so plenty of warranty left
• No scratches or anything
• Comes with Android 6
• Selling because I want a Nexus 6P
• Available: when I receive my Nexus 6P (2? more weeks?)
• Price: offer

Mail me at: yeri+nexus @ tiete.be

I got these from China, including the Bezel (~$5 more expensive, and doesn’t make you have to fizzle around with a heat gun to detach the old LCD – but you’ll have to work from the backside, and remove all hardware components).

All in all changing the LCD was fairly easy and straight forward. Be careful removing the back pane (plastic), the small little feet break off easily. And as usual, be careful when removing the battery, it’s glued with two-faced tape, and you don’t want to damage it.

You do need to dismantle most of the phone, but if you pay attention it’s really easy to do. Swapping the LCD can be done in 20ish minutes while taking your time.

All I can say is: I WANT MY NEXUS 5 BAAAAAAAAACK.

So when N5 2015 is released, I’ll have a Nexus 6 for sale!

Why did I switch?

• GPS fucked
• Battery fucked (recharging 2-3x per day)

• big display & resolution is fun,
• it is smooth & fast,
• it does last the day,
• The OLED display light up is really fun (e-ink style), but I wonder how many battery it actually drains and it's usually too short to actually check what notification came in

• I can't type with one hand
• I almost dropped my phone a bazillion times attempting to type with one hand ... My right thumb doesn't reach letter A/Q buttons
• The back is curved, it's thus impossible to put the phone down on a table, and for example pulling down the notification list with only one hand (the phone starts spinning and moving)
• The latex-ish build of the Nexus 5 was really really really cool. The N6 is regular hard plastic.

I’ve come across an issue for the past 10 days that Waze kept losing its GPS fix. This meant:

• constantly switching between 0 and 120 (or whatever) km/h
• constantly zooming in & out on maps (dynamic zoom level depending on speed)
• being in a field/not on the road for most of the time, or stuck to a location of many minutes ago
• often & randomly losing GPS fix (ie middle of the highway without any buildings blocking the line of sight)
• I could do a 45 minute trip with Waze never getting a GPS fix
• not knowing road issues (accidents, traffic jams ahead, speed traps, etc)

• nothing changed (no new car window, didn't move my phone location in the car, etc)
• not moving (ie parked car) didn't really improve the GPS fix
• even left my phone with Waze on in the car for 30 minutes parked (got a fix, but later that evening when driving home it started to lose its GPS fix again)
• clear Waze cache
• uninstall Waze completely
• GPS Essentials showed a fix with 3 or more GPS satellites when Waze couldn't get a fix
• I was about to find a way to reset my GPS and/or clear its cache (???)

What I did notice, however, is that in Google Maps the arrow (clicking the pin point button twice or something) was pretty much showing the opposite direction of how the car was moving (thus driving backwards at ~120km/h). This made me think, as I know the GPSes in smartphones are quite cheap and aren’t always on (to save battery – my phone is always being charged in the car though) and the phone uses the accelerometer and other sensors to “guess” current path (or rather, path changes, ie taking a turn or slowing down/accelerating).

I then recalibrate my compass using this method with the free app GPS Essentials (compass tab). I noticed two things

• my compass was showing south as north
• calibrating it in my room (no known magnets here) gave a mixed result (it sometimes pointed north, and sometimes stopped doing so)
• moving around gave me a better calibration (more accurately pointing north)
• question? Is the compass chip fucked? broken? cheap ass crap?

• Waze almost instantly has a GPS fix
• Waze doesn't lose its GPS fix most of the time but ...
• Waze still occasionally loses its fix (but regain it after a second or two, three)

Edit: the problem comes back after ~1 day. Compass often stuck and doesn’t really point north. Ever. Calibrating sometimes helps, but it ends to get stuck again after a while. Nexus 5 chipset issue? Google Navigation works (way) better (it doesn’t remain at the same location for ~10 minutes), but it’s not very precise either (always lagging behind a a street or cross road or something). Perhaps Google Navigation is better at using GSM localisation and doesn’t use the compass to figure out so much?

