Google Pixel 4 Review - Inside the Hype Machine!

The Pixel 4: A Smartphone with Ambitious Features and Disappointing Execution

As someone who has had the chance to use the Pixel 4, I can confidently say that it's a smartphone with ambitious features that don't quite live up to their full potential. One of the main reasons why I think this is because of the camera capabilities. The camera on the Pixel 4 is excellent for still photos, with punchy and detailed results that are hard to match. In fact, I personally prefer the camera on the Pixel 4 over other smartphones like the iPhone 11 Pro, even in low light conditions. However, when it comes to video recording, the Pixel 4 doesn't quite compete with the iPhone 11 Pro.

The iPhone 11 Pro has a more versatile camera setup, with an ultra-wide lens that gives it an edge over the Pixel 4. The iPhone also crushes it in video recording, with 1080p front-facing wide camera and the ability to top out at 24fps video. This makes it a better option for those who are in it for video recording.

That being said, if I had to pick one smartphone that has the best camera, I would have to go with the iPhone 11 Pro. However, this is not a decision I take lightly, as both smartphones have their strengths and weaknesses. The Pixel 4's camera is excellent, but it doesn't quite match up with the iPhone 11 Pro in certain scenarios.

One of the areas where the Pixel 4 shines is in its low light performance. It takes stunning photos that are hard to match, even on other high-end smartphones like the Google Pixel 3a. However, the Pixel 4's ultra-wide lens is not as impressive as some of its competitors.

The iPhone 11 Pro also has a good low-light camera, but it can be a bit noisy at times. On the other hand, the iPhone 11 Pro has a more advanced feature called Night Mode, which gives it an edge over the Pixel 4 in terms of noise reduction and overall image quality.

Another area where the Pixel 4 shines is in its display. The phone features a 90Hz refresh rate display that gives it a smooth and responsive feel. This is something that not many other smartphones can match, and it makes for an excellent viewing experience.

However, despite its strengths, the Pixel 4 still has some major weaknesses. One of the biggest issues is its battery life, which is just average at best. The phone's compact design also means that it doesn't have much space for a bigger battery.

Another area where the Pixel 4 falls short is in terms of storage. The base model comes with only 64GB of storage, which can be a bit restrictive for those who want more space to store their apps and files. This is not unique to the Pixel 4, as many other high-end smartphones also have limited storage options.

Despite these weaknesses, the Pixel 4 still has some amazing features that set it apart from its competitors. One of the most notable features is Android 10, which gives the phone a range of advanced features and capabilities. The new operating system includes features like Smart Lock, which allows you to use your phone with just a glance, and an improved Google Assistant.

Another feature that sets the Pixel 4 apart is its Night Sight mode, which uses advanced algorithms to capture stunning low-light photos. This is something that has been available on the Pixel 3a, but it's taken to the next level in the Pixel 4.

The Pixel 4 also features a new feature called Live Transcribe, which allows you to transcribe conversations in real-time using your phone's microphone and speaker. This is a game-changer for those who want to be able to take notes or capture quotes from conversations without having to rely on a separate device.

Overall, the Pixel 4 is a smartphone that is full of features and capabilities that make it an excellent choice for many users. However, it also has some major weaknesses that need to be addressed before it can truly compete with its competitors. If you're in the market for a new smartphone and are willing to overpay for the latest version of Android, then the Pixel 4 may be the perfect choice for you.

However, if you're looking for a more affordable option or prefer the ecosystem of an iPhone, there are many other great smartphones out there that may be better suited for your needs. The Google Pixel 3a, for example, is a great alternative to the Pixel 4 and offers many of the same features at a lower price point.

In conclusion, the Pixel 4 is a smartphone with ambitious features that don't quite live up to their full potential. While it has some amazing strengths, such as its excellent camera and smooth display, it also falls short in terms of battery life and storage capacity. However, if you're willing to overlook these weaknesses and want the latest version of Android with advanced features like Smart Lock and Live Transcribe, then the Pixel 4 may be worth considering.

A Comparison with Other Smartphones: The iPhone 11 Pro

The iPhone 11 Pro is a smartphone that has some of the best camera capabilities on the market. With an ultra-wide lens, it's able to capture stunning photos and videos that are hard to match. However, in terms of low-light performance, the iPhone 11 Pro can be a bit noisy at times.

