Pixel 4 hands-on: Google goes dual-camera By Engadget

I, don't know if it's fair to say, Google's, new, pixel, 4 and Forex are the most exciting, Android smartphones I've seen this year there has been a lot of really stiff competition, but I do have to give them credit for building devices that, in some very specific ways, try to redefine what pixels are capable of. Let's take a closer look, first off, we really need to quickly talk about this design. It's pretty utilitarian in the way that pixels generally are, but there are a couple changes here: the black model, if you happen to like that, one that comes solely in a sort of glossy piano black finish, the white and the orange actually feel matte on the back, no matter which version of the pixel you go for, though it's going to have this slightly redesigned plastic edge. That kind of feels a bit drippy or so I've never really had to worry about driving this, and even though I'm just kind of this is how hands-on, thanks guys she's get used to it. Now there are a couple of design changes here to keep in mind like the redesigned camera square on the back. But let's talk about the front.

First, both Lisa phones use a 19 by 9 so-called smooth display because they can ramp up the refresh rate from 60 to 90 Hertz in specific situations when the phone thinks that's me necessary Google. If not specifically said when that happens, it seems to kick in when you're scrolling through long chunks of text. That's when I described it the most at least- and it does seem to do a really nice job of smoothing out the action and making things that feel a bit more persistent, a bit more physical, which is nice since we're talking about software, and I'm sure you've already noticed, butts above the screen. This big forehead, Google heads ditched and not entirely this year, because it's using that extra space for the sole II radar chip. This is something that Google's been working on for a while as part of it's a tap initiative, and we're finally seeing it in a smartphone.

Basically, it's a radar array inside the phone that can detect when you're making gestures in front of it and when your hand is moving towards it. You can use that to control things like media, you can scrub forward and back through tracks and even disable alarms as you're moving your hand towards the phone, but that's actually kind of it. For now, I was a little surprised by how limited the sold felt in its first outing here the thing about motion sensor solely or whatever you want to call it is that it largely ties into existing Android API. So when you're swiping through to change songs, that's just going into the media, playback API developers can't actually do anything to specifically tune their apps for motion. Sense, that's a little weird, because I figured Google with what people that go wild with this stuff, but for now it seems like the plan, as Google wants to figure out the basics.

What people really need first and kind of go from there. I do also want to talk about another way. Google expects you to interact with your phone. That is the Google Assistant, which is, as you know, been around for a while, but as Google said at its IO 2019 developer conference, it shrunk down Google assistants footprint to the plane where it sits and fits on a phone directly. So Yeti is not all of them.

Voice commands that you would commonly give Google Assistant have to get farmed out to a server somewhere. They got processed right on the phone, which means you can get lightning-fast interactions and I have to emphasize. The word can because, at least in the demo space here, that's not really been. My experience, it seems, like Google Assistant, has been having trouble sort of remember in the context from one voice command as I move on and ask it another one, so I'm not able to have this sort of long strings of conversational commands that Google has been showing off FOIA. That might be a thing that might be a Wi-Fi thing.

Don't write this off, yet we're going to keep testing this. The last part of the pixel puzzle is, as always, the cameras, and they're. Now, a couple more of them sort of around back you'll find a standard, wide 12, megapixel camera plus a new 16 megapixels, telephoto, camera and I know what you're thinking a lot of companies are embracing the ultra-wide as the sort of de facto secondary camera lens, but Google firmly believes that telephoto is the more flexible, better option for most people here and considering what we've seen them do today with their really impressive zoom, which combines both the telephoto lens and a lot of super resumes. Ai smarts I think it's a strong argument for having that zoom camera. Now it's really tough to get a sense for what these things are capable of inside a crowd of demo room and a couple of things that are worth pointing out.

Smart HDR does seem to work a little better and, more importantly, when you're shooting with the camera itself, you now have a sense of what that HDR plus is doing to your photo in real time. It's called live HDR plus it just wasn't really possible, considering the horsepower available and earlier pixels. But it do you a better sense of what your next photo will actually look like and considering how we all tend to just sort of shoot and assume that what we see is what we get that's, probably a step in the right direction. There are now also new changes to portrait mode like sliders, which now allow you to change the level of lighten dark saturation happening. In the background of your photos, it's a little weird to get used to, but it does feel remarkably powerful, especially if the kind of person who loves taking really bouquet that photos, because I should point out Google- is also improve that as well.

There are also updates to my site which allow you to do really impressive, Castro photography. The phone can sense when it's sitting still and enable long exposures, but either way it's getting, not exposure to ones that are slightly underexposed and compensate even and there's a lot of things going on here. That, frankly, will take more than 30 seconds to dig through so stay tuned. For a closer look and our four of you once we've got that going all total. It's way too early to try any strong conclusions about the pixel 4 and the Pixel 4 XL they're, definitely a step in a different direction for Google and that's going to raise some people's hackles.

Not everyone's gonna love, what's happening here, but I. Think it's fair to say that Google is not quite content with the pixel formula as it was, it knows, pixels can be more and if nothing else, these phones are a first step down that new path. You.

Source : Engadget