Edit 2: It works “fairly ok” if I calibrate my compass just before driving. It still loses its fix a few times, but all in all it was acceptable.

I’ve seen in tools like GPS Status that north always points to the bottom right (“south east”) unless it finds a GPS fix. When it’s stuck “finding GPS location” my compass is entirely off and Waze is seeking a fix. When it has a GPS location Waze is fine.

Note that while it cannot find a GPS location, it does have a fix with 3+ GPS satellites.

So I’m not sure if it’s a compass issue, or a GPS issue, and what the definite difference is between both (a smartphone compass not being a magnetic compass if I understand correctly).

My Nexus 7 (1st generation, 2012 model, with 3G) is encrypted, so I guess that might also slow everything further down.

Three things I did to solve the lagginess:

• Wipe cache (howto),
• Clear space (I had some movies left on it, deleted a few big files and it seemed to instantly pay off),
• For some odd reason turning off WiFi optimalisation (advanced settings of WiFi) seemed to have the biggest impact on speed.

I’ve now done a complete wipe again, but have not encrypted the storage (and removed more useless apps). And it is noticeably less laggy.

Edit (8/2/2014): It’s actually very smooth again, I can run and use the tablet in a decent way. Encryption on Nexus 7 (v1) is a no go.

It worked and booted, but the battery got drained in ~8 hours (100% to 0%). And it felt a tiny bit warm on the cover, just above the battery (battery area was normal). Especially in my pocket it would get quite warm.

At 0% it wouldn’t turn off though (but it did anyway after about half an hour of being at 0%).

I was hoping that entirely draining the battery a few times would fix whatever it was, but after the 2nd drain, the red light of death popped up again, and I haven’t been able to boot since.

I’ll attempt to RMA it (I don’t know if they’ll notice I swapped the battery, as that would kind of void my warranty… Well done, LG, well done).

Should probably clean the display before taking a picture next time. ;)

Edit:

I've read on XDA-Developers this might be a product error. My girlfriend also has a Nexus 4 (about 3 months old, mine was 5 months), and that one hasn't caused any problems (although, it seems less smooth, and the battery is drained quicker, than mine).

I'd generally suggest, if you have a red light of death (and it's not flashing) to just RMA it. Not sure if I'll ever see my N4 again. :(

I had about 60% of battery left when I turned on the GPS. I tend to recharge my battery every night. It’s times like these I usually just use the GPS without using the car charger. I don’t mind my phone being at 10 or 20% when I arrive home, late at night, as it will be charged overnight anyway.

Almost home, the notification of 14% battery left popped up; I dismissed it as I had 10 more minutes to go. About 5 minutes after that, my phone suddenly switched off. Like, just, suddenly black. No shutdown or anything. It caught my attention, but I left it at that.

Finally home, I quickly unpacked some stuff, checks some mails, etc, and about an hour later I headed to bed.

That’s when I took my phone and plugged it into the charger and a red led popped up. I had never seen this one before.

From there on, I was unable to turn on my phone (my entirely drained Nexus 7 has the same behaviour, it requires being plugged in for 10ish minutes before booting up). I decided to let it charge 10 minutes. Nothing. Hitting power button didn’t change a thing.

As my Roomba seemed to have had a fight with the charger cables under the bed, I thought it might have half ripped the cable or something, so I tried a USB cable and a PC: same. Another charge: same.

Fair enough, I left it charging for the right. Waking up (yes, these things kind of keep me awake – or rather, wake me up) several times during the night, I tried turning it on… but alas. And still a constant red light turned on.

I just had the latest 4.3 bis update (the 7 or 9 Mb update) like 24 or 48 hours before. And I don’t think I had rebooted the device since. Was this causing it?

I started Googling, got in touch with my Amazon.de seller (as it’s ridiculously expensive in Belgium, and I think when I got it, it wasn’t officially for sale here yet) and bought Skype credit (yep, didn’t have a backup phone) to call Google Play support.