One of the areas where the iPhone 11 Pro shines is in its Night Mode feature, which gives it an edge over many other smartphones when it comes to noise reduction and overall image quality. The iPhone 11 Pro also has a more advanced feature called Deep Fusion, which uses machine learning algorithms to capture stunning photos that are full of detail.

Another area where the iPhone 11 Pro shines is in its display. With a 6.1-inch OLED display, it's able to produce vibrant colors and deep blacks that make for an excellent viewing experience.

However, despite its strengths, the iPhone 11 Pro also has some major weaknesses. One of the biggest issues is its price, which can be steep for many budgets. The phone starts at $999, which is more than some other high-end smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra.

Another area where the iPhone 11 Pro falls short is in terms of storage capacity. The base model comes with only 64GB of storage, which can be a bit restrictive for those who want more space to store their apps and files. This is not unique to the iPhone 11 Pro, as many other high-end smartphones also have limited storage options.

Despite these weaknesses, the iPhone 11 Pro is still an excellent choice for many users. Its camera capabilities are among the best on the market, and its Night Mode feature gives it a serious edge over many other smartphones when it comes to low-light performance.

The iPhone 11 Pro also features a range of advanced features that set it apart from its competitors. One of the most notable features is Face ID, which allows you to unlock your phone with just a glance. The phone also has an improved Google Assistant and support for wireless charging.

In conclusion, the iPhone 11 Pro is a smartphone that offers some of the best camera capabilities on the market. However, it also comes with a higher price point than many other smartphones, as well as limited storage capacity. If you're looking for a more affordable option or prefer the ecosystem of an Android device, then there are many other great smartphones out there that may be better suited for your needs.

The Future of Smartphones: A Look at What's Next

As we look to the future, it's clear that smartphones will continue to evolve and improve in terms of camera capabilities, display quality, and storage capacity. Some of the most exciting features on the horizon include improved augmented reality capabilities, advanced biometric security measures, and faster charging speeds.

One of the areas where smartphones are likely to see significant improvement is in their camera capabilities. With advancements in machine learning algorithms and sensor technology, it's possible that future smartphones will be able to capture even more stunning low-light photos and videos.

Another area where smartphones are likely to improve is in terms of display quality. As OLED displays become more widespread, we can expect to see even brighter colors, deeper blacks, and faster refresh rates on our smartphones.

Finally, as we look to the future, it's clear that smartphones will also be getting more advanced biometric security measures. From fingerprint scanning to facial recognition, these features are becoming increasingly common and secure.

