Google Pixel 4 and 4 XL review: Android refined, but not perfected By Engadget

This is the pixel for, and the pixel for, Excel, and if they look familiar, it's probably because they've been leased more than maybe any other phones in recent memory and as usual, they run clean Bills of Android and have some really great cameras don't be fooled, though. These pixels are proof that it's not just business as usual and Mountain View as Google laid out during its big hardware launch event. It tried to build a more actively helpful kind of smartphone one that can respond to your voice, commands more quickly, one that doesn't require you to pick it up to use all the time, because God knows we all have other stuff to deal with we'll get to that. Later, though, it almost doesn't matter how helpful a phone can be if the basics aren't taken care of. So let's start there. As always, these pixels share a common foundation.

They both use this snapdragon 855 chipsets with 6 gigs of RAM. They both come with either 64 or 128 gigs of internal storage. Furthermore, they both were an Android 10 plus the same handful of pixel exclusive features. Furthermore, they both have the same 12 mega pixel wide and 16 megapixel telephoto cameras around back and the same 8 megapixel, selfie, camera out front, I've already belabored the point you get it they're, basically the same phone. The only differences here are pretty obvious: their batteries and their screens the standard pixel for uses a 5.7 inch, Sleds screen running yet Full HD plus. While the XL uses a bigger 6.3 display of running you get a quad HD, plus they look better than usual this year too, but not because the screens are any more vivid than the last one. It's partially because of a system called ambient EQ that Tunes the color temperature of the screen, depending on the kind of light you're standing in, but it is mostly because of Google's smooth display system which temporarily ramps up the refresh rate from 60 to 90 Hertz.

When things are happening on screen. Let's say: you're scrolling through my very long pixel for review on a pixel for death screen buzzing by on the screen will look noticeably smooth other devices ditto for when you're playing certain games. If you really wanted to you could force these phones to run it 90 Hertz, all the time for buttery, smooth action across the board, but hey that's a developer option and B. It will definitely eat into your battery life, which is not great we'll get to that later. There are a few design flourishes, you're bound to notice like the square camera hump on their backs or the pops of color on these power buttons.

But let me direct your attention to one of the most important, the pixels for head. Not everyone will like it, but for me, it beats having a deep and frankly deeply Album. Not more importantly, though, this big forehead is a big deal. Next to the eight megapixel front, facing camera, there's a series of near infrared emitters and cameras for the pixels new face on lock, which Google says is the fastest you're likely to find and yeah. It is pretty fast it's on par with the incredibly fast face on Lux you get on the iPhone 11 and since the pixel doesn't require an intermediary step by swiping up on your screen, you can get to your stuff much faster.

Here is my problem, though your eyes don't actually need to be open for the feature to work. That does mean that pixels face unlock is incredibly fast, but it's not hard to dream up some problematic scenarios. If you have a curious kid or a partner, they could unlock your phone with your sleeping face and start digging through your apps or god forbid. If someone gets arrested, the authorities to just hold the phone in front of their face to get into their data, all it takes is a split second. These kinds of superfast, not super, secure approaches to unlocking aren't new, but the problem is photos leaked before that pixel on show that Google was working on a feature that required your eyes to be open for face online to work, but it's not present in my or anyone else's review devices.

It proves that Google is at least aware of the issue and has already started to try and fix it, but the company needs to ship that fixed now. Here's hoping they fix some other issues along the way. My colleague shrilling lo, has also been testing the pixel for, because she's set up face, unlock with makeup on. She then couldn't use the feature when she wasn't wearing makeup and when she set up face like again with her makeup off, you guessed it. The phone wouldn't unlock with her makeup on I haven't had anything like this happened to me, but that sounds like very bad news.

The pixels' forehead is also home to a shockingly tiny sold radar array. The hardware that makes Google's emotion sense possible. Here's how it works thanks to a lot of training data, that radar can see your hand in front of the screen and translate your emotions into actions on your pixel. If you want to change tracks and Spotify just swipe your hand in front of the screen, if you're like me- and you need your phones alarm to just shut up a little in the morning, you can snooze it by waving your hand over the pixels face. This isn't a new idea.

Honestly LG did something very similar with its flagship g8 earlier this year, but Google's approach here feels less arcane. You don't have to hold your hand a certain way or remember any intricate gestures. All motion sense seems to recognize right now or when your hand is close to the phone and simple quick flicks as long as you're within about a foot of that sold radar, the whole thing mostly just works. What struck me after using motion sense for a while is that it feels remarkably natural, but it does really need some fine-tuning. Most of the time it took only one attempt to skip through tracks, but it occasionally took a couple because motion sense, seemingly couldn't tell my hand from anything else around it.

Things got a little better once I realized that solely seems to be better at recognizing. My hand when my fingers were spread apart, but enough misses happened across the board. That I never really felt like I could rely on motion sense fully, even though I wanted to the other thing. To keep in mind is that for now you just cannot do much with motion sense. It's mostly just the music controls and the alarm stuff I mentioned earlier.

I will say: Google did work with companies like Pok?mon and us too, for some cutesy games and demos, but none of it really uses motion sense and any new or exciting ways. In fairness, it is very early days from motion, sense, and I've gotten the impression from conversations with Google execs that the company is more concerned about the long game here it pushed it out the door, and it will improve it at some point. Of course, there is more than one way to interact with your phone without actually touching it. Google's assistant got a big upgrade on the pixel force. It runs noticeably faster than on last year's models, because Google managed to shrink some of its massive speech, recognition and understanding models, so they fit on the device.

Not only does that mean it's quicker, it also means the voice clips that the assistant interprets don't need to be shipped off to a data somewhere. It all stays on your phone. Really. The best thing about this upgraded assistant experience is the redesign. That means it's a little less obtrusive when you're actually talking to it and the ability for it to handle sort of contextually irrelevant questions.

