Google Nexus 5 with Android 4.4 is Now Official

The wait is over. Google has finally made the Nexus 5 official. While we’re excited about the announcement, we can’t say the same about the specs as most of the details about the Nexus 5 have been leaked to death but anyway here’s the lowdown.

Manufactured by LG, the Nexus 5 features a 4.95-inch 1080p display with Gorilla Glass 3, a 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 processor and 2GB of RAM. In terms of cameras, you get a 1.3MP front shooter and 8MP at the rear with optical image stabilisation. Google have also packed in wireless charging capabilities, LTE, NFC and a 2,300mAh battery. The one thing that we don’t like, the Nexus 5 forgoes the all-glass construction of its predecessor, the Nexus 4, in favour of a plastic back panel.

And of course the Nexus 5 is powered by Google’s latest and greatest Android version to date — 4.4 KitKat. Google engineers have designed KitKat so that it can run on the most basic of devices with as little as 512MB of RAM. With KitKat, the operating system’s memory footprint has been reduced considerably by removing unnecessary background services and reducing the memory consumption of features that you use all the time. RAM is usually one of the most expensive parts of a smartphone and by allowing its latest version of Android to run with less RAM, Google is opening up possibilities for manufacturers to expand their low-end market offerings with new features.

The Nexus 5 retails for US$349 for the 16GB version and for US$399 you can get 32GB of on board storage. Closer to home, we know that the Nexus 5 will be available in Malaysia but as of now there’s no official word on when that will be.

More images and promo video of the Nexus 5 after the break