Gadgetory

google has announced the pixel 3 and pixel 3 XL I have the XL here with the notch and we have a lot of thoughts about this phone we've had plenty of time to come up with thoughts because the device has been leaked for weeks and weeks and weeks the unboxing turned out to be real the leaks look exactly like the device what do you think of it it looks like the pixel 2 with some minor refinements so of course we have the knowledge screen on this 6.3 inch XL the pixel 3 has a 5.5 inch screen on the back you still have Google's two-tone display as they're calling it or two-tone color which just means there's a glossy part on the back and then this matte part this part is actually shrunk it's gotten smaller every single iteration 12.2 megapixel camera on the back but the back also is all glass Google is some kind of special at cheating with the glass so that you can actually finally have wireless charging and a pixel is the first pixel to have wireless charging is that right yes that's true and it's great because it means that it brings the pixel kind of up to the level of some of the other flagship phones and Google's in fact even selling a pixel stand for $79 that kind of has some pixel only special effects I guess you think it's still a standard Qi charger so if you have another device like an iPhone 10 you could put it on there so it's not a bad investment but when you have a pixel plus the stand it has that kind of glanceable ambient mode where you can just see notification from across the room it's a pretty cool idea I think so too right you know that's not what's gonna get people to buy the phone you know I think the camera is something that Google is really trying to sell and you know notice of course that this is a flagship device with one camera on the back that's a rarity at this point it really is you know you've got Huawei you've got LG coming up with three cameras on the back and you know there's speculation that a Samsung phone is gonna have four cameras on the back and here you've got Google basically thumbing its nose at everybody else saying you know with your four cameras or three cameras we can do all of that or more with just one one camera and a ton of crazy software plus one piece of hardware that's in there that image processing chip that have talked very little about with the two and they talked a lot about it with a three and it's supposed to make everything so much more amazing with one camera that seems really strange that they could push it do you think that's going to work I mean I think Google has a really great track record with photography on the pixels and I think that Google's bread and butter isn't software right that's where its prowess that's where it came from the hardware is just a conduit to get to the software it's got a lot of AI it's really ahead of the others in that I think one thing that really stood out is for a long time we've been saying that the pixel phones are really great at low-light photography and Google is calling this future night sight basically saying you'll never need a flash again because our low-light photos are so good and so bright you know Samsung's phones tend to I guess / brighten those low-light scenes so they sometimes seem really unnatural I'm really looking forward to what this phone can do if I can live up to that promise yeah I mean Google was really boastful with that they're all saying wait nope we started with the world's greatest camera first put it into a phone saying that you'll never use a flash again with this kind of software improvements that's really really bold if that's possible that'll be very impressive because iPhones have always been really great when came to cameras Samsung has really come close to it pixels have been great and this is a lot a lot of bragging that they have to live up to so what's interesting is though even though Google only wants to have one camera on the back there are these two cameras up front on both the pixel three and the pixel three so these are eight megapixel ones much more noticeable on this guy it looks like a robot face to me constantly I can't unsee the face I see I see it I see it definitely so the whole point is that there's a second telephoto lens so that there's depth to your portraits and and you can to your portrait shots but also more importantly so that you can have a wider angle to take either you and all of your friends or more room for your background landscape if we test it out a bunch like it during the actual live event and we were messing with this and that was way off in the corner and as we zoomed out you could see way more people behind you that so much more is captured without having to have a selfie stick I think people are gonna actually use that a lot I think so too and you know it Google's not the first company to have this this was a page taken out of LG's book but it could be the case of you know the Apple effect where the pixel phones popularized this in other devices so from a hardware perspective what we're looking at is something really iterative probably gonna be a lot better than last year's pixel - but no real killer feature here yeah it's kind of a nice design yay let's talk a little bit about the software though right yeah absolutely I have some feelings about Android Pi on this device and I think that you know the gesture controls are pretty good not as fluid as what Apple has and not as food is what some other Android phone makers have used as well so for example you swipe up and then it just kind of like stops it bounces back at you and if you want to go to the app tray and see all of your apps you have to swipe up again and also you can slide right on this kind of home button but you can't slide left you have to press this back arrow and I just feel like others have done this better why