Gadgetory

hey what's up guys I'm Kip EHD here and turns out the Google pixel is one of those phones that you have to actually use to really fully understand how good it is and that's real like this phone it's pretty uninspiring right the designs not that exciting it's not turning any heads just with its looks or anything like that but we actually use this phone full-time as a daily for a couple weeks like I have that's a completely different thing so technically this is the first pixel phone and not a nexus phone because they're not openly putting another manufacturers logo on at this time so we had nexuses by Huawei by HTC by Samsung in the past this is the pixel phone by Google so you've got a Google logo on the back and it's made by Google which is great I respect that but you should still know it's getting HTC to build it and you can kind of tell it has that HTC general design language has some familiar antenna bands on the sides and on the bottom and some of even said that this is actually the design of a body that HTC was working on before Google came up to them and said hey we want you to work with us on this pixel project either way this is what we get to showcase Android 7.1 a pretty plain Jane looking phone mostly metal all around the body as you can see and it does have a slight wedge shape so it's a bit thicker at the top if you didn't notice and it has some pretty tactile buttons on the sides with good placement and travel it's also not the thinnest phone in the world coming in at 8 millimeters thick and I feel like you could land a 747 on those not very thin bezels as well again maybe HTC was planning on doing something different there and then it has this glass thing on the back the two-tone design has splits on people I'm personally not a huge fan I kind of like the way like the Nexus 6p handled glass on the back better but it's fine you know having a glass section can't improve signal strength can be better with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi so there's no wireless charging so it's not for that but yeah it's just kind of this big glass window with no real shape it's just kind of there so obviously this is not my favorite smartphone design of all time but if you want to spice it up you can go with the really blue variant that's an option you have or you can cover it up at any time with the D brand skin and this one's actually really cool they'll let you keep a cutout of the nostalgic Nexus logo on it that's dope now it's kind of funny hearing this phone is co built by HTC because H was known for a while for having some of the best speakers in the business and mobile phones they pioneered boom sound a couple years ago and then here comes pixel in 2016 with one of the worst speakers in a phone of the year it's not very loud it's downward facing and it can sound decent when you're not blocking it but it's just extremely easy to block with like one finger by accident it's just bad and that combined with no water resistance and no expandable storage kind of makes it seem like you're getting a not so premium build for a pretty premium price but those couple missing features are not my least favorite part of this phone it's literally just how boring it looks as my least favorite part and maybe I've been spoiled because I've seen you know I played with the galaxy s7 this year played with the note 7 we had the xiaomi me mix even the new iphone and all its matte black glory but by comparison picking up and holding and using a pixel just doesn't feel future like the edge displays or doesn't feel all that crazy I mean it's just it's the way it looks it's the industrial design what you're going to do but what's on the inside though is really pretty check out these specs you get a Snapdragon 820 one chip you get the Adreno 530 GPU 4 gigabytes of ram 32 or 128 gigs of storage yes I went with the 128 and then you have the only difference between the pixel and the pixel XL which is the battery size and the display size that's it which I like so no handicap and the smaller phone to try to upsell you on the bigger one but obviously you can see the benefits of having the larger pixel XL the bigger screen the sharper screen and the 3450 milliamp hour battery but both of their batteries performed really well so you guys already know you don't really need a ton of super high-end specs to make a pure stock Android phone run smoothly that's kind of been its Forte but the pixel kind of has those anyway so I'll tell you right now this is definitely the smoothest Android phone that you can get right now both out the box and way later this is that's the first thing I noticed about this phone right out the box with Android 7.1 it's really buttery and the battery life is phenomenal so I did most of my testing with the pixel XL just because I'm a big phone type of person and this phone was regularly getting the 5 plus hours of screen on time every single day and you guys know my high intensity high brightness you know bluetooth streaming all that type of stuff by high intensity use usually crap cell phones by the of the day but I was ending the day regularly with like 25 plus percent left on the pixel XL and the fact that you can also have a lighter day and end the day with like 40% left means the standby time was also very good and then performance is top-notch as you should expect we've seen other phones with lower end specs run close to stock Android or with lighter skins because that helps performance and battery life but since it already has these beefy specs pixel is more of an optimized Android experience and is able to handle everyday use plus heavy multitasking constant browsing games and back again with no hiccups this is one of those phones that super smooth way after the day you take it out the box and for all this you can thank Android 7.1 out of the box the pixel is just so clean there's hardly any pre-installed apps and the ones that you do get can be uninstalled it definitely doesn't have many of the bells and whistles of the galaxy s7 for example or should I say the flashbang of the note 7 but it's a great performer you can't hate about that that's what the stock Android experience has been so good at for a while what it adds to the mix is stuff like Google Assistant so now you can argue it's not really adding that much since most of its features like voice control and stuff like that we're already in previous versions of Android but on a pixel it's just that little bit more accessible you can long press the home button at any time or just that anywhere say ok Google which I by the way loves saying in videos because it always triggers someone's phone but overall assistant is really helpful and all of the features you can see in a video that I dropped comparing it directly to Siri there's