Google Pixel Review - The Good and The Bad

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi everyone Aaron here for Zolo tech and this is Google's first attempt at their own hardware this is going to be the top five or six positives and negatives about this hardware it's really great and I've been using it for about a week or so and want to give you my thoughts as far as that goes so the first thing is the hardware the hardware is really solid it's made by HTC and similar to how Apple does it Apple creates the design and then farms it out to Foxconn to build it for them Google has done the same but with HTC so they design the hardware HTC builds it and that means it's pretty high quality this is aluminum this is glass and then we have gorilla glass on the front we've got speakers on the bottom or a speaker on the bottom along with a microphone and USBC and then we have our sim card slot right here we've got a headphone jack on the top which is always nice and then on this side we've got our volume and power buttons and the power button it has this knurled aluminum feel it is metal and it helps you differentiate between the volume button I would have liked to see these on the opposite side of each other but it really helps feeling the diff differences between the hardware so that's the hardware itself we've got a great camera in front and back and we'll talk more about that in a moment but the first positive is the hardware itself the second is the specs we've got a Snapdragon 820 one chip in it it's really nice and very fast it's a quad core this is the excel model so we get four gigabytes of RAM and it's got 32 gigabytes of storage you also have 128 gigabytes as an option so this is really nice the specs make this crazy fast it never slows down whatsoever in fact when I was installing the apps setting this up it never slowed down at all so if you've ever used Android before and you install apps when you first set it up I brought over all of my different data from my iPhone including texts and everything and then I installed these applications and while doing that it never hit up pick up it never slowed down nothing at all so that is the second positive superfast smooth experience with this particular version of Android and this hardware optimized for this hardware there really is no faster Android phone out there at this point the third positive about the pixel XL is its display its a 5.5 inch qHD display and it's a little bit smaller than last year's 5.7 inch Nexus 6p display but right now the pixel is at half brightness and the Nexus 6p is at full brightness so if we turn this way up you'll see it's very bright it's easy to see in sunlight no problems whatsoever and it looks great you'll never see a pixel and you really don't need to kill your battery leaving it at full brightness because it's plenty bright at about half brightness so it looks great the fourth positive is battery life battery life has been pretty great actually it's it's been depending on the day it basically gets me a day and a half and that's the same as my iPhone 7 plus so you can see it says 19 hours 21 hours ago 19 hours left I've been using this right alongside my iPhone 7 plus to give it a fair comparison and really it's been pretty great we've got one hour 58 minutes of screen on time and I've had the screen on a lot just recording this with the different brightnesses so it's kind of draining battery a little bit more quickly than normal but I can easily get through the day without charging it plug it in at night and you're good to go v positive is Google Assistant Google assistant is on another level compared to Google now it basically brings an assistant in similar to Siri and let you do all of the same lookups you could do with Google now and set alarms and timers and all sorts of things but you can also tell it to get the weather tell the tell to get the weather daily it learns what you like and basically fetches the same thing Google now would but also can give you so much more so let me give you a few examples okay Google what's the weather today it'll be sunny in Charlotte today with a forecasted high of 79 and a low of 52 degrees Fahrenheit it's 76 and sunny okay Google how are you today I'm feeling helpful what can I do for you what do you think of Apple they have good products I'm a fan do you like iPhone I'm an Android fan but I might be biased so aside from just the simple normal look ups you could do you can hold a conversation whether if you really wanted to and kids usually like to play around with that but basically it does a lot more than just this show me the tech news from yesterday here's a result from search show me what technology was released yesterday so it has a few different options it will show you different things you can do with it but it also can do things like fetch news for you show me the tech news from this morning here's technology news we have an obituary now for isn't so that's probably not the best technology news but it will play you some news and it's about in a minute and 28 seconds long so you can do that on the go what else can you do here are a couple of suggestions you can say things like navigate home or navigate to work to see more just swipe the options on your screen Google now is really handy and it works really great actually it worked so well as far as voice recognition goes was driving down the road at 45 miles per hour and it could understand what I was saying with all my windows down so it's pretty good as far as that goes the sixth and final positive I have to say about the Google pixel is the camera the camera is really phenomenal it's a slightly redesigned interface it's super fast I can just keep hitting pictures and it takes those pictures and it they just look great you can zoom it is digital zoom but it does a pretty good job and then if I want to swipe over I can take video as well so we just take video and it's also stabilized via software so if you're walking around it actually looks pretty good when it's stabilized the other thing you can do is switch recording modes they've got 60 frames per second a lot of really nice features built into this camera and if you want to take a selfie you just basically shake it in your hand and then you've got this and as you can see I'm recording with the 7 plus so the camera overall is a great feature and the Google pixel is great but there are some negatives and I would say the first negative has to do with the design now the design itself is very familiar and blend basically it you have to admit it looks familiar to an iPhone you've got a large chit on the bottom