Gadgetory

what guys it's long hear from Andrew forty and as Josh Berg our from authority what's going on everybody and we've already given you our initial review of the pixel XL but we wanted to get lon in here to give us his perspective as he has been using the phone as well so instead of just reiterating a lot of the stuff that we already said in the initial review we thought how about we just have a discussion on this the Google pixel XL in this final review so I'm going to go ahead and address the elephant in the room with a pixel phone's design and a lot of people seem really divided on the design right now and a lot of people have been saying it a lot of people have been thinking it the pixel phones look like the iPhone and whether you like this or not is going to be a matter of perspective if you're coming from the Nexus phones which brought a really unique design to the table each and every year you're going to be a little bit disappointed with the pixel phone's design now on the flip side of that there's a lot of people out there that really enjoy the iPhones hardware but always wish that it ran Google's software and if you wanted an iPhone running Android this is the best iPhone running Android you can buy another part about the design is that it looks really generic especially from the front and a lot of that has to do with the big bottom chin but not necessarily the fact that it's a big chin but because it feels like an empty voided space it feels very underutilized I know it's housing some very important components but there could have been a button on there or a speaker but instead the speaker is actually on the bottom and for a single bottom firing speaker it actually sounds really good and gets very loud but it definitely could have benefitted from being on the front and that might honestly be one of the only problems that this phone has is the fact that its design is so understated even without the iPhone comparison the Google pixel XL it just looks kind of generic that can actually be a good thing for the pixel mainly because you don't necessarily assume a whole lot about the phone and then when you turn on the phone there's a lot of amazing that can come out of this device on the other hand however it's not flashy and not that any phone has to be flashy but it also has to be attractive the pixel XL simply does not seem to be very attractive to a lot of people and to us yeah I do say bare-bones understated generic and pretty much all of those terms have been used by fans like yourself so unfortunately for the pixel XL it just isn't really going to be that eye catching and unfortunately that could be a detriment to what is otherwise a very good phone so with the display shows looking at a 5-inch 1080p panel on the regular pixel and a 5.5 inch quad-hd panel on the pixel XL both of them are Super AMOLED and display on the pixel XL looks absolutely fantastic it has excellent colors great viewing angles and it gets extremely bright that seeing it outdoors especially on a sunny day like this is not an issue whatsoever and because it's Super AMOLED you get those inky deep blacks and high contrast ratio which makes it perfect for watching movies playing games or anything that you really want to do on this phone it's great for it you won't be disappointed and performance has been very top-notch especially because of the Snapdragon 820 1 which we already alluded to in the initial review but the thing is we're still dealing with pure Android here and even though the Snapdragon 820 one is supposed to be the most powerful one out there pure Android doesn't necessarily need too much to provide a great experience it's up to Google to make that feel the way it should be and it definitely does there's an attention to detail when it comes to the transitions and all of the different animations that definitely shows when you're using this phone and it just feels like the fastest version of Android out there and keep in mind also that Google's going to keep this version of Android updated for the Google pixel so that makes this already one of the most reliable devices out there I even did some gaming with recent apps and games like the most recent release in the Google Play Store don't starve and it provided again a topmatch experience rest assured that because of the Snapdragon 801 but also because of Android itself this is one of the most reliable and smoothest experiences out there now it's probably no surprise that one of our main gripes with the pixel phones is the lack of expandable storage now with a 32 gigabyte base models of either phone you might run out of space consistently if you're doing 4k video recording and taking a lot of pictures and that has definitely been the case for me over the last number of days trying to use this as a vlogging machine you can also use Google photos in order to skirt some of that by using their unlimited full resolution storage in the cloud but even if you're using mobile data to upload it it takes a long time to upload 4k clips and that amount of time could keep you from getting the the way that I've sort of remedied this is using a micro SD card reader that plugs into the USB C port via OTG but even then it takes up some time to transfer all of those files over to the SD card that I use in that reader you can always get the 128 gigabyte version of this phone but that's a lot of money to put down and I honestly don't think a lot of people out there will be willing to put down that much money for that much storage for me battery life has been for the most part average maybe a little bit lower on that spectrum because I got three and a half hours to four and a half hours of screen on time now my usage could be different from wands but I do GPS navigation I listen to a lot of music and podcasts and I also watch a lot of YouTube but with all of that in mind we did use the Android authority battery testing app on this phone and using its most intensive test which is a gaming test it got four hours and 45 minutes now that kind of fits squarely between lawn and I so that makes this phone for the most part average maybe slightly above average but even then if you started to run out of juice throughout your day which shouldn't really be an issue then you can always juice it up real quick using the quick charging that is involved here so with the cameras you have an 8 megapixel camera on the front and a 12 point three megapixel camera on the back and it's crazy to think that Google has gone from having some of the worst cameras on a smartphone to having some of the best cameras on a smartphone and I would say the pixel phones are easily in the top three when it comes to image quality in daylight the images are very sharp very well detailed and the camera has excellent dynamic range especially with that HDR plus mode it does a great job of toning down the highlights and the shadows without making the images look unnatural or fake which is a problem that some Android cameras tend to have and the best part