In conclusion, the Pixel 4 is a smartphone with ambitious features that don't quite live up to their full potential. However, if you're willing to overlook its weaknesses and want the latest version of Android with advanced features like Smart Lock and Live Transcribe, then it may be worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what is up guys mkbhd here this is the pixel 4 xl this is one of the phones i was looking forward to the most this entire year for 2019 for a couple of reasons and so now i've been using it daily since it's unveiling this is my honest review so let's just start with the way it looks i honestly think it's a pretty decent looking phone it's low-key really clean there's almost no markings along the back just the google g at the bottom matte black aluminum rails as part of the design all the way around the phone speaker slots at the bottom lined up with the usb type-c port and the colored power button of course on every version and the whole back of the phone on two of the colors is this soft touch matte finish which does a great job of not showing fingerprints it doesn't seem to scratch very easily at all so of the three colors available i'm gonna say this white this panda version is the best one that power button is pretty sweet then i'm going to say oh so orange is in second place not so great power button but at least it's matte and then that jet black weirdly very glossy version is in third place fun fact though since the rails are still matte black you can slap a matte black dbrand skin on the back of any of these phones and you just created the matte black everything phone google should have made in the first place so link to that below and of course shout out to dbrand for sponsoring this video the pixel square camera bump is again annoyingly a little bit raised but i don't find this as drastic as say apple's larger double raised triple camera bump but more on the cameras later so yeah you know what generally it's grown on me pretty decent looking phone i was though let a little bit down by the not super clicky buttons just the volume ones mainly but on the other hand something a lot of people have missed that's good to know the phone is now ip68 water resistant it still has the squeeze sensitivity for the assistant and it still has stereo speakers so they're not front-facing pair like they were last year but they are still a good sounding solid pair with the slots at the bottom and the earpiece speaker combined uh the worst part about the way this phone looks is the front the part you look at most of the time i'm not a fan of the forehead it has a smaller chin at the bottom than before but yeah that big forehead i don't like it i'm still kind of barely getting used to it and overall the reason for the forehead doesn't really have me convinced so there's a cluster of new sensors up here in the top including the selfie camera then also infrared projector receiver and radar which is new in any smartphone and this new sensor suite up here is good for two things the fastest face unlock in any smartphone and some gestures okay maybe it makes me a little not forward thinking but i still like fingerprint sensors and this phone has none of that the face unlock is the only biometric unlock this phone has and i find myself missing a fingerprint sensor and the rate of improvement for fingerprint sensors under the glass has been pretty good so that move was not my favorite pixel 4 uses a radar sensor to essentially project a little bubble around the phone to see when things are near it when things are in the bubble when they enter it exit it etc so when you reach for your phone basically your hand enters the bubble and it starts firing up the infrared and face unlock sensors early so by the time you pick the phone up it's already reading your face and logging you in and it's incredibly fast over and over again it's super impressive possibly too fast this kind of reminds me of the oneplus 6 and other phones that would just do face unlock with just the rgb cameras so they'd be insanely fast they would just see anything that looks like you and just unlock as soon as you glance at it so this isn't that it's still infrared so it still can't be fooled by a photo or video of you it still works in the dark and things like that so it's got advantages but it's still a little bit wild i find myself just unlocking this phone left and right all the time anytime i even just look at it sometimes i pick up the phone just to move it across my desk and i'll just glance at the time and it unlocks the phone it also doesn't require your attention so it will unlock with your eyes closed that's uh that's a bit of a weird security quirk and it actually even tells you it'll do this in the settings when you turn this on it says looking at the phone can unlock it when you don't intend it to and your device can be unlocked by someone even if it's held up to your face even if your eyes are closed and potentially could be unlocked by someone who just looks a lot like you these are things that could potentially be fixed or improved with a software update and google's been pretty good about software updates but as of right now they're just pretty annoying my solution is turn off the skip lock screen option so if i do accidentally unlock it at least it won't be awake for a while it just sits on the lock screen and then it'll go back to sleep but yeah i mean that's what i think i mean when i say i would have liked a fingerprint reader option it's a little safer we're a little more used to it and it just sort of works when we need it and doesn't when we don't so that's face unlock but then these sensors also enable a couple very specific gestures so anytime you're in a situation you can wave over your phone and use the gesture the status bar sort of lights up it starts glowing and that means it's ready so those situations are alarm clocks timers media controls and a pikachu live wallpaper and there are no instructions like really built into android there's none in the android 10 setup for example nothing really tells you what's going on when you first get that glowing bar you just kind of have to