large one on the top and I really liked the more iconic design of the Nexus 6p some people love this design some people hate it but there was no mistaking that it was a nexus this one can be mistaken for an iPhone I've had a lot of people actually ask if it was the new iPhone sitting on my desk so it's definitely not an iconic design yet but I think they'll get there and if you saw it from the back it would be hard to mistake it but from the front it looks like every other phone out there and that's either a good thing or a bad thing to you my second negative about the pixel is the speaker there's only one of them unlike the Nexus 6p that has dual front-facing speakers you only have one on the pixel in the pixel XL they're nice and loud so let me play a video for you here this is a video I made about the pixel I'll turn it up I ordered this within minutes of it going live maybe even seconds of it going live it's nice and loud but unfortunately there's only one so that could be a major positive or a major negative for you as far as the loudness but for me I'd love to have a dual front facing speaker or stereo speakers facing me the third negative for some is going to be that this is Verizon only or you can buy unlocked from Google and Best Buy in other places but if you want it on a carrier and you want it through a contract or through payments usually you'll have to go through Verizon in the United States they're still unlocked from what I understand and it does come with a couple apps that you can uninstall but if you do want it it's tied to Verizon for now I'm sure will come hopefully to other carriers in the future as the Google pixel basically maybe we get a pixel - hopefully they'll pair with different carriers similar to the iPhone when they went with AT&T and then eventually move to others so that's one of the other negatives as well fourth negative has to do with no wireless charging now this might be a stretch for some some people don't care about it but the Nexus 6p didn't have wireless charging and neither does this phone so if you want wireless charging you're going to have to look elsewhere to something like a Samsung for example the fifth and final negative is the price most people are complaining about the price of this phone it's $800 plus after-tax in the United States for the unlocked pixel XL and that's only with 32 gigabytes of RAM if you want more than that 128 you're going to pay another hundred dollars so that's pretty expensive and the regular size pixel is still expensive as well we're talking iPhone and Galaxy Note galaxy s7 prices so if you don't have that kind of money you're going to have to look at something else like the Nexus 6p which is a great phone but in order to get this phone you're going to have to pay that premium price so that's really all I have as far as the pixel it's a great phone there's not many negatives to really say about it it's the best and fastest Android experience I've ever seen the Google assistant is great and the hardware is great but there are a couple negatives so let me know what you think about those in the comments below do you like the pixel XL you're going to stick with the Nexus or the Nexus 5x let me know in the comments below if you haven't subscribed already please subscribe and like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll see you next time youhi everyone Aaron here for Zolo tech and this is Google's first attempt at their own hardware this is going to be the top five or six positives and negatives about this hardware it's really great and I've been using it for about a week or so and want to give you my thoughts as far as that goes so the first thing is the hardware the hardware is really solid it's made by HTC and similar to how Apple does it Apple creates the design and then farms it out to Foxconn to build it for them Google has done the same but with HTC so they design the hardware HTC builds it and that means it's pretty high quality this is aluminum this is glass and then we have gorilla glass on the front we've got speakers on the bottom or a speaker on the bottom along with a microphone and USBC and then we have our sim card slot right here we've got a headphone jack on the top which is always nice and then on this side we've got our volume and power buttons and the power button it has this knurled aluminum feel it is metal and it helps you differentiate between the volume button I would have liked to see these on the opposite side of each other but it really helps feeling the diff differences between the hardware so that's the hardware itself we've got a great camera in front and back and we'll talk more about that in a moment but the first positive is the hardware itself the second is the specs we've got a Snapdragon 820 one chip in it it's really nice and very fast it's a quad core this is the excel model so we get four gigabytes of RAM and it's got 32 gigabytes of storage you also have 128 gigabytes as an option so this is really nice the specs make this crazy fast it never slows down whatsoever in fact when I was installing the apps setting this up it never slowed down at all so if you've ever used Android before and you install apps when you first set it up I brought over all of my different data from my iPhone including texts and everything and then I installed these applications and while doing that it never hit up pick up it never slowed down nothing at all so that is the second positive superfast smooth experience with this particular version of Android and this hardware optimized for this hardware there really is no faster Android phone out there at this point the third positive about the pixel XL is its display its a 5.5 inch qHD display and it's a little bit smaller than last year's 5.7 inch Nexus 6p display but right now the pixel is at half brightness and the Nexus 6p is at full brightness so if we turn this way up you'll see it's very bright it's easy to see in sunlight no problems whatsoever and it looks great you'll never see a pixel and you really don't need to kill your battery leaving it at full brightness because it's plenty bright at about half brightness so it looks great the fourth positive is battery life battery life has been pretty great actually it's it's been depending on the day it basically gets me a day and a half and that's the same as my iPhone 7 plus so you can see it says 19 hours 21 hours ago 19 hours left I've been using this right alongside my iPhone 7 plus to give it a fair comparison and really it's been pretty great we've got one hour 58 minutes of screen on time and I've had the screen on a lot just recording this with