Gadgetory

hey what's up guy is mkbhd here and there's probably a lot of videos in your subscription box right around now I'm glad to click this one this one will be a little different this is your official unboxing of the Google pixel 2 and the Google pixel 2 XL retail packaging so by the time you're seeing this video I've already had a pixel - for around a week and I'm putting together the full review right now literally as you're watching this but I did want to give you guys a few quick thoughts as I'm finishing testing so obviously we can get these first impressions in the crowded hands-on area that was a little while ago but seeing the phone again in your own hands is always a little bit of a different experience so you can see everything here that comes in the box for both pixel 2 and pixel 2 XL wall adapter USB C cables 2017 smartphone starter kit dongle the whole deal this unboxing is of course of the pixel but then of course what do you know I've been testing the XL so mine is already fully setup so this is our second look at the phone and of course it's our second look at these bezels in real life but honestly the more I look at them the less ugly they look and I feel like they may also be necessary for the squeeze feature to activate Google assistant but I'll definitely have more on that in the full review and also the soft touch metal all the way around the body of this phone has held up pretty well it's a pretty medium to lightweight phone but it holds up to pretty much zero scratch damage and it's surprisingly good at repelling finger prints with whatever oleophobic coating they're using on it I like it but really what I wanted to dive into in this video is to show that basically in the time that I've been using this phone and the previous generations it's become pretty obvious that the differentiating factor when you're trying to pick which of these phones to buy for this one it's the software software experience with Android 8.0 Oreo on the pixel - it's full of little things and little features that you might call it polish but it to me it's just kind of things that make you go oh yeah that's that's that's really nice that's a good thing they thought of that that's maybe the best way I can describe it so while this isn't the most stunning hardware in the world there is a lot of cool stuff going on in a software department so let's break it down number one the Settings app is redone and cleaned up and sorted so different Android skins handle the ever-increasing number of extra features in Android in different ways you know some of them spread them out more some of them are very cool well this one is more into nesting the less used features but overall I think this is super clean you have a consistent theme you have the search function that works really really well it's white and blue so it's really easy on the eyes I'm a big fan of the Settings app in this new version of Android now number two is the Now Playing feature which is pretty freakin incredible so this is the feature that's supposed to proactively tell you what song is playing where you are on your phone before you have to even ask it to it works most of the time not all the time but a lot of the times when you'd experience that sort of a desire to know what song's playing when you're in like a coffee shop or in some place where music is playing it's usually a pretty popular song and that's why it works often but it's using the O's on mics on this phone and it's using pixels ambient services to pull from a pool of tens of thousands of songs which doesn't sound like much but that's usually enough based on like we said where you're hearing these songs so basically when it does recognize one of the songs you're listening to it works as advertised it shows up on your lock screen you can drag down your notifications and actually click on that song that it's identified for you and maybe play it on YouTube or add it to a Spotify playlist whatever you want to do with it it's pretty solid the only downside was I did get rickrolled recently I know you're judging me for that but it was actually way funnier like three minutes later when I saw never gonna give you up on my lockscreen thanks Internet now number three is google lens and this was the image recognition software that we're seeing both built into google photos and in the camera and eventually gonna be on its own its pixel exclusive for now and it's just basically starting to work on our phones basically google lens is best at identifying things with text in them it's basically doing a reverse google image search and anytime you do a reverse google image search adding text is really really good for narrowing down what you're looking at so this house will add photo I took is a great example when you look at the wide-angle photo with the whole shape of the camera the text isn't necessarily in focus and I hate google lens and it just kind of knows it's a camera but when I do a second close-up photo where you can see the text Hasselblad is more InFocus Google ends definitely recognizes that text and adds it to its search and it's more able to properly identify what it's looking at by adding that so overall I didn't go out of my way to use google lens that much but when I did it was really cool to see it didn't really approach me the way something like the now playing feature did it just kind of appeared in my face but I think this is one of the things that will also get better with time especially seeing how much AI is a forward focus with Google right now I expect it to and the number four is I just want to say the new picture-in-picture implementation for the new youtube app on these phones is fantastic essentially you used to hit the home button before and it would immediately go into background play and whatever video you're watching would not be visible on these phones you're watching a YouTube video you hit the home button and it shrinks perfectly into a picture-in-picture window that you can still manipulate and move around the page and use it in the background I want to bring it back you could tap on it and fullscreen the video again I think it's great and then number five the wallpapers yes the wallpapers on this phone are super dope normally I use an app called backdrops if a lot of you've been wondering where some of the backgrounds on my phones have been coming from lately that's the app I usually get them from those are the still static photos but these are different remember live wallpapers way back in the day on Android where you used to be able to like touch them to interact with them when they were brand new they were a little resource intensive you know the powerful phones could get away with running them in the background but not everyone could do it these on these new pixels are sort of like the 2017 next-level modern version of that so you go to load up one of these wallpapers and it looks pretty simple at first nothing too fancy here but if you look closely if you look closely on this one check out the cars driving on that road down there under the clouds these tiny little moving objects still going at a high frame rate barely noticeable unless you're actually looking at them or these these three little I guess they're hot-air balloons flying over Monument Valley again super subtle but you wouldn't even know that they're moving us you were looking for them or this one my personal favorite actually the waves crashing down on the beach at this well-known coastline in Lagos these are sweet and good news with this part is they aren't pixel exclusive technically they've already been ported out so I'll leave a link right below that like button to get these and put them on your own Android phone if you want them right now but yeah there's way more stuff I have to share with everything from like the little things like notifications improvements on this phone or the stabilization in the video camera all the way up to long-term battery life and performance all this will be in the full review I know I just did a video DxO mark but the claim for best camera in any smartphone yeah that also does hold up here so there's a lot to unpack expect the full review and a couple days a little bit down the road but this has been fun for the the first impressions on the unboxing thank you for watching talk to you guys the next one peace