Gadgetory

well you look at that it's the pixel - and it's the pixel - Excel the Google phones are back for another round and they might not be all that much to look at but they're good really good this is only the second year of Google making its own phones but you can already tell that the company is sticking to a few consistent themes it wants to make something that's really practical these are phones that are more impressive to use than they are to behold they just do dozens of little things better than you might expect given their kind of unassuming form and it starts with the hardware the nice thing about these phones is that other than the size of the screen and the battery they are basically identical Google isn't making you miss out on too much by choosing the smaller phone and for both of different sizes there are a few different colors and they all have slightly different textures the white and the blue ones look nicer to me but the black ones are a little bit easier to grip even so I really prefer the pixel to excel because of the screen it's got this huge 6 inch 18 by 9 OLED screen that goes nearly edge-to-edge with curved corners and a ridiculously high 538 pixels per inch and the screen looks good to me but I will tell you that it has been polarizing you see lots of Android phones have these pen tasmad goreck colors especially compared to the iPhone but here the pixel screen is tuned to srgb and so the colors are much more toned down it's better than your worst LG v30 fears but it is not up to Samsung quality if you're into the smaller pixel to the 5-inch screen there isn't quite as technically good but it's still really nice it's just smaller and square it off so we should talk about bezels both phones have them and they look especially big and dumb on the smaller pixel - but even the XL has some thin bezels that go all the way around so yeah the bezels are not awesome but they do make space for dual front-facing speakers and yo the speaker's sound great they get really loud without too much audio Distortion they've got pretty good stereo separation and they even manage to convey a little bit of bass now they're not going to replace a separate Bluetooth speaker but I am finding I'm using a way more often than I expected speaking of sound there is no headphone jack which is frustrating and annoying it's the one impractical design decision that Google made and I still feel like it's gonna be a year or two before the accessory world gets caught up I have precisely zero faith that USBC headphones are going to be standard or any good anytime soon so yeah don't lose the dongle that comes in the box and sorry there are no headphones in the box oh but on the bright side Bluetooth here is 5.0 and I experienced way fewer drops and audio stutters that I did on the last pixel Google kept the glass shade on the back it's pretty much already the pixel trademark now but they did make it smaller there's also a tiny bit of a camera bump Google also kept the fingerprint sensor in the same easy to reach spot and it's a crazy fast fingerprint sensor by the way it's faster than any I've used on any other Android phone specs sure let's run them down they're totally standard for flagship Android phones it's a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with 4 gigs of RAM and base storage of 64 gigs the bigger pixel has a bigger battery so I am getting a little bit more of a day of use out of it the smaller one didn't quite go that long for me but it should still hit a day of light to medium use unfortunately there is no wireless charging but the fast charging over USB C is in fact very fast the new pixels are also finally water and dust resistant they're rated at IP 67 which is good enough for a short dunk but you probably shouldn't go swimming with them honestly it seems like Google went out of its way to make these phones feel kind of plain so for example they're made out of Gorilla Glass and aluminum just like every phone but Google coated the aluminum in this textured finish that makes them easier to grip and also hides the antenna lines think about that Google took a metal phone and covered it in a material that makes it feel like plastic just so that's easier to hold you really won't impress anybody with a look of these things see if you want to impress somebody with the pixel - you should just take a picture of them yes the most impressive thing about the pixel 2 is it's camera both because of the pictures it takes and because the 12 megapixel camera is just endlessly interesting from a technical perspective the pixel you see it takes pictures a little bit differently from other phones you've probably already noticed that there's only one lens on the back not to Google thinks that's all that it needs do the same kinds of camera tricks that other phones do with multiple lenses instead of a dual camera Google is switching to something called dual pixels basically each individual pixel on the sensor that reads light is split into a left and a right pixel which doubles the number that gives Google more raw data to work with and makes portrait mode possible without an extra lens another major change this year is the addition of optical image stabilization which should help keep blurring down if you have shaky hands but the most important thing that Google is doing is constantly shooting photos while the camera app is active and then stacking a small set of them whenever you hit the shutter button combining them with you know math Google calls as hdr+ but it's much more than just high dynamic range it's using algorithms to take a bunch of very noisy data from a bunch of shots and combine them into one good image now to be clear Google is not the first to use HDR auto it's not the first to use oh is and it's not the first to use dual pixels what it does seem to be doing is taking all of those technologies and combining them algorithmically better than anybody else photos you take with the pixel seemed to pick up more detail and provide sharper images then you're gonna see on an iPhone 8 plus or a note 8 I'm consistently impressed with the results I'm getting in even challenging situations including backlit subjects and low lighting conditions saturation seems pretty well-balanced about in line with what Apple is doing now it's not nearly as intense as what you're gonna get out of a Samsung phone as for portrait mode it's impressive but it's not radically better than the competition the way Google