TechCrunch went hands-on with Google’s newest smartphone, the Nexus 6, and took some time to compare it to the iPhone 6 Plus. In the photo above, you’ll see that the two phones share near identical dimensions, though the Nexus still manages to pack a larger 6.22-inch display space into the same body.
The Nexus is actually a bit bigger than it looks in the photo, though the perspective makes it a little hard to tell. When compared spec-for-spec, the Nexus comes in at 6mm taller, 5mm wider, and 3mm thicker than the iPhone. It’s not a huge difference, but the Nexus display is still noticeably bigger than the iPhone 5.5-inch screen. How?
The big difference here lies in the space just below the display. On the Nexus there’s a thin bezel and nothing more thanks to Android’s software home, back, and menu buttons. This allows the screen to stretch all the way to the bottom of the case. The iPhone, however, has to house the home button below the display. This is Google’s advantage.
But there’s another side to this: notice is that the home screen dock on both phones ends up about the same distance from the bottom of the handset. Both hardware and software buttons take up similar amounts of room, but the hardware button can serve double duty by functioning as a fingerprint sensor. This is Apple’s advantage.
Both phones have a similar amount of space dedicated to the same function, but one cleverly incorporates an additional feature (Touch ID) into the hardware while the other uses the space to juice the display size specification. Whether consumers will prefer one over the other will be up to them, but I’m not convinced Google’s “bigger” display is really that much of an advantage at this point.