the different brightnesses so it's kind of draining battery a little bit more quickly than normal but I can easily get through the day without charging it plug it in at night and you're good to go v positive is Google Assistant Google assistant is on another level compared to Google now it basically brings an assistant in similar to Siri and let you do all of the same lookups you could do with Google now and set alarms and timers and all sorts of things but you can also tell it to get the weather tell the tell to get the weather daily it learns what you like and basically fetches the same thing Google now would but also can give you so much more so let me give you a few examples okay Google what's the weather today it'll be sunny in Charlotte today with a forecasted high of 79 and a low of 52 degrees Fahrenheit it's 76 and sunny okay Google how are you today I'm feeling helpful what can I do for you what do you think of Apple they have good products I'm a fan do you like iPhone I'm an Android fan but I might be biased so aside from just the simple normal look ups you could do you can hold a conversation whether if you really wanted to and kids usually like to play around with that but basically it does a lot more than just this show me the tech news from yesterday here's a result from search show me what technology was released yesterday so it has a few different options it will show you different things you can do with it but it also can do things like fetch news for you show me the tech news from this morning here's technology news we have an obituary now for isn't so that's probably not the best technology news but it will play you some news and it's about in a minute and 28 seconds long so you can do that on the go what else can you do here are a couple of suggestions you can say things like navigate home or navigate to work to see more just swipe the options on your screen Google now is really handy and it works really great actually it worked so well as far as voice recognition goes was driving down the road at 45 miles per hour and it could understand what I was saying with all my windows down so it's pretty good as far as that goes the sixth and final positive I have to say about the Google pixel is the camera the camera is really phenomenal it's a slightly redesigned interface it's super fast I can just keep hitting pictures and it takes those pictures and it they just look great you can zoom it is digital zoom but it does a pretty good job and then if I want to swipe over I can take video as well so we just take video and it's also stabilized via software so if you're walking around it actually looks pretty good when it's stabilized the other thing you can do is switch recording modes they've got 60 frames per second a lot of really nice features built into this camera and if you want to take a selfie you just basically shake it in your hand and then you've got this and as you can see I'm recording with the 7 plus so the camera overall is a great feature and the Google pixel is great but there are some negatives and I would say the first negative has to do with the design now the design itself is very familiar and blend basically it you have to admit it looks familiar to an iPhone you've got a large chit on the bottom large one on the top and I really liked the more iconic design of the Nexus 6p some people love this design some people hate it but there was no mistaking that it was a nexus this one can be mistaken for an iPhone I've had a lot of people actually ask if it was the new iPhone sitting on my desk so it's definitely not an iconic design yet but I think they'll get there and if you saw it from the back it would be hard to mistake it but from the front it looks like every other phone out there and that's either a good thing or a bad thing to you my second negative about the pixel is the speaker there's only one of them unlike the Nexus 6p that has dual front-facing speakers you only have one on the pixel in the pixel XL they're nice and loud so let me play a video for you here this is a video I made about the pixel I'll turn it up I ordered this within minutes of it going live maybe even seconds of it going live it's nice and loud but unfortunately there's only one so that could be a major positive or a major negative for you as far as the loudness but for me I'd love to have a dual front facing speaker or stereo speakers facing me the third negative for some is going to be that this is Verizon only or you can buy unlocked from Google and Best Buy in other places but if you want it on a carrier and you want it through a contract or through payments usually you'll have to go through Verizon in the United States they're still unlocked from what I understand and it does come with a couple apps that you can uninstall but if you do want it it's tied to Verizon for now I'm sure will come hopefully to other carriers in the future as the Google pixel basically maybe we get a pixel - hopefully they'll pair with different carriers similar to the iPhone when they went with AT&T and then eventually move to others so that's one of the other negatives as well fourth negative has to do with no wireless charging now this might be a stretch for some some people don't care about it but the Nexus 6p didn't have wireless charging and neither does this phone so if you want wireless charging you're going to have to look elsewhere to something like a Samsung for example the fifth and final negative is the price most people are complaining about the price of this phone it's $800 plus after-tax in the United States for the unlocked pixel XL and that's only with 32 gigabytes of RAM if you want more than that 128 you're going to pay another hundred dollars so that's pretty expensive and the regular size pixel is still expensive as well we're talking iPhone and Galaxy Note galaxy s7 prices so if you don't have that kind of money you're going to have to look at something else like the Nexus 6p which is a great phone but in order to get this phone you're going to have to pay that premium price so that's really all I have as far as the pixel it's a great phone there's not many negatives to really say about it it's the best and fastest Android experience I've ever seen the Google assistant is great and the hardware is great but there are a couple negatives so let me know what you think about those in the comments below do you like the pixel XL you're going to stick with the Nexus or the Nexus 5x let me know in the comments below if you haven't subscribed already please subscribe and like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll see you next time you\n"