While Huawei’s stab at a device bearing the Nexus badge has received a lot of praise for its fabulous camera and excellent build quality, it appears that the Nexus 6P also comes with its own host of problems.
Awhile back we reported on an issue where users discovered that the glass panel on the back of the Nexus 6P was spontaneously cracking, probably due to the phone’s metal body as metal is a substance that is very reactive to heat. Now, it seems that Google’s premium Nexus phone has encountered a new problem: spotty voice quality.
Several threads on the Google Product Forum and XDA-Developers have spawned with users complaining that people on the other end of their phone conversations couldn’t hear them very well. The problem appears to extend to the speakerphone as well.
Based on unofficial experimentation by Nexus 6P users, it appears to be a problem with the phone’s noise cancellation setup. Some users say that covering the rear microphone solves this issue while others discovered that this actually causes the problem.
For those who are unaware, most new smartphones use multiple microphones to supplement the main microphone to filter out surrounding noise, like wind, to improve the vocal clarity of phone calls. The root of the problem does seem to be related to this setup on the Nexus 6P as one of the users who posted on the Google forum indicated that a root-level build.prop modification solved the issue for him.
On the plus side, Google representatives have responded to the posts on the official forum, letting users know that they are looking into it though as of this moment there is no official statement on the cause of these problems.
Let’s hope that Google can fix this issue with a software update and not have to resort to recalling users’ shiny new Nexus 6P devices.
