Google Pixel XL - A Ruthless Review By ThioJoe

How's it going guys Theo Jo here and today, I've got the pixel phone XL. There has been so much talk about this phone recently, some websites even calling it the best Android phone in the market right now, but you know what I'm not so easily impressed, especially when Google decides to price this as one of the most expensive phones on the market and I did buy this phone with my own money. So it's not a sponsored video in any way. There's not going to be any bias here, so I'm going to do what I call a ruthless review I'm not going to hold anything back if something sucks I'm going to say it sucks, because I figure, if you want to spend $900 on a phone that thing better, be danged near perfect, and maybe it is I hope it is we'll find out. So the hype stops here. Let's get started.

First, I want to point out the different options for this phone there's: the smaller pixel and the larger pixel XL. Supposedly, the only difference is being screened, size screen resolution and battery size and for both you can choose between either 32 gigabytes or 128 gigabytes of memory for this review, I got a 32 gigabyte, pixel XL, although I will be talking about the smaller one as well. So why don't? We start off with the obvious what the phone looks like beginning with the screen. The screen size on the smaller pixel is 5.0 inches and a 1080p display, whereas the pixel XL is 5.5 inches and has a quad HD 2560 by 1440 display, and they're, both AMOLED, which is great because you get excellent black levels and viewing angles on the XL. The screen does look very sharp.1440P is a good resolution. That's about 534 pixels per inch very sharp.

However. The smaller pixel at 1080p only has a pixel density of 441 pixels per inch. That resolution is a real bummer and, quite frankly, unacceptable at this price point I mean even three years ago the Nexus 5 had a 1080p display and also considering that Google is really pushing VR with these phones.1080P is not going to cut it now. As for brightness, it's actually pretty good I think it's actually slightly brighter than my Galaxy S7, which is great and for color it's very vivid colors. The screen looks very nice.

It's not over saturated, though it seems like a good balance and if you want really accurate color, you could always go into the level for options and enable RGB color space mode, but that's another video entirely. Next, let's take a look at what is also on the front of the phone. You've got an 8 megapixel selfie camera, which, for a front-facing camera, is a great resolution. There are also no buttons on the front of the phone, because all the home buttons are software buttons as opposed to hardware. This is all going to come down to preference, but I actually prefer software buttons.

So I'm happy with that. Then, besides, the proximity sensor, there's not really anything else on the front to talk about, except, of course, the huge bezel at the bottom, which seems to be there for no apparent reason. Although I guess that's a design choice and also comes down to opinion on the right hand, side of the phone you've got a textured power button and below it is a volume rocker, and they feel like they're, a good positioning for your hand. On the left side, you have a NATO SIM tray, but no expandable, SD storage, slot for shame Google and on the bottom, there's a USB type-c port, which is awesome, no more fiddling around trying to orient the cable correctly to plug it in and there's also two speaker ports, except one of them, appears to be fake and only the left side seems to be functional. As for the headphone jack, for some reason, they put it at the top again, that's down to preference, but I would strongly prefer it at the bottom.

So, if you put in your pocket, everything comes out the same way, especially considering one of those speakers isn't even real. They could have definitely put that phone jack on the bottom. Moving on to the back things, get pretty interesting. We've got a twelve point: three megapixel camera with an aperture of f28, which I'm going to come back to in a second and the sensor. Pixel size for the camera is 1.5 5 microns, the bigger the camera pixel size. The more light can let in means better low-light performance, less noise, just better images overall and I- believe that's the largest camera sensor pixel size available right now, though, I'm not sure why they went through so much trouble to get larger, pixel sizes and then didn't go with a wider aperture like F 1.8, F 2.0 doesn't let in as much light so it kind of defeats the purpose of having those larger pixels. Now for autofocus, the camera uses phase detection and a laser autofocus sensor.

This means it's going to have crazy fast autofocus, though I'm going to get way more in depth on the camera later on in the review, so stay tuned for that also in the back, you've got the fingerprint sensor, but I'm not really sure why they didn't put it on the front on that huge bezel. The fingerprint sensor definitely isn't uncomfortable, but I think it just would have been better positioned on the front, because, if you think about it, when you're holding your phone, you almost always have your thumb at the bottom on the front anyway, and this would also allow you to use your fingerprint sensor when the phone is down on a table, though I will say that with it on the back, it makes it much easier to unlock your phone when you're, taking it out of your pocket. So I guess that's another personal preference. Now, let's get into the internals the battery on the XL is three thousand four hundred fifty William hours, pretty big, but not the biggest we've seen, for example, the Galaxy S7 Edge has about thirty-six hundred million power battery. However, I did find the battery life to be very good, which makes me happy even with the screen at full brightness.