know so when an alarm or a timer is going off as your hand enters that radar bubble it quiets the alarm and then you can dismiss it by tapping or swiping away over the phone that for me was my favorite it worked really well i can sleep with my phone on this pixel stand next to the bed and when the alarm goes off i just reach for it and it's already quieting down the other thing that was less consistent for me is music apps so if you're in spotify or google play music or any supported app where that glowing bar starts showing up you can swipe forward and swipe back through previous and next tracks and yeah that's it just forward and backwards when i first tried this at the event i was getting a success rate of like 10 percent i'm not even exaggerating like it was pretty abysmal now with some troubleshooting and practice and some tips from twitter i'd say i'm up to like a 70 swipe success rate maybe 75 so it's less of like a big arm movement although that sometimes does work but it's more of like a casual swipe and not too close to the phone like right around where that radar bubble might be i think the real problem is it doesn't show you or tell you how to do it better the made by google twitter account they tweeted at me saying you can go to the pixel tips app which is pre-installed on the pixel click save time and then click try it and then there you will find a demo if you want to practice it but even then there isn't actually i tried it there isn't actually any feedback it's just letting you practice so all of that being said i'm still not going to use these i it sort of falls in that same gimmick bucket as the g8s weird hover hand swiping action if it told me how to do it better maybe i'd be more into it but yeah not going to use these if there's anything to love about the front of this phone it's the new display pixel 4 and pixel 4 xl have made the jump to smooth high-res high-refresh rate 90 hertz displays my favorite trend in smartphones of the past year so it's difficult to show you exactly how much better that looks obviously i keep saying on camera because this is a 30fps video you know the correct frame rate but in person it makes a huge difference and every time a new phone comes out with a 90 hertz or higher display i can see a serious difference versus 60 hertz it comes with some trade-offs though it's not the brightest display sometimes daytime visibility is pretty weak unfortunately so i'm keeping this phone at max brightness often and high refresh rate also requires more power so you're going to see a hit on battery life now initially i was we're all concerned about the battery life on pixel 4 knowing it has a higher fresh rate and then the xl having a 3 700 milliamp hour battery and the smaller pixel 4 having a 2 800 milliamp hour battery that's one of the smallest i've seen in a phone in a while but impressively these phones have had for me okay battery life but there's a big reason for that i was briefly messaging dave2d who's he's testing this smaller pixel 4 and he said he's getting around five hours of screen on time which if i take his word for it that's actually pretty impressive um for me i've been getting around five hours on this xl on 90 hertz which you know that's c plus which is a lot better than the f i thought it could be turns out the reason this phone has been able to get even okay battery life is because it ratchets down to 60 hertz constantly all the time it's supposed to be smart about it so it says when you turn on smooth display that it'll turn back down to 60 hertz when you're not looking at it or you're not using it much and then ratchet it back up to 90 when you're swiping or you see animations and stuff but i found often it just stays at 60 hertz for extended periods of time for no apparent reason it almost seemed like it was defaulting to 60 hertz most of the time and then sometimes bumping up to 90 hertz for scrolling and some other things i started to not like it i started to find that this phone felt significantly choppier like any other 60hz phone than say the oneplus 7 pro which seems like it's almost always at 90 hertz so i was like okay this isn't great it's not my favorite implementation of 90 hertz it's smooth sometimes but it's almost like a tease that it switches back and forth so much so i'm like digging around in developer options just to see if there's anything new and there is i found an option that i'd never seen before it's called force 90 hertz and it just keeps the display at 90 hertz all the time no matter what's happening on the screen closer to what oneplus does and it's made a huge difference now it's always smooth so i guess pro tip if you're one of those people who's more of a power user and uses their phone all the time and wants to see that 90 hertz happen you can go in the developer settings scroll down find force 90 hertz and turn it on it will obliterate your battery life it's definitely even worse now closer to a d it's not lasting all day um but at least it's smoother now anyway i also found that it has ambient eq which is supposed to be auto adjusting the color temperature depending on the light around you kind of like apple's true tone on the iphone but i found it much more subtle so i just left it off it's not nearly as dramatic and overall it's just it's not the flashiest or most eye-catching or dramatic display on any smartphone it doesn't curve over the edges or anything but it's 90 hertz it's 1440p it's oled and it's flat but listen we all know what the pixel 4 is about it's what the pixel 3 was about and it's what the pixel 2 is about it's the cameras and we got some new cameras on the back of the pixel 4. there's dual cameras back here it's a 12 megapixel primary camera and a new 16 megapixel 2x telephoto camera um okay if you told me the pixel 4 would have the first second camera of any pixel phone and asked me what would be the most useless second camera they could put in the pixel right behind like a black and white depth sensor or a time-of-flight camera i would have put like a 2x telephoto lens just behind like an ultra wide clearly being way more fun or a 3 or a 5x telephoto or any of that other stuff