does it goes back to those dual pixels even though they're less than a micron apart that's enough for Google to detect depth combined that with the multiple shots that you take every time you click the shutter button and you end up with a massive pile of data for the pixel to use machine learning on to make a portrait with a blurred background hell you can even do portrait mode on faces in the selfie camera even though it doesn't have dual pixels there because of all that machine learning now just like with the iPhone A+ and the note 8 you can usually tell when a phone is artificial and blur to the background the pixel generally does a better job cutting around the hair on a subject and it is able to work with non-human subjects on the rear camera but I can't say that it's unequivocally better because the pixel only has one option for portrait mode on or off and you can't tweak the results either there are some other camera tricks notably motion photos which are essentially a little video they're not quite as nice as Apple's live photo to my eye but you can get basically the same fun little motion effects unfortunately I wish there were more ways to edit them after the fact Google also combines both oh is an electronic stabilization when you shoot a video it's still not a perfect system you can get some fake looking video when you pan but overall it does a much better job of accounting for shake and bounce we'll do a full deep dive photo comparison once the iPhone 10 is out but in the meantime here's the bottom line it's in the same class as the best phone cameras out there and it's often at the head of that class what's so fascinating about Google's approach is that it created a camera that gathers more data not one that just gathers more light it's an AI approach to photography because AI if you haven't figured it out by now is a very big deal for the pixel to now if we're talking about AI the most important thing to pay attention to is obviously the Google assistant it's good at things you might take for granted as an Android user it can do a lot of stuff when you're offline you can set Spotify to be your default music player you can ask questions in a pretty normal language there's a full history of your previous searches that's really easy to find and you can type to it if you don't want to talk which I love and now there's a new way to launch the assistant by squeezing the phone it is a little gimmicky but it's also surprisingly convenient and it works well you can adjust how hard you need to squeeze the phone to launch the assistant and you can also set it to silence the ringer when you squeeze it what you can't do with this so-called active edge feature is remap that squeeze to anything else its assistant or nothing the assistant does a better job of worming its way into my everyday use of the pixel than Siri ever has with the iPhone it just tends to be more generally useful with results of point to what I actually want more often and sometimes soon you're gonna get another input method for the assistant your camera the feature is called google lens and for now it's limited just to a button inside the Photos app it can recognize stuff like Mark Worth or landmarks or books movies and some other things that are pretty easy to do an image search on lens will be much more interesting when it's built into the Google assistant or the camera app or Google key or whatever else you can think of long term lense is supposed to be another input method next to text and speech short term though it's basically just a parlor trick I'll be at one that's occasionally useful oh you know how the pixel is also always listening for you to say ok Google now it also listens for music it shows you what's playing on the lockscreen without you even needing to ask for it all of that identification happens locally on the phone it doesn't send anything to Google's cloud and it even works if you don't have data so hopefully it's not too creepy for you anyway it is a nice subtle touch in fact there are a lot of nice subtle touches on this phone and most of them aren't actually AI they're just iterations on the software every time Google makes a phone and some stuff around on the homescreen this time the Google search button gets moved to the bottom integrated into the doc that search box now does double duty as your on device search - which is smart the homescreen also has a new widget which shows your next calendar appointment the weather and the date there are a few artfully animated wallpapers but I wish there were more of them and there's no way to make your own with motion photos but there is one neat trick if you have a dark wallpaper the app drawer and the notification shade switch to a dark theme automatically the lock screen can be set to always on and show little icons free notifications I do wish there are a few more customization options for it though also there are some other like neat features on the way like augmented reality stickers inside the camera app but unfortunately they're just not ready for the launch yet but really the most important thing to know is that this is Android as Google sees it it's pretty clean there's no extra gunk that you don't want and it has the fastest and most consistent access to OS updates and overall performance has been pretty great I just hope it doesn't get crufty over time like some Android phones tend to do but the pixel been pretty good in that regard I just really like the direction that Google is taking the software here and I really like this phone a lot of phones are designed for one thing above all else to give you a dazzling first impression the pixel 2 doesn't go in for all that in fact the first Hardware impression you get isn't going to blow your hair back but then you start to use it and you notice those little things like your hair not getting cropped off weird on your portrait mode and you notice yourself using the assistant or and then it's giving you better answers and you notice that the software is fast and it helps you be more productive those impressions don't get mentioned often enough but they're super important the pixel 2 and the pixel 2 XL our phones that are designed to be of use they're not the nice dining room table where you lay out the fancy silverware for your guests they're the kitchen counter where you actually eat it's those everyday impressions that show why this year's Google phones that have great design in fact there are a lot [Laughter]