It was easily able to last all day, and that was with several hours of screen on time, but the battery size on the regular pixel is another story and leaves much to be desired. It's only 27 70 William hours to me, that is an outright unacceptable battery size. This day and age, I expect any phone have at least 3000 William hours with more the better, especially at this premium price point I find a battery that small ridiculous. Now the one thing it does have going for it is. These phones seem to be very efficient, but still that does not mean that you can skimp on the battery for memory.

These phones both have 4 gigabytes. Certainly good fits right in with other smartphone flagships, and the processor is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 one. Now this is what I'm talking about it's currently Qualcomm top-of-the-line, Snapdragon CPU and one of the best CPUs you can get on an Android phone, and it certainly shows I'm going to get into that in a bit. Now, let's move on to the performance of the phone starting off with a camera, which is the same in both the pixel and the Excel. As expected, this phone takes really great pictures for a phone in really low light.

The noise actually isn't terrible and in practically no light like in this picture. Well, I'm surprised it can capture anything at all and by the way that light is not the flash, but rather the laser autofocus. However, when you enable the HDR plus feature it's a totally different story, I was very impressed. Let's compare that last photo in the bathroom now, with HDR+ enabled the difference is night and day now. Obviously, the picture still looks like trash, but it's much better than the first, which was totally destroyed by noise.

Take special note of the vent at the top. You can actually see the individual, grates and I cannot understate how little light there was in that room, I open the door, the tiniest crack, the fact that it can remove so much noise is frankly amazing, so the HDR+ is easily one of the best features on this phone. How it apparently works is as soon as you open the camera app. It starts rapidly taking pictures in the background and stores them in a type of offer, and when you go to take the picture, it captures the actual image and goes back and uses some of those automatically captured frames to gather more light information. This reduces noise, increases dynamic range and just makes the photo look much better.

In general, I've used this camera to capture other great photos of high dynamic range scenes, such as a sunset with a dark foreground, and it has a surprising amount of detail, and it has almost no distortion. Even in the furthest. Corners of the picture, I will say: I think the pixel phone has the best photo processing in any phone I've. Seen no contest now for autofocus, the pixel is very fast, it's not quite instant, but very fast. It seems like it takes a brief moment to calculate the focus and then locks on to it.

So it's still much faster than just contrast, autofocus, where it searches back and forth to get into focus. This is much faster. The only thing I don't like about this phone is the Google camera app. It gives you only the most basic controls and really the only manual control you have is for white balance, and even then it only gives you a few presets. There's no manual focus no manual exposure, no shutter speed, ISO, nothing for such an awesome camera.

It's a real shame: they don't give you more control over it. The final big feature, though, with this camera, is that Google has made it. So when you use this phone, you get unlimited. Google photo storage for your photos and videos and that's original quality. Even high resolution photos and 4k video, normally Google photos only allows you, unlimited storage, if you upload those images in reduced quality, but any images or videos you upload from a Google Pixel, do not count towards your quota and that is full quality and there's also a feature to free up space.

So if you're running out of storage, you can click that, and it will delete old photos off your phone, but keep them in Google photos. So you don't really have to worry about running out of space ever so. If you're, someone who takes a lot of photos and videos, this is certainly a huge feature and could make it worth it to get this phone alone. Now, as for video, I wish, I could say it was as good as the stills, but it's not. There are three different options for a resolution to capture video.

It's 4k, 1080p or 720p.4K is 30 frames a second and for 1080 and 720 you can do either 30 or 60. To me, the video quality actually seems pretty subpar, which is surprising. In moderate indoor lighting, there was a significant amount of noise. The 4k video quality actually holds up pretty well with the much higher resolution able to hold on to a lot more detail even with the noise. However, at the lower resolutions, it was clearly relying on some heavy noise reduction filters which dealt with the noise but also killed a lot of the detail in the video, and this was predictably worse at 60fps, because obviously you're getting half the amount of light into the sensor as at 30fps.

