The Pixel 4 is an INSANE Value in 2021! By Mark Spurrell

This is google's pixel 4 and a lot of you may remember it as being a bit of a letdown when it launched in late 2019. It had some software issues with the 90hz display motion. Sense. Wasn't all that great and to top it all off, it was very expensive at around 800 or 900 bucks. But here in 2021, the story of the pixel 4 is significantly different. The software has matured over the past year and a half and the price has dropped so significantly that it's now cheaper than a lot of budget and mid-range phones.

Today, I'm going to tell you why the pixel 4 is such an insane value buy right now, but I'm also going to let you in on a few little secrets that a lot of pixel 4 owners might be too proud to admit it's time for tech rewind. In my opinion, the pixel 4 is a beautiful looking phone from the rear. The soft touch matte glass on the back feels so good in the hand, and it produces no ugly fingerprints. The powdered black aluminum side rails creates this really nice contrast with the white back and the orange power button, and I even like the squared off camera bump that matches the contour of the frame. It's a very aesthetically pleasing phone, at least from the back.

The front side of the phone is a bit less impressive with that relatively large forehead. That is necessary to contain all the motion. Sense project solely tech that Google put inside this phone, which we'll talk about a little later. My thoughts on the forehead are this? No, it doesn't look all that great at first, but, like all notches hole, punches, foreheads and chins. You get used to it really quickly, and it's not even worth talking about for more than a few seconds.

The 5.7 inch OLED display is actually pretty nice. It's a 90, hertz high refresh rate display, and it has a resolution of 1080 by 2280. It's not a 1440p panel, but remember this is a 5.7 inch display. Furthermore, it doesn't need a resolution that high it already has a pixel density of around 444, which is excellent and basically just means the display is plenty sharp in everyday use here in 2021, I have absolutely zero complaints about the display or the refresh rate it runs at. As I mentioned earlier, there used to be a problem where, if you turn down the brightness on the display, the refresh rate would throttle back to 60hz for some weird reason that has long since been fixed, and I haven't noticed any frame rate dips at all.

Since I started using this phone, it is a touch on the small side for media consumption these days, but the phone does have a nice set of stereo speakers. If you don't have some Bluetooth headphones lying around also inside that forehead is a few pieces of tech that you would actually find on all iPhones with face ID. The pixel 4 uses a dot projector and a flood illuminator to accurately scan your face for a very quick and easy facial unlocking system. Given that I wear a mask every time I go out in public, I think I would have preferred an in-display fingerprint reader here, but the facial unlocking system on the pixel 4 is actually quite a bit faster than the face ID on my iPhone 12 series phones so thumbs up for that. Google then there's performance, and this is one of the main reasons that you should consider buying the pixel 4 in 2021.

Aside from the crazy good camera system which don't worry we'll get to in just a sec. Android is google's baby, and it runs as expected on the Google Pixel 4. In the time that I've been testing this phone I've encountered very few issues and because of that 90 hertz display it feels just as snappy as most modern flagships. I put this phone up against the s21 ultra and saw very few differences between the two in most apps, the pixel 4 is running a snapdragon 855 and six gigs of ram, both of which should be perfectly capable of doing almost anything on your phone for at least the next couple of years. It's a great little gaming phone too, especially when paired with this racer fish.

That turns it into an android Nintendo Switch kind of thing. Alright, the moment, a lot of you have been waiting for. Let's talk about these cameras on the back of the pixel 4, sits a 12 megapixel wide and a 16 megapixel telephoto, there's no ultrawide here, and that was criticized very heavily by a lot of people. After mark Levy came out on stage saying, the telephoto is better than an ultra-wide, which we all know to be completely false. Interestingly enough, the selfie camera on the front seems to basically be an ultra-wide.

It's the widest selfie camera, I've seen in a number of years. Pixel phones have always been known for taking incredible photos and nothing has changed in that regard. With the pixel 4's rear cameras, it uses the same mix 363 sensors that is present in both the Pixel 4a and the pixel 5. So the shots coming from the main wide angle. Camera should be very consistent with a decent amount of sharpness and loads.

Of contrast, you're gonna, hear me say contrast a lot of times here and that's because pixels tend to produce very contrast photos and most of the time I, like the images I get straight out of the camera, the portrait mode seems to work great too, on both the front and rear-facing cameras. The background blur or both it creates is a little on the unbelievable side, but you can always turn that down a little in the edit. Then we have motion sense and here's where the problems with the pixel 4 start cropping up. We can all agree that, up until this point, everything has been pretty decent right. Well, this is where it starts to just go.

A little downhill in the top right of the forehead is a little radar. Chip called solely and the whole idea of it is that you can use gestures to control the pixel 4. Without touching it, you can skip forward or backward through songs, or you can silence interruptions like an alarm or a phone call. The radar will also attempt to recognize when you reach, for your phone, and it'll, get all the facial recognition components ready so that as soon as you grab for your phone it'll unlock super quickly. There are two problems with this system.

A that's pretty much all motion sense. Does there's nothing crazy, special or even particularly useful about it and b it eats battery life like crazy and the battery life on this phone is not great to begin with. Okay, so how bad is the battery life? The pixel 4 has a battery capacity of 2 800 William hours and with a 90, hertz high, refresh rate display, and that motion sense tech. That was not a big enough battery when it was new, let alone, if you buy the phone used with motion sense and the always-on display turned on the battery life was abysmal at best. If you turn those features off, it does get quite a bit better, but we're talking, you know four hours of screen on time versus like two and a half, if you're a heavy user like if you enjoy taking a lot of photos, or you play a lot of games on your phone, I'd strongly consider forgetting the pixel 4 and just going for the Pixel 4 XL it'll be a little more expensive, but it has a 3 700 William hour battery instead of a 2800 one and the battery life will be much better.

Thankfully, the pixel 4 is equipped with 18 watt wired fast charging to get that relatively small battery back up to full pretty quickly, and it does have wireless charging capabilities as well and to be totally honest with you guys. The battery life and the gimmicky motion sense stuff is the only problems that I've had with the pixel 4. Everything else has been great, there's no performance or software related issues. The cameras are fantastic, the display is great. It still feels very premium in the hand and best of all the pixel 4 is a lot cheaper to buy right now than you might think on the used market, the pixel 4 routinely goes for around 200 or 250 us dollars, which is an insane value for what you get out of this phone.

I mean that costs just what like a quarter of what it did just a year and a half ago. The reason the pixel 4 was such a flop, when it launched, is because this thing cost around 700 or 800 dollars and for what it offered it just really couldn't stand up to the other flagships at the time. But now that it's like 200 bucks, it's an awesome value phone, and it's totally worth it. In my opinion. So at the end of every tech, rewind episode, I give each phone a rating from 8, plus at the top and f at the bottom, and the pixel 4 gets an minus rating from me.

If you can get past that battery life issue, it is an excellent value buy here in 2021, if you like this video, but you can't get past the bad battery life in the pixel 4 check out this tech rewind episode, where I review the OnePlus 6t, which has a much, much bigger battery thanks for watching and as always have a great day.

Source : Mark Spurrell