Amazon told me to try to do it via Google, or it will take a “very long time” to RMA it.

Google told me to do it via Amazon as it wasn’t bought via the Play store (and send me a troubleshooter to try to “get it out of deep sleep” – but that didn’t work).

I tried several steps, including the hard reset (volume up + power for 60 seconds), but nothing helped.

As it was still under warranty, I didn’t want to really mess up too much, but I couldn’t imagine having to miss this device for another day, let alone weeks…

Drove to my parents to get a backup phone, and there we opened the device (with those odd you-are-not-supposed-to-open-this screws) and, as one post stated on XDA-dev, to unplug the battery.

The multimeter showed 0 volt on the battery (but the connector was so small we weren’t sure it quite touched the copper.

However, reconnected the battery cable and inserted the USB charger… And the screen lit up, a charging icon popped up, and no red light of death. Yay.

Let it charge for ~3 hours (the battery felt warm, but not sure if it was anomalous) and so far so good. We’ll see tomorrow whether it drains faster than usual.

Some people pointed out a product issue, either causing the battery to overdrain (which is bad) or to be too strict on it (and refusing to recharge when it’s quite safe to do so). But the battery itself could also be dying.

I have a phone mount on my dashboard, and during the summer, in full sunlight, using my GPS, and the phone being black, I noticed the back side got quite … hot… So did this cause any permanent damage?

EDIT:

After being fully charged, I noticed a drop of about ~10% per 60 minutes. Which seemed a lot. I let it discharge overnight, and when I woke up it was indeed entirely dead again.

Attempting to recharged caused the red light of death again. Unplugging the battery (for 5 minutes) didn’t solve the problem anymore. It seems like it’s really dead.

We managed to read the voltage with a multimeter, stating 3,15V (instead of 3.8). Unsure whether it’s the battery or the charger of the phone… Unplugging the battery and attempting to charge also causes a red light of death.

I’ll get a new battery on Monday, and do my best to swap it (apparently they glued in the battery… sigh).

EDIT 2:

This.

My phone was running hotter and battery life was suddenly crappier than usual. But not really paying attention, until my cell provider (Proximus) texted me I was over my data consumption limit…

As it was the beginning of the month, so that was unusual. I checked data usage in settings, and noticed ~7Gb of traffic by mail app over WiFi and ~3Gb over mobile data.

The day after I noticed the unusual usage (and as I reached 4Gb traffic) Proximus cut off my data connection around 14h00 (leaving me stranded in the middle of Brussels, unable to use my GPS)…After phoning them I got my access back though.

Not sure where to look (some attachment problem? some fucked mail?) I cleared my inbox, and removed all mails from the folder that IMAP syncs on the Android… Still it was downloading continuously. I started to try to debug the IMAP servers, to see what commands my client was sending, but not finding anything interesting there, I started to wonder what to do…

Then I tried something I really didn’t want to try (yea, now that I think of it, I probably should’ve tried that first, and well, something to do with hating to change settings; and it took me 3 days or something before I tried this): I deleted the first of my 2 IMAP accounts, checked back after ~10 minutes to see if data consumption increased, and no, it hadn’t.

Yay. So now I knew the problem was one of the 2 accounts. I restored my mail account (and to my amazement it actually wasn’t that much settings I had to put back) and kept checking on the data. It didn’t increase anymore.

Soooo, oddly enough that solved the issue (remove and readd the IMAP account).

No idea what happened there.

My bill is 145ish euro’s because of this by the way.

4.2.1 came. It solved 5% of the lagginess.

However, it was still unbearably slow. With 4.1 I had an amazing phone, 4.2 made me want to shoot it.

But after 4ish weeks I found something out… Go to Settings and then Sync, click the Google account(s). Disable Google Currents syncing.

Enjoy. You might want to reboot to be sure, but for me this brought my phone back. It’s not perfect, it’s still a bit slowish, but it’s a lot better!