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Remember when mobile phones were monstrously-proportioned beasts that would bloat your trouser pocket in the most unsightly fashion? If so, the chances are you also experienced the subtle transition from gigantic talk-tech to truly pocket-sized alternatives - but the race to miniaturise mobile telecommunications was somewhat short-lived. The arrival of touchscreen smartphones has seen the pendulum swing violently back in the opposite direction; the iPhone kicked things off with a 3.5-inch display in 2007, but since then its Android and Windows Phone-based rivals have pushed the envelope dramatically, leading to the rise of the somewhat irksome portmanteau "Phablet".Samsung's 2011 Galaxy Note - equipped with what was then considered to be an absolutely ludicrous 5.3-inch screen - was the first mainstream device of this type, and the Note range has thus far sat alongside the mainline Galaxy S in Samsung's portfolio. However, Google isn't offering the general public the same option; the latest entry in its long-running Nexus range comes in one size and one size only: massive. Produced in conjunction with hardware partners such as HTC, Samsung, LG and - this year - Motorola, the Nexus lineage of handsets offers a pure and unsullied version of Google's Android OS, and it is via this family of phones that the company pushes the latest iterations of its software. That means if you're not a fan of big-screen phones yet you subscribe wholeheartedly to the Nexus program, you're going to have to suck it up and come to terms with owning what initially feels like an absurdly big handset - unless you're happy to sit it out and retain last year's Nexus 5, of course.
The Nexus 6's massive 5.96-inch AMOLED panel is arguably the phone's biggest talking point, offering a pixel density of 493ppi. A quad-core Snapdragon 805 chipset is responsible for moving all those lovely pixels around, and while this isn't cutting-edge anymore, the fact that it is accompanied by 3GB of RAM helps to keep things fast and smooth. As ever, there's no way to expand the storage on the handset, but this is the first Nexus phone to ditch the 16GB option and instead offer 32 and 64GB flavours.
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