but that's what we got we got 2x telephoto but you know what specs are just one thing i gotta actually use it in person that's what i've been doing maybe it'll change my mind yeah it didn't really change my mind typical photos from the pixel 4 are very similar to pixel 3. great dynamic range great sharpness and detail very contrasty and punchy and dramatic and biasing a little bit towards cooler tones typically if anything but they're excellent photos they've got this image processing pipeline and their hdr down to a science and that didn't shock anyone thankfully so that's good and the improvements in the viewfinder are cool too you now have real-time approximation of the hdr effect you're going to get applied before you even snap the photo so there's no guessing you can pretty much just see what the final photo is going to look like as you're taking it plus there's new sliders for exposure and shadow adjustment that can be really cool and you can mess with if you want but then having a second lens should mean portrait photos are better now because you have two lenses and you can finally do depth data between them i found that they're about the same matter of fact some of the ones i took of mac here look worse than any i ever took on the pixel 3. just look at that cutout failure that's pretty terrible maybe i shouldn't depend on pet photos for my testing and portrait mode but i'm not exactly convinced by that but generally on photos of people it's doing about the same job with that aggressive cutout and then speaking of portrait mode you actually can't do wide portrait photos anymore which the pixel 3 took some of the best wide portrait photos but it gets even more double weird when you actually look into it so pixel 3 took some pretty great portraits with one wide camera right when you switch to portrait mode on the pixel 4 it automatically zooms in but not quite to 2x to about 1.7 or 1.8 x but then it doesn't let you zoom out and take wide portrait photos like the iphone does but as i'm messing with this i realize if i cover the telephoto camera while i'm in portrait mode nothing happens it's still using the main camera for portrait mode photos it's just using the second camera for depth approximation so why does it zoom in i have no answer for that so basically the best thing about having a telephoto camera is for zoomed in photos i don't take a lot of zoomed in photos but i did notice them higher quality so if you're someone who likes to go 6 8x zoomed in you'll appreciate the better super resume there you go anyway the question still is is this the best camera in any smartphone uh because i think we can all agree pixel 3 was top of the stack last year but now the field is catching up especially iphone 11 pro so which is better okay honestly in daylight for most photos i prefer pixel photos i definitely like that contrasty punchy detailed look same with wide angle selfies punchy detailed i'm a fan in lower light though i actually start to prefer iphone photos and i know the pixel you know just got astrophotography capabilities that are really cool and night sight has always been great for well over a year now but they get a little more dramatic and as a result a little more noisy and iphone's new night mode and deep fusion i think stay truer to life and as a result better in quality fun fact i actually did a collab that's live now with supersaf in one of his legendary side by side photo comparisons so that's the best way to see the differences between the two so you can see iphone 11 pro versus pixel 4 side by side in all of our glory i'll leave a link below to that so is this the best camera in any smartphone sometimes i'm going to say it's a toss-up depending on the scenario and that's not a cop-out i gave my reasons um but if i could only pick one which is sort of a different question i would pick iphone 11 pro because it's more versatile it has the ultra wide and it absolutely crushes it in video like video is just not as much of a focus with the pixel 4's camera anymore no pun intended it tops out at 4k 30fps which google tweeted is because it would basically take up too much storage but then like you could have still enabled it in settings if you really cared right and that also doesn't explain why it doesn't have 24fps video which would have been a cool addition and it also tops out at 1080p from the front-facing wide camera so just generally if you're in it for video you shouldn't be looking at pixel you should be looking at iphone 11 pro my pixel versus iphone camera graph is like this pair of lines where the middle is where most photos are taken most of the time and that's where i prefer pixel but on the edges of photography like low light or ultra wide then the iphone does better so there hopefully that explanation makes sense and then you can't forget android 10 which gets the special treatment on the pixel since it's google's baby there are some good features here that add to how smart it is as a smartphone you already heard about the radar bubble and the smart unlock features they move the text-to-speech offline local on the phone so text-to-speech is way faster and way more consistent i love that you can talk as fast as you want and it just works and there's a new voice recorder app that takes advantage of that to live transcribe everything you say and then indexes that text to make it searchable that's like an s pen level feature i personally probably won't use it too much but i can see how people who use that would find it a really big deal but yeah the best part of the pixel again is how refined android is if you want the latest version of android if you want to be first with updates if you want the coolest edge features and the assistant and all that is the phone to get so overall many of the conclusions about pixel 4 are of course about how disappointing it is which i think is an easy conclusion to reach if you followed all the leaks and nothing really surprised you and there are things that are let down i personally really enjoyed using pixel because of the punchy confident excellent camera for still photos and the 90 hertz display which a lot of phones don't have