Review: New Google Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a (5G) By Erin Lawrence

Google has just released two new pixel phones, keeping up an annual pace of brand-new smartphones with improvements and new features. I'm Erin from techgadgetscanada. com, and I recently had the opportunity to get hands-on with the new pixel 4 a 5g. That's this one and the pixel 5, which is also 5g ahead of their public launch to test them out. Try the new features and see what's new. Now, as usual, my reviews are more consumer focused, meaning I try out the key features, see how they work in real life and then show you how to use them and talk about what's new in these phones overall, I'm not going to get much into the specs or speed tests or that kind of thing.

So just so, you know what you're in for with this review, an early heads up that if you end up liking this review and finding it helpful to please hit that like button and give me a sub since it does help me, keep making more videos that I hope everyone out there can watch enjoy and learn from. One of the most obvious changes to the pixel phones is the new matte backs in both just black and sorta sage, green. The phones have done away with the super glossy glass back and switched to a painted aluminum finish. That looks almost like paper. It's really nice to touch, though it doesn't seem to provide much more grittiness, I'm a big fan of using a case at all times and Google's fabric pixel cases are pretty much a favorite of mine.

These new phones have a much more edge to edge screen design, and that means you're, essentially getting the bigger screen size of the Pixel 4 XL, but in a smaller body size. The front camera has also migrated to be embedded in the screen in a more hole, punch design when it comes to what's new. In a nutshell, there are three key things: the new Pixel 4a 5g and the pixel 5 have 5g cellular connectivity, and they have additional camera features as well, plus a longer battery life. Now, let's start with the 5g, and I'm just going to point out really quickly that the new Pixel 4a 5g um, there is already a Pixel 4a out there um. It was launched a few months ago, I think, maybe even last year, but that one wasn't 5g ready.

So this new version is 5g ready, and it seems like this season. Every manufacturer is launching a 5g phone.5G is a new network standard for cellular connectivity, and it gives you bigger bandwidth for your smartphone and wireless use, allowing for things like faster downloads, lower latency and better overall smartphone performance. Now actual 5g access across Canada right now is kind of hit or miss, since a lot of carriers are just rolling it out in the bigger cities. First. Now with that said, my smartphone carrier does not support 5g right now, so I can't make any claims about how well these phones are going to use the more powerful network, but if you're looking for a phone that has access to 5g in the future, making it future-proof both of these new pixel phones are 5g ready.

The camera on the pixel, 4a 5g and the pixel 5 do have some improvements and enhancements this time around. I have always enjoyed the photos that pixel phones take right from the original pixel on up. Google just seems to get that great photo and video quality is almost important to a lot of us as all the other features combined now, while night sight for better low light photos and macrophotography is back in both the new pixels. There are a few brand-new features as well. New portrait light is designed to give you more control over the light in your photos in camera mode portrait light automatically adds light to improve the overall lighting in a scene in photos.

You can then adjust the lighting of your shots from portrait mode for creative effect or add portrait light to older, portraits in your photos. Library, portrait light can also enhance a photo that you already like, or do things like brighten up a part of the face, that's in shadow or fill in that light to brighten up a certain area, the pixel 4 added, a telephoto zoom lens, and now on the Pixel 4a and the pixel 5. There is an ultra-wide lens. This allows you to capture a wider field of view, just open up the camera app and tap the slider bar at the bottom of the viewfinder and pull it back.2.6X google says machine learning can correct any distortion, while video recording is available in 4k or ultra-high definition, the pixels do skip offering 8k video, as some other makers like Samsung and lg are offering, but those phones also cost about three times the price of a pixel. A new video feature called cinematic pan lets you take swooping and steady pan shots or camera movements worth pointing out.

You can't capture audio when using cinematic pan and a little mic icon on the screen will remind you of that. To use this feature go into video mode, then tap the shaky hand icon on the right and select cinematic pan. There were complaints that google squashed the battery life in favor of adding some other goodies back in the pixel 4. , so in the 4a 5g and the pixel 5 they've brought in some new battery features and battery improvements. For starters, the batteries are bigger.

The pixel 5's battery is 4 000 William hours, while the 4a 5g has 3 800 William hour battery. The pixel 4 by comparison had only a 2 800 William hour battery, so this is a significant upgrade and a way for Google to maybe write a previous wrong adaptive battery is back, and it's now combined with something called extreme battery saver. That promises to add an extra full day to your battery life, make your phones last up to 48 hours. Now. I am still experimenting with this feature and I want to do a little more testing about how well it works.

But for now the promise is that EBS will pause, some of your apps and actions, and apparently you can pick which ones it'll hold back, but it does keep them still accessible. It'll also turn off some power heavy features and slow your phone's processing. If you are in a situation where you really need to worry about preserving your battery to access this feature, pull down from the top of the screen for your quick settings menu and enable battery saver mode, then you'll get a notification inviting you to try extreme battery saver you'll be asked which essential apps you'd like to keep on while in that mode and in settings you can change your essential, apps and choose when to use this battery saver mode as well. With the new Google Pixel 5. Only you can now wirelessly charge your Pixel Buds or other QI compatible charging devices using your pixel 5's battery.

This is great for emergency situations or, if you don't have a cable, you can use reverse wireless charging in two ways you can plug the pixel 5 into the wall or manually enable the feature in settings. Then flip your pixel 5 over and lay your Pixel Buds or other device against the rear of the phone, which is now essentially acting as a QI charging mat as a journalist and writer, one of my favorite apps of all time is google's recorder. App recorder makes audio recordings of your interviews, lectures, presentations or calls, but it will also transcribe them in real time and let you search the transcript for words or phrases to instantly find them on the tape. New features in this year's recorder on pixel phones include text corrections. If the automatic transcriptions made a mistake now it's fixable, you can correct or delete individual words by long pressing on a word in the transcript and then tapping edit word by the way.

You cannot correct more than one word at a time in this current version. There's also smart scrolling recorder will automatically find important keywords and put them on a scroll bar. So you can quickly jump to the sections you're looking for just drag along the vertical space. On the right hand, side of your transcript and you'll see a gray handle appear. You can tap on the keywords to navigate to different sections in my tests.

I guess this worked. Okay, I wouldn't say the words that it chose were the ones that I would pick, and I also couldn't see how to choose my own keywords. If that is indeed possible, so I'm going to have to spend some more time with this feature. Still a couple new features in the recorder app. You can edit your audio by editing the transcript just press on the scissors icon to go into editing mode, and if you have a bit of audio, you want to share with others.

Recorder now gives you the option to create a video clip of that audio with the waveform and the transcript baked in. I do think price is worth mentioning here. The pixel phones are much more accessible now than ever, particularly when you compare them to some other smartphones. The pixel 4 a5g sells for about 679, Canadian and the pixel 5 sells for about 799, Canadian and in some cases these cost less than half of what some other smartphone manufacturers are selling their phones for making the pixel phones a great phone at a majorly, accessible price tag. Overall, I have only had a few days with both of these phones, but I think there are a lot of cool new toys and features well.

It might not be worth an upgrade if you got the pixel 4 already, for example, if you're looking to switch over to a pixel, or you have an older pixel phone. These are definitely worth the upgrade I'm going to keep playing around with these phones to get more detail on them. But if you have any questions you can post them here or if you want to read this review or reference any of what I talked about. You can head over to techgadgetscanada. com as well thanks so much for watching I'm Erin until the next video you can catch me on either Twitter or Instagram, I'm at Aaron.

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Source : Erin Lawrence