Nexus 5 video appears, showing off Android 4.4

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With the sheer volume of hardware leaks for Google's Nexus 5, many Android fans are eager for Google to hurry up and announce the phone so we can all throw money at them. Instead of an order page we have another leak, only this time we've got a look at an early build of Android 4.4 as well.

There's been very little confirmed in the way of Google's OS update, which is surprising given how little there is left to show regarding the Nexus 5. It seems that the leak prevention team at Google has been working very hard to keep their next OS a secret, but now we've got a little bit of a clue about what is coming next.

The video leaked shows off a Nexus 5, but it's running a version of 4.4 from back before it was called KitKat. Despite the age of the build, and the lack of the Nexus logo on the backk of this pre-production model, there's still plenty to see in the video. Plus, having the screen on shows up the quality of the display, which appears to be quite nice.

There's very little wasted space in the launcher for Android 4.4, with the icons filling the screen and smoothly swiping from page to page. Google's continued efforts in making Android feel less jittery and laggy have clearly continued into KitKat. Every app that this mystery user goes to in the video scrolls very nicely, which isn't surprising given the 2GB of RAM and the Snapdragon 800 processor under the hood, but it's clearly smoother than the current devices with that same or better hardware. There's also some simple design changes, like the off-white color for the clock, wireless radios at the top right of the OS, and a transparent navigation bar for the software button on the bottom of the UI.

Curiously missing from this video is the messaging app, which is used to send SMS and MMS on Android phones. The suspected reason for this is a deeper integration with Hangouts, which is expected to get support for these services in the next update. With the messaging app missing altogether it would almost force users to take part in Hangouts, even if they aren't already Google Talk users.

A new icon is on the homescreen as well, labeled GEL Stub. This could be an engineering test app, or some kind of internal testing system for wherever this phone came from, but sources at Android Police seem to think this is for an update to the Android launcher that will be dubbed Google Experience. This new launcher is expected to be deeply customizeable and will be installable on devices that aren't running the pure Android experience.

There's still no launch date for Android 4.4 or the Nexus 5, but our own sources have reported that the Google Play edition devices are also being prepped for the update already. It is expected that those devices will be updated within weeks of the official announcement, just like previous Nexus launches.

With each of these new leaks we find ourselves saying "well, it can't be long now," but we've really only got the rumors that the phone will be shipping by the end of the month to go on for that expectation. It's hard to imagine Google waiting too much longer to launch the phone, though.

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