Gadgetory

hey what is up guys Mk PhD here and this is it this is the Google pixel excel in the flesh we finally have it here by the time you watch this video I will have been using this phone for about half a week or so so about four days so that's not quite enough time for me to give my full review of this phone but it is enough time for me to get to know this phone a lot better and I learned a bunch of new things about it and a lot of these things have to do with Android and the software it's running so this is the first phone running Android 7.1 out of the box so not even 7.0 so usually a point one update is a pretty sizable update but a lot of these things you're going to notice are still little tweak updates from Android 7.0 even so nevertheless these are five of my favorite observations from a couple of days so far using the pixel so number one is the new navigation bar at the bottom of the screen design is a little bit different you can see the buttons are filled in now and it's grown on me a little bit the other thing is not all phones have software buttons so that's something you have to get used to I've switched phones a lot between on screen and off screen buttons so I came from the 1 plus 3 so the big old on this phone I found myself like tapping in that empty space to go back or go multitask that doesn't do anything there's nothing down there it's just the software buttons but yeah like I said I've gotten used to the new look and I'm actually using the assistant a bit more than I use now on tap you can see there's this little animation now for pressing home and of course the long press home will get you to the new assistant so number 2 let's talk about that the assistant so on pixel phones it's baked into the OS so like you saw a long press of home will open it as far as I know this is only on pixel phones so on other Android phones you can get to the assistant with the alo app or something like that but the way works here is pretty clean and familiar you have the long press and it starts listening and you can also say okay Google from anywhere on any screen or even when the phone is off to get it to start listening to you and take a command or question if there's stuff on my screen I can hold home and then actually swipe up to get potentially useful information based on what it's reading on my screen so that's still useful from now on tap so number three is the completely finished pixel launcher so a bunch of you might have been like me and we're using the apk of the pixel launcher before on some other phones but now this is the final version and there's also actually still so many things for those who weren't using it number one thing you'll notice is the circular icons yes there are circles everywhere it's not entirely consistent like you still have the alo icon is not a circle for example the Dropbox icon is not a circle but the one thing you can say is that they're now all the same size so you couldn't say that before but that minor adjustment actually makes a big difference to feeling clean and this launcher you now swipe up to get into your app drawer instead of pressing a button actually have grown to really like that so it gives you a way bigger touch target to swipe up from instead of having to hit a button in the middle of the phone it's actually easier if your reach and then you can just swipe anywhere from the dock area so that gives me an extra slot in my dock for another favorite app also at the top of the launcher is a clickable weather forecast now it actually goes to your weather and in the launcher settings you actually also now have something called app suggestions which I turned off but it'll literally show you in your app drawer an app that you don't have installed just because it thinks you might want to have it so I probably would turn that off all right so number four might look familiar to people who have used a certain other smartphone recently and that is the ability to long press any icons on your homescreen or in your app drawer to get functions inside of your apps so the Twitter app for example you could long press the icon and it will give you a shortcut to go right to your DMS or right to composing a new tweet this reminds you of 3d touch on the iPhone so while Apple sort of developed this really technically impressive proprietary display technology for sensing pressure Google just built it into a long press so yeah a lot of Google first party apps now have this functionality freshly baked in because they were expecting it but yeah more and more third-party apps will soon start to have this as well so I'm ready for that I'm assuming the rollout will a lot like the way it did with 3d touch on iOS not sure how much I'll use it because again I mean if you're an iPhone user honestly how much do you use 3d touch some more than others maybe you do more than me but it's a cool feature I just think it's cool that they figured that out and they built it right into the phone and then this number five last but not least something pretty small called gestures or moves so if you go to the settings you'll see a section just called moves and it's for some new gestures three main new things one is you can switch between the front and back cameras and the camera app with a double twist so it's kind of similar to what you did in the Motorola camera app back in the day to open the camera number two is to double tap the power button to open the camera this isn't new we've seen this before and other nexuses but again it allows you to not have a camera shortcut on your phone you can just double tap the power button and the third and final thing is you can use the finger probe reader on the back to swipe up and down to pull down the notification tray from anywhere and also pull it back up so that's pretty cool I turn that on I definitely do have some accidental swipes when I'm just holding the phone and handling the phone but for the most part if I made an effort to think about it it actually works as a shortcut to just swipe down and check the time and then swipe back up and if I have a notification I'll see it pretty quickly so there you have it it's a bunch of small refinement type stuff on Android 7.1 on this pixel phone obviously the full review is coming soon so what I want you to do is let me know in the comments section right below that like button what you want to see in the full review obviously the camera that's a major one that I want to test its so far looking really promising and I have good initial impressions but that's something I want to test battery life I have the excel again so far so good but stuff like that let me know what you guys want to know about this phone and that will surely be tested for the full review video either way that's been it thank you for watching I'll talk to you guys the next one peace