yet and of course the extra ram finally a smooth pixel phone but this isn't a phone i'm going to go around recommending to everyone it still needs a bigger battery still needs more storage and it's just generally not complete for most people so i guess if you're like me which is in a tiny group of people who really like high refresh rate screens of course value the camera and want the latest version of android and these quick updates and things like that and you're willing to overpay because we all know the pixel is a bit overpriced for the storage you don't get then sure i recommend the pixel it's great for people like that but for most people i'm not going to end up recommending the pixel 4 mainly because of the battery but also because there are just better deals out there right now including the cheaper iphone 11 weird to save but it kind of hits the ear funny but it's true so there you have it the pixel 4 possibly a victim of the hype machine of being the most leaked phone of all time i kind of wouldn't be surprised if it happens again next year but either way now you know what it's like to own it and i'm curious are you in this tiny group of people who would like this pixel experience let me know either way thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peacehey what is up guys mkbhd here this is the pixel 4 xl this is one of the phones i was looking forward to the most this entire year for 2019 for a couple of reasons and so now i've been using it daily since it's unveiling this is my honest review so let's just start with the way it looks i honestly think it's a pretty decent looking phone it's low-key really clean there's almost no markings along the back just the google g at the bottom matte black aluminum rails as part of the design all the way around the phone speaker slots at the bottom lined up with the usb type-c port and the colored power button of course on every version and the whole back of the phone on two of the colors is this soft touch matte finish which does a great job of not showing fingerprints it doesn't seem to scratch very easily at all so of the three colors available i'm gonna say this white this panda version is the best one that power button is pretty sweet then i'm going to say oh so orange is in second place not so great power button but at least it's matte and then that jet black weirdly very glossy version is in third place fun fact though since the rails are still matte black you can slap a matte black dbrand skin on the back of any of these phones and you just created the matte black everything phone google should have made in the first place so link to that below and of course shout out to dbrand for sponsoring this video the pixel square camera bump is again annoyingly a little bit raised but i don't find this as drastic as say apple's larger double raised triple camera bump but more on the cameras later so yeah you know what generally it's grown on me pretty decent looking phone i was though let a little bit down by the not super clicky buttons just the volume ones mainly but on the other hand something a lot of people have missed that's good to know the phone is now ip68 water resistant it still has the squeeze sensitivity for the assistant and it still has stereo speakers so they're not front-facing pair like they were last year but they are still a good sounding solid pair with the slots at the bottom and the earpiece speaker combined uh the worst part about the way this phone looks is the front the part you look at most of the time i'm not a fan of the forehead it has a smaller chin at the bottom than before but yeah that big forehead i don't like it i'm still kind of barely getting used to it and overall the reason for the forehead doesn't really have me convinced so there's a cluster of new sensors up here in the top including the selfie camera then also infrared projector receiver and radar which is new in any smartphone and this new sensor suite up here is good for two things the fastest face unlock in any smartphone and some gestures okay maybe it makes me a little not forward thinking but i still like fingerprint sensors and this phone has none of that the face unlock is the only biometric unlock this phone has and i find myself missing a fingerprint sensor and the rate of improvement for fingerprint sensors under the glass has been pretty good so that move was not my favorite pixel 4 uses a radar sensor to essentially project a little bubble around the phone to see when things are near it when things are in the bubble when they enter it exit it etc so when you reach for your phone basically your hand enters the bubble and it starts firing up the infrared and face unlock sensors early so by the time you pick the phone up it's already reading your face and logging you in and it's incredibly fast over and over again it's super impressive possibly too fast this kind of reminds me of the oneplus 6 and other phones that would just do face unlock with just the rgb cameras so they'd be insanely fast they would just see anything that looks like you and just unlock as soon as you glance at it so this isn't that it's still infrared so it still can't be fooled by a photo or video of you it still works in the dark and things like that so it's got advantages but it's still a little bit wild i find myself just unlocking this phone left and right all the time anytime i even just look at it sometimes i pick up the phone just to move it across my desk and i'll just glance at the time and it unlocks the phone it also doesn't require your attention so it will unlock with your eyes closed that's uh that's a bit of a weird security quirk and it actually even tells you it'll do this in the settings when you turn this on it says looking at the phone can unlock it when you don't intend it to and your device can be unlocked by someone even if it's held up to your face even if your eyes are closed and potentially could be unlocked by someone who just looks a lot like you these are things that could potentially be fixed or improved with a software update and google's been pretty good about software updates but as of right now they're just pretty annoying my