So if you're looking at YouTube, you can just say show me On, Ape tit videos, because I am team BA for life. The rest of the pixel experience is centered around Android 10 and the interesting little additions Google made to it for a closer look at what Android 10 offers. You should really check out our full review. I'm, just going to dig into what's different here. Among other things, you have more control over how Android 10 looks right out-of-the-box thanks to some new style controls.

Personally, I prefer the classic pixel look, but if you're the kind of person we'll have to change up your fonts, your icons in the system, trainer accent colors, you will have some interesting choices to play with the live, caption tool. Google also demoed back at I/o, is here too and guys I love it long story short. It creates instant subtitles for whatever video podcast or audio recording you're. Listening to you, and since this is school we're talking about here, the captions tend to be more or less right on the money. It doesn't seem to work for music, though so, if you're trying to decipher some incomprehensible lyrics, I'm.

Sorry you're just on your own Google use the same on device speech, recognition that powers live captions to build a new recorder, app that provides on-the-fly transcripts for your story, conversations, which is great if you were like me in college and just fell asleep in lectures, but still needed that information I've been using an app called otter that largely works. The same way for a while, now and Google's transcriptions do seem more thorough and more accurate I just wish it could identify individual speakers and flag. What they're saying in the transcript all the software wouldn't count for much if the phone ran like a dog, but that is thankfully not the case here due mostly to its high-end chipset, and that clean software, the pixel for and for Excel, run remarkably well in the days since I've started using them. As my daily drivers, I haven't, noticed any lag while multitasking and getting stuff done and there's plenty of power here, even for pretty serious gaming. It's not as crazy powerful as something like Asus is our OG phone ?, but for Google, pure power was never the point.

What the pixel fours offer is well in line with the rest of this year's premium. Smartphones, plus, it has great software to add value. The batteries are a different story for the pixel for I sell Google went with a 3700 William hour battery, which has generally been enough to get me through a full workday plus most of an evening out without much fuss. On days when I didn't actually use the phone that much I found that it would still be alive the next morning, but only just I was expecting the 4 XL to last longer than that, but I have to suspect that motion sense and the always-on display and the smooth display stuff all really took their toll here. Since all of that stuff is in the smaller pixel 4 -.

It's unfortunately, no surprise that it's battery life is its pretty bad I, often struggle to get it through a single day with consistent use without needing some kind of trip to a power outlet. As these batteries' longevity starts to naturally degrade over time. I suspect some people will end up regretting their decisions to buy these things. If there is one reason you should consider buying a pixel, 4 or 4 XL anyway, it is the camera setup. Google has proven that you can get tremendous photos out of just one camera, but this year we have two a twelve point: two megapixel wide sensor with an F 1.7 aperture and dual pixel phase, detect autofocus and a 16 megapixel telephoto sensor. Honestly, I would have preferred an ultra-wide camera instead of the telephoto but whatever, and just about every way that matters that pixel 4 improves on what Google achieved, with it's already great pixel freeze when you're shooting with that main camera, there is more detail to be found.

Exposure is handled better, so brightly lit spots, aren't blown out and even colors feel just a little more impactful. A little more sumptuous low-light performance is generally really. Nice too, though, I have to say the way that pixel processes, its photos, means, and we just captured in the dark, sometimes look more blue than they really should, it's kind of weird, with just a few exceptions. Those results are great when you're sure you in that 2 times, telephoto camera, the results are obviously nicer than what you'd get with the pixel 3 software zoom. But to me, it's still, the weaker of the two cameras I, sometimes notice a significant shift in white balance when switching from the wide camera to this one, and even though it shoots at a higher resolution, the results do kind of come at fuzzy, sometimes in anything, but the best lid situations.

If nothing else, though it's a good team player, it does a solid job, helping the main camera take really striking, portraits and ensures that those super resume photos look better than they would have otherwise done those full-on eight times zoom the photos look good enough to hang on a wall, no I mean probably not, but they'll do in a pinch when you absolutely can't get any closer to your subject. Google also added a few new creature comforts care like live HDR+, which gives you a real-time preview of what your photos will look like after they've been processed and to expose your control slider. So you can more easily give your photos, the tone you're looking for oh and about that new Castro photography stuff in the nitrite mode. Well, look it's really hard to test a feature like this. When you live in New York, but I'm, pretty proud of the results that Pixar produced just take a look.

Nitrite is still a great option, even when you're not taking photos of the stars, but there are more sample photos and impressions in my full written review, which you should definitely read, but I will leave you with this. Apart from the rare quirk or to the pixel. Forest cameras are easily my favorite out of all the Android phones, I've tested this year, but it faces some incredible competition in the form of the iPhone 11 Pro Apple has improved by leaps and bounds. This year to the point where even I was kind of shocked in most of my test shots, the 11pro did a better job of capturing detail. On the other hand, the pixel forest photos generally had deeper more appealing colors, though there were a little less true-to-life.

The camera rivalry between these companies has never been fiercer and, as always, I think, which of these cameras are ultimately better kind of boils down to what you like. As for me, I have been going back and forth all week at this moment. I prefer the flexibility and the clean look of the iPhone 11 Pro, but the pixel is bright there, and I keep bouncing back. I can't make up my mind at the end of it all. Google didn't get everything right with the pixel 4 in the 4 XL face unlock is in need of a fix that batteries are questionable and motion sense, as magical as it can feel.

Just doesn't do much yet, despite that, I can't help but love these phones with their clean software, and they're fantastic cameras in their ambition. The pixel forest feels like something of a transitional step between the status quo and the future of smartphones. They were bound to be a little awkward, but they get enough right. That I still think they're worth considering you.

Source : Engadget