So if you have very good lighting conditions, you'll be fine, but otherwise I would recommend you're, always shooting in 4k. So you can get that extra bit rate extra detail in the video, though it's not all bad in terms of video, because there is one feature that I did not mention yet, and that is the fantastic video stabilization. This phone does not actually have optical image stabilization. Instead, it uses a gyroscope, so instead of using mechanisms inside the camera to stop the camera from moving, it actually just uses the gyroscope to record how the phone is moving. Then it uses that data to calculate how to undo the movement it experienced by manipulating the frames and I also suspect it uses some cropping and over sampling as well, either way it works great.

Here's a video without stabilization of me, literally just jumping up and down with a camera, and here it is with the stabilization, enabled yeah pretty good. So as for video, the image call is really not that great. Unless you have good lighting, though at least you don't have to worry about shaky-cam, which arguably would be worse next, let's talk about battery performance, as I mentioned before I'm very happy about the battery life on the pixel X out with the screen at full. Brightness I got about 4 hours of screen on time and that was using general everyday apps like email browsing the web, maybe a couple of games or two, and even in the most intensive apps it was nice to just not feel the need to worry about the battery running out, and this phone also has fast charging which Google claims to be able to get you seven hours of usage time with 15 minutes of charging, but I'm just going to say it that is BS Google you're, not fooling anyone. Maybe you could get seven hours out of 15 minutes of charging if you didn't turn on the screen at all during that time, but that's about it.

The battery life is good, but not that good. Now, from what I understand, the pixel does not actually use Qualcomm quick charge, 3.0, or at least they say so, even though it is supported by the Snapdragon 820 1 processor. Instead, they fast charge with the USB power delivery, which is part of the USB type-c standard, either way, though, the charging is great, I found it was able to charge about 16 percent in 15 minutes. So that's about 1% per minute, which considering the size of the battery, is very good now for the next segment. Of course, we need to talk about how it actually feels to use this phone.

What's the experience like overall, this phone feels very snappy I, don't remember its stuttering even once, and that's likely due to the fact, of course, of the powerful processor and stock Android 7.1, there's no bloatware and considering Google built this phone themselves. I expect they did a lot of optimizations that they couldn't before the entire phone is smooth responsive. It really just feels like this is how a phone is supposed to be and as a quick tip, I also like to go into the developer settings and speed up the animations, which makes it even more snappy. There are also a lot of other features in 7.1 that I appreciate. One, for example, is night mode which is similar to Apple's the night shift or the program flux.

What this does are removes blue light from the screen kind of shifts it orange, because blue light is known to keep you up at night and I love that its built-in. Now, because before you had to use these third-party apps and all they would do, is overlaid a red filter. It would just look so ugly, didn't even really work well now its built-in and is awesome though I do wish. You could control this strength of the effect like you can on iPhone, because I would just max it out. Another neat thing I, like is when the screen is off on the phone.

You can put your finger on the fingerprint sensor and, if it recognizes it, it will not only unlock the phone but also turn on the screen. So there's no need to press the power button, so I thought that was just really convenient and also makes it really easy to take out of your pocket and just instantly go and unlock the phone. Also, another commonly overlooked feature is that on the fingerprint sensor it lets you sample the same finger more than once. You might think. Well.

Who cares about that? Well in previous phones, you couldn't do this. If you tried to sample the same finger again, it would say you already sampled this finger, but the problem was that it's almost impossible to always get the entire finger covered. So there was always a part of your finger that if you use that against the sensor, it wouldn't pick it up, but now what you can do, for example, if the tip of your finger doesn't get recognized ever you can just add finger and add more samples of that finger in the parts that it's missing. This might not initially seem like a big feature, but it is. This basically means that you never have to worry about trying to position the finger correctly, because you can now make sure that your entire finger is sampled, even if you have to take more than one now next, of course, we can't forget to talk about Google Assistant, which is another flagship feature.