is Google doing this to us Google's using their Android pie which ditches the home button in general then now there's this little - saying that you can move the pill yeah it's being a pill because it doesn't work both ways and you're right it's a strange kind of version of Android pie considering it's Google's why doesn't work as well as others but I think that's gonna be some interesting back and forth between the first buyers of this device and Google to see if they can change this like 9.1 maybe it'll be a little cleaner yeah that will be really interesting to see it's true I'm some other software that definitely stood out also was well you can now trust your phone you can silence an incoming call by turning the phone over that's not new to the phone industry but it is new to pixel there's what I know you really want to shift things it's nothing better than a call screening kind of thing I cannot believe the the demo that they showed when you get a call you can actually sense you tell your pixel ya ask who this is and what you're calling for and then you can choose with a bunch of little options how to respond back I thought that was a really interesting way to basically like suggestions like smart reply is how to make your phone work for you better and I thought that was their gimmick with the whole presentation and that's a really cool feature it will be really interesting to see how that works and if you are able to parse out robo calls from like you know accidentally like asking grandma you know who that really is obviously you wouldn't have somebody from your inbox who you know would be a call you don't know but what if it's the doctor's office or the pharmacy this isn't somebody you necessarily want a robo call you want to be there to pick that up so it will be interesting to see how many false positives and you know false negatives there are in that case that's come in a pixel first and that's the thing like it is Google going to give that out as a feature somewhere else I don't know if they will but it's gonna be on the pixel one thing we haven't talked about yet is pricing and this is a real hot-button issue so $7.99 brings you the 64 gigabyte version of the three it goes all the way up to $9.99 for the top-of-the-line 128 of the XL but there's no way to increase the storage it's these are your options and so it seems a little bit of limited don't you think I do think that because I've done a comparison with you know the total storage capacity for other phones and you know even the LGV 40 only has a 64 gigabyte option that's your only option but it will take microSD card so you know you're taking all these amazing shots you can save and raw but where do you put it if you run out Google's saying well you can go ahead and use unlimited you know Google Photos cloud storage but you can't save everything that way and what if you don't want to you just don't have as many options you've got that and you might have issues with your wireless carrier I don't what your data plan is like I don't know what your speeds are like and you're shooting 4k and you're sending it up to the cloud that might be a problem over time so that's I think it's a kind of a weak kind of answer for their shortage on storage but it is what it is I think another thing that's really interesting and worth noting is that this is one of the few flagship phones truly flagship phones that starts at under $1000 we've seen the price of phones creeping up and up and up and up and it almost doesn't matter who you are and even though it gets really close on the 128 gigabyte version of the pixel 3 XL it doesn't start off there so you can still save a few hundred dollars by getting the pixel and you have the benefit of everything that Google offers which is of course you know the security updates that are more timely and the Android updates that are also before any other phone that's the other thing about the pixel 3 versus the XL hardware-wise they're not tremendously different you're not really doing a lot of trade-offs other than the size of screen maybe and size of battery so even if you wanted this power and one of the cameras you're getting essentially the same thing at $7.99 which is I think a little easier for people to jump on board with the pixel phones are coming out right when we're about to go into a big holiday crunch and there's already a ton of competition we've got Samsung phones out there we got LG we've got iPhones you get an iPhone 10 R that's coming around the same time as the pixel at 7:49 so that's another competitor at around the same time we've got the oneplus 60 that's coming up as well and seen it was first to report that that's come for $550 so that's more expensive than the past one plus but that's still cheaper than this pixel phone and there's a lot that it can offer Android enthusiasts the pixel phone seems to appeal to a wide array of people it's either somebody looking for a budget phone pure Android phone or they want the top-of-the-line phone so they're competing against everybody which is a very very difficult feel to take on and in the u.s. this phone's also in an interesting sales position because Verizon is the exclusive carrier you can also buy an unlocked from Google's store or you could get it through Google's project five with the project via SIM card yeah and the wireless carriers would probably do some crazy holiday promotions that these new top line phones will be like a BOGO or you'll get one for half price you get a whole bunch of really good deals on really good phones I think you've hit it right on the nose and that those holiday promos are going to change the pricing dynamic or they're gonna mess with Google's plans entirely now our reviews are ongoing on the pixel 3 and the three XL come back to see a net for the full rate of reviews