also little adjustments to Android like the new buttons at the bottom they slightly cleaned up Settings app you know the new launcher where you swipe up to get your apps instead of hitting a button these are all things that you don't really think of right off the bat but you get used to them pretty quickly so when trying to figure out if pixel is actually a great smartphone if it's worth spending the extra couple bucks on you might want to consider my five pillars of a great smartphone which I've gone over before first great build quality well it's metal all around it's pretty solid it's missing a couple things is not water resistance so it's okay great performance yes this definitely has that no question great battery life yes again this actually has that one of the best in any smartphone great display this is actually also a pretty solid display it's an AMOLED it could be a bit brighter it's not the best ink but it's pretty good again and a great camera oh the camera on this phone yeah this camera is pretty special pixel is rocking a twelve point three megapixel camera all right no optical image stabilization but an F 2.0 aperture and a pretty big sensor with a one point five five micron pixel size before the phone launched Google hyped it up again saying they're pumped about what they've done with it it's got the highest DxO mark rating of any smartphone camera again but we've heard this before like does that rating even matter anymore well bottom line yet this is a really good camera I've shared a lot of photos from the camera in the past couple weeks since I posted the unboxing video and people are constantly impressed with the quality I even did a blind test on Twitter with the same photo angle from the pixel camera and the iPhone 7 plus camera and plenty of people couldn't decide which was which the number one main reason that the pixel can take such good photos is actually the image processing I mean it's a pretty great sensor in all and that's nice to have pretty decently wide aperture but hdr+ is really important here so remember back in like the Nexus 5 review when I told you guys even though it takes like an extra two seconds turn hdr+ on because those photos look way better than the non HDR plus photos and you get way better colors dynamic range sharpness detail quality everything right this holds true again with the pixel camera but this time it's a no-brainer because auto HDR plus can be turned on by default and it Snapdragon 820 one makes it instant you can take all the exposures of an HDR plus photo instantly in the same amount of time as a regular photo so just turn Auto HDR plus on leave it on all the time for every shot and you will get much better photos with every photo out of the pixel camera so a typical photo from the Google pixel is pretty bright slightly wider angle I would say has a really bright vivid saturated colors and excellent dynamic range and has an occasional lens flare I think the colors look great in terms of realism photos from the pixel tend to have more accurate like reds and greens and most cameras that go for that more saturated look and then there were quite a few photos that I took that made me literally say wow out loud after I took them this is one of those photos now it might not look crazy at first it's not like a scenic landscape but consider this this is taken from a car window I rolled the window the car is going 50 miles an hour the truck next to me is going 50 miles an hour and everything is in perfectly tack sharp focus colors are super good the action is all frozen super well and the dynamic range with the blue sky holy crap that is good and one the worst thing about this random snap out of a moving car window is the lens flare that can apparently be fixed with a software update I think we got a winner now yes the lens flare is pretty common I don't know how much of it can be fixed with software like google claims because lens flare is caused by hardware and physical lens elements but I don't really care I love this camera enough and the photos it takes with it are good enough for me to say that this is my new favorite camera and any smartphone right up at the top of my list in first place the 4k video from the pixel also looks pretty good if you're a person that shoots a lot with their phone I did a whole video shot just with this camera so I'll link it below it's the video on Apollo and it looks pretty good I think the main thing you'll notice while watching is the stabilization so like I said the camera lacks optical image stabilization but the app actually uses data from the phone's gyroscope to provide an improved electronic image stabilization but it's it's super aggressive as you can see so it can sometimes make it look so smooth that you'd swear I was on a tripod even though I'm holding the phone with my hands but other times when it tries so hard to smooth it it can look a little jittery because your hands are moving too much to keep a stable image so it's a little distracting sometimes a little bit beautiful at other times but this can also be improved with a software update I think the weirdest part can be how much of a crop you see in the viewfinder versus the final stabilized video since as you know having a lot of electronic image stabilization means you get out some of the framing punched in a bit alright so going back to the original 5 pillars of what makes a great smartphone the only thing that the pixel isn't great or best-in-class at is the industrial design you know it's not water resistant it doesn't have expandable storage the speakers are bad and in a bad place and it's just so boring but all that just melts away when you actually use the phone the software the pure Android the assistant the great camera all that works so well so if all that being said I think Google pixel is right now my favorite smartphone experience tops in my book there I said it so is it worth the price I think that by challenging other flagship smartphones at this you know the six seven hundred dollar price it's going to price itself out of a lot of other people because if it shows up in a store next to you know the galaxy s7 or a note seven or all these phones that have these crazy bells and whistles features or edge displays or just things iris scanners things that make you say wow the pixels just going to sit next to it and not really look like it's going to do anything special so for a normal person they'll probably skip over it but for an enthusiast for someone who's made it through this entire video and trying to figure out what smartphone to buy looks on YouTube and tries to find the best option this is definitely a great pick and hands-down I have no problem recommending it so there you have it thanks for watching I'll talk to you guys in the next one peace