Nexus 5 Arrives in UK Priced at £229

This afternoon, Google finally announced the Nexus 5, the newest addition to its Nexus line of tablets and smartphones. The Nexus 5 will replace the Nexus 4 as Google's flagship Android smartphone. It's priced at $349 in the United States and is already on sale (actually, it's already sold out). So when will folks in the United Kingdom get the new Nexus?

Like in the U.S., the Nexus 5 is already on sale in the UK. Though it won't hit stores until tomorrow, it's available through Google's own Google Play store from today. Pricing starts at £229 for the 16 GB black model. According to Pocket-Lint, that's all that's currently available from Google Play in the UK.

Outside of Google Play, Carphone Warehouse will have the phone from tomorrow, November 1, where you can buy the phone SIM-free or on contract. Carphone will also be giving the first 1,000 people who order the phone with a 4G contract a free 15 GB Nexus 7 tablet. Three and O2 will also be stocking the phone, though it's not clear if they'll have it from tomorrow. EE has yet to confirm its Nexus 5 plans.

The Nexus 5 is an LG-made phone, and Google says it's the slimmest, fastest Nexus phone yet. It packs a 4.95-inch 1920 x 1080p full HD display (though Google is calling this a 5-inch phone), a quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU clocked at 2.3 GHz, support for 4G/LTE and dual band WiFi, wireless charging, a 2300 mAh battery, and an 8-megapixel camera with Optical Image Stabilization. There's also a 1.3-megapixel camera up front for video calling.

Of course, the big news is that the Nexus 5 will ship with Android 4.4, also known as KitKat. KitKat packs improvements to the phone application, as well as a new Hangouts app, a new camera shortcut on the lockscreen, support for third-party cloud storage in the Gallery application, and hands-free voice search. You can read more about KitKat here.

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