This is Google's answer to Apple Siri, and it claims to be able to use artificial intelligence that sounds cool and all, but I found that most of the best features. Don't seem to work yet, for example, if you ask it where your package is, it says it can't do that yet, and they said it would be able to control Phillips you and other smart home devices, but I guess they haven't implemented that feature yet either they're apparently adding more features, but who knows which ones or when right now it just seems to be able to do things. That would probably just make sense to look up yourself at the moment. It just kind of seems like glorified voice control, if you don't say something in the correct structure of the phrase or use a key word. It recognizes it probably won't know what the heck you're talking for basic functions, though it does work setting timers reminders playing music, asking the whether.

That sort of thing and I will say that the voice recognition is actually very good, but as for actually usefulness, it's got a long way to go. Also. If this is something you really want, you could just download the Google ALO app and use the assistance through that on really any phone. Of course, it probably won't be baked into the OS like it is on the pixel, but don't think that the Google Assistant is super exclusive to the pixel. However, one big thing I want to point out, and this won't apply to many people, but Google, Apps or G.

Suite accounts cannot fully integrate with Google Assistant unless you have a pixel phone, if you're on a G suite account- and you try to use Google Assistant through the all app you're going to notice that it refuses to link the accounts because G suite is not supported, but G suite accounts do appear to fully work with Google Assistant on the pixel phone. It can do stuff that it won't. Let you do through the all app again, that's not going to apply to many of you, but I'm sure there are some of you who are wondering about it all right now for the conclusion the gloves are coming off. Is this phone worth? It there's plenty to consider a lot of great features, but also some notable omissions and what I'll do is decide for each version of the phone's separately. First, let me just get this one out of the way.

I do not think the regular size. Pixel phone is worth it. That's specifically because of the frankly tiny battery size and low resolution screen I. Think if you're going to get a pixel phone, it only makes sense to get the Excel, but keep in mind it is a big phone. You might not like that with the regular sized pixel being $650 or 750 with the extra storage I.

Think if you want a phone that size at that price point, you can do better, go with a Galaxy S7 and that when you've got wireless charging, expandable storage, LED notification, light and water resistance, what I think is the pixel excel should have been priced where the pixel is, and the regular pixel should have been much cheaper now for the pixel excel. Is that worth it that one I think is justifiable, but certainly wouldn't call it a good deal so that one is probably not worth it either I'm going to get into? Why and you might disagree, it really only has a few good things going for it. First, you've got the big battery, but it's not the biggest we've seen on the market. At this price point it does have a great camera, a really great camera actually, and I would say that is its biggest advantage and don't forget about the awesome video stabilization. It's got stock Android 7.1 with no bloatware, it's a very responsive and snappy phone, and just great to use. As for Google Assistant, the only advantage I see here is that it's more integrated into the OS.

So why don't I think this is a good deal? Well, it's mostly because of what Google did not include and definitely could have. It has no wireless charging which is not difficult to implement these days, and it has no expandable storage either, and it's only IP 53 rated, which means it's dust protected, but not even dust tight and as for water protection, it only protects against light spraying water, which isn't really reassuring. So you can't expect this phone to survive any submersion in water or at least at any real depth. If these phones had more Hardware features, it would be a totally different story, but besides the camera, it seems bare-bones, there's really no killer. Features to justify the price.

To me, it seems like Google is clearly trying to squeeze out premium Apple like prices with a mostly average product. Now look if price doesn't matter to you, you can get this phone. You won't be disappointed, it's a good phone, it does what it says, and it does it well. But if you're someone who looks at the main features I talked about- and you don't really get excited by them- save your money because that's all you get there's nothing else, gonna! Surprise! You think you'd probably be more happy spending your money on a phone with more utility. If you had handed me this phone without telling me, the price I probably would have said yeah, it seems like a pretty good phone, but if you're paying upwards of $1,000 for a phone, do you want pretty good, not me so Google, you blew it and that's what I think so.

That concludes this review. I would love to hear you guys, thoughts on this I expect this may have been a little different from other reviews, but keep in mind. I wasn't just being critical for the sake of being critical. Furthermore, I actually thought these things. So, if you guys did like this, video definitely give it a thumbs up, so I know you enjoyed it.

I appreciate it. If you want to subscribe, I make new videos every Tuesday, Thursday Saturday three times a week, oftentimes more, and if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos here. You can click on these, even if you're on a phone, it's a new type of annotation. So thank you guys so much for watching. If you made it to this point, I'm looking forward to hearing from you down in the comment section, and I'll see you next time have a good one.

Source : ThioJoe