about the HDR image processing is that it's actually fast now whereas on the Nexus 6p it was a little bit on the slow side now as the Sun is coming down on me it's kind of apropos that I'm going to talk about low-light photography right now low-light shots on the Google pixel XL are still really grainy and they lack the kind of stabilization that optical image stabilization brings the is doesn't really help in this situation so the photos come out quite grainy and if your hands are not all that steady you could get a kind of blurry shot because of the slower shutter speed that ends up showing motion blur that said however this does do a pretty good job in low light compared to plenty of other Android the different devices out there especially given its larger pixel sizes but of course video capabilities mean a lot to me personally so on the pixel XL I use this camera as my vlogging machine for the last few days and it did a very good job the stabilization is actually really good but there are a couple of things that you have to know about it the e is on here kind of compensates for general movements and maybe walking but it won't be able to perform miracles if you're running with the device the reason why is because the camera uses information from the gyroscope and if the gyroscope is going haywire and going all over the place it just won't be able to keep up and what you end up getting is video that is trying to search for the place that it needs to be rather than actually finding it you also don't really get any manual controls to cater the video to the certain exposure or focus that you want you have to rely on touch controls in the rather simplistic application one of the main gripes that I have here is that holding the focus points takes a very long time to finally lock and from there you can always swipe up and down in order to change the exposure compensation which is fine but even then getting to that point could take a while after you try and locking the focus and the exposure of course with this being a Google made device you're getting the latest version of Android that Google has to offer with Android 7.1 nougat and there's a lot of great features that are on the pixel phones and I'm going to go over some of the main ones and then a couple of minor ones that I think actually make a pretty significant impact to the overall experience first let's talk about the biggest feature to the pixel phones and that is Google assistant and Google assistant is basically an improvement upon Google now it's a lot smarter it's much more conversational you can say a lot more things to it you can joke with it you can even ask it to read you a poem if you want but you can still do all the basic stuff like set a timer an alarm hate calendar event check sport scores the weather all the basic stuff that you would expect it can still do and it still has all the now on tap features from before so it can still analyze your screen and give you information on what it sees but it's a lot faster than now on tap which was always really slow to load because of that long animation Google assistant pretty much loads up instantaneously and it's not perfect but it's definitely a huge step in the right direction and overall it works extremely well next let's talk about the pixel launcher so the pixel launcher is exclusive to the pixel phones at least for right now and it brings a lot of changes you still have the Google now home screen on the leftmost home screen but to conduct a search you just tap on the G logo in the upper left corner and the app drawer is now accessible with a swipe up from the bottom which means there's no app drawer icon anymore and this frees up an additional space in your dock for another app of your choice which is awesome and the other big change here is the app icons themselves they're all circles now and it's not completely consistent across the board some of the apps still have their own icons but it's a huge step in the right direction and at least all the apps now are all the same size there's a few minor features in this new version of Android but I actually think make a pretty significant impact to the overall user experience first Google has finally added a reboot option after all these years of refusing to add this feature it is now baked into stock Android and it was definitely long overdue second there's a new long press feature that is similar to Apple's 3d touch - the 3d touch basically you long press on an application and it will give you access to certain functions without actually having to open up the app the last thing I want to mention with the software is if you have the Verizon version of the pixel it does come with a few bloatware applications but all of them can be easily uninstalled and I wanted to make one final assertion that Google assistant is a wonderful layer on top of Android 7.1 if you haven't used it in Google a low yet give it a try and then remember that that is across all of the Android interface inside of the Google pixels imagine that kind of functionality and I've been using it a lot recently mainly for the daily briefings which I think are a wonderful addition and from there I also use it to add calendar entries now doing add an event is really easy because the Google assistant asked me for each piece of information one by one so nothing gets left out now Google assistant may not be the most conversational assistant but you can find a middle ground if the way that you say or ask something doesn't work in the first place say it again in such a way that it's what you would probably type in a Google search box and then after that it'll probably work so you can find the middle ground or once you get past that somewhat little bit steep learning curve it becomes a pretty invaluable tool especially because the hot word works so well on this phone and can wake the phone and just allow Google assistant to appear immediately and you just tell it what you need and it will try its best to get to you so overall the pixel phones are two very fantastic smart phones and is a completely new direction for Google if you want the best that Google has to offer the pixel phones are what you're getting for 2016 it really goes to show what Google is capable of doing when they have control of both the hardware and the software that goes into their phones and I can only imagine how much better it's going to get from here but as of right now it's already pretty good as always thank you guys so much for watching this video I hope you enjoyed this review of the pixel XL and I hope you enjoyed this slightly different review style and if you did let us know in the comments below and we may do it again in the future and keep it tuned here to Android authority check us out on social media instagram twitter snapchat google+ all that good stuff will be linked down below oh and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and check out the website as well and georgia 30 a calm because we are your source for all things Android