The Nexus 5 has a tough spot in the market. Thanks to its spec sheet, it will be compared to high-end phones from every other OEM. A 2.26Ghz Snapdragon 800 processor; 2GB of RAM; and a 5-inch, 1080p screen is certainly worthy of any company's flagship.

There's one part of the spec sheet that is definitely not comparable to a flagship phone, though: the price. At only $350 off contract, the Nexus 5 comes in at around half the cost of other high-end phones—an off contract iPhone 5S is $650, an HTC One is $600, a Galaxy S 4 is $640. It's almost hard to be critical of something that delivers so much value for the money.

The Nexus 5 is the first device to ship with Android 4.4 KitKat. KitKat integrates Google Now into the home screen, brings a Google Maps-powered dialer, and features some nice design refreshes all over the OS. There's so much KitKat stuff to talk about that we're going to have a separate review focusing just on the new OS. This review, however, will mostly focus on the Nexus 5 as a piece of hardware.