solution is turn off the skip lock screen option so if i do accidentally unlock it at least it won't be awake for a while it just sits on the lock screen and then it'll go back to sleep but yeah i mean that's what i think i mean when i say i would have liked a fingerprint reader option it's a little safer we're a little more used to it and it just sort of works when we need it and doesn't when we don't so that's face unlock but then these sensors also enable a couple very specific gestures so anytime you're in a situation you can wave over your phone and use the gesture the status bar sort of lights up it starts glowing and that means it's ready so those situations are alarm clocks timers media controls and a pikachu live wallpaper and there are no instructions like really built into android there's none in the android 10 setup for example nothing really tells you what's going on when you first get that glowing bar you just kind of have to know so when an alarm or a timer is going off as your hand enters that radar bubble it quiets the alarm and then you can dismiss it by tapping or swiping away over the phone that for me was my favorite it worked really well i can sleep with my phone on this pixel stand next to the bed and when the alarm goes off i just reach for it and it's already quieting down the other thing that was less consistent for me is music apps so if you're in spotify or google play music or any supported app where that glowing bar starts showing up you can swipe forward and swipe back through previous and next tracks and yeah that's it just forward and backwards when i first tried this at the event i was getting a success rate of like 10 percent i'm not even exaggerating like it was pretty abysmal now with some troubleshooting and practice and some tips from twitter i'd say i'm up to like a 70 swipe success rate maybe 75 so it's less of like a big arm movement although that sometimes does work but it's more of like a casual swipe and not too close to the phone like right around where that radar bubble might be i think the real problem is it doesn't show you or tell you how to do it better the made by google twitter account they tweeted at me saying you can go to the pixel tips app which is pre-installed on the pixel click save time and then click try it and then there you will find a demo if you want to practice it but even then there isn't actually i tried it there isn't actually any feedback it's just letting you practice so all of that being said i'm still not going to use these i it sort of falls in that same gimmick bucket as the g8s weird hover hand swiping action if it told me how to do it better maybe i'd be more into it but yeah not going to use these if there's anything to love about the front of this phone it's the new display pixel 4 and pixel 4 xl have made the jump to smooth high-res high-refresh rate 90 hertz displays my favorite trend in smartphones of the past year so it's difficult to show you exactly how much better that looks obviously i keep saying on camera because this is a 30fps video you know the correct frame rate but in person it makes a huge difference and every time a new phone comes out with a 90 hertz or higher display i can see a serious difference versus 60 hertz it comes with some trade-offs though it's not the brightest display sometimes daytime visibility is pretty weak unfortunately so i'm keeping this phone at max brightness often and high refresh rate also requires more power so you're going to see a hit on battery life now initially i was we're all concerned about the battery life on pixel 4 knowing it has a higher fresh rate and then the xl having a 3 700 milliamp hour battery and the smaller pixel 4 having a 2 800 milliamp hour battery that's one of the smallest i've seen in a phone in a while but impressively these phones have had for me okay battery life but there's a big reason for that i was briefly messaging dave2d who's he's testing this smaller pixel 4 and he said he's getting around five hours of screen on time which if i take his word for it that's actually pretty impressive um for me i've been getting around five hours on this xl on 90 hertz which you know that's c plus which is a lot better than the f i thought it could be turns out the reason this phone has been able to get even okay battery life is because it ratchets down to 60 hertz constantly all the time it's supposed to be smart about it so it says when you turn on smooth display that it'll turn back down to 60 hertz when you're not looking at it or you're not using it much and then ratchet it back up to 90 when you're swiping or you see animations and stuff but i found often it just stays at 60 hertz for extended periods of time for no apparent reason it almost seemed like it was defaulting to 60 hertz most of the time and then sometimes bumping up to 90 hertz for scrolling and some other things i started to not like it i started to find that this phone felt significantly choppier like any other 60hz phone than say the oneplus 7 pro which seems like it's almost always at 90 hertz so i was like okay this isn't great it's not my favorite implementation of 90 hertz it's smooth sometimes but it's almost like a tease that it switches back and forth so much so i'm like digging around in developer options just to see if there's anything new and there is i found an option that i'd never seen before it's called force 90 hertz and it just keeps the display at 90 hertz all the time no matter what's happening on the screen closer to what oneplus does and it's made a huge difference now it's always smooth so i guess pro tip if you're one of those people who's more of a power user and uses their phone all the time and wants to see that 90 hertz happen you can go in the developer settings scroll down find force 90 hertz and turn it on it will obliterate your battery life it's definitely even worse now closer to a d it's not lasting all day um but at least it's smoother now anyway i also found that it has ambient eq which is supposed to be auto adjusting the color temperature depending on the light around you kind of like apple's true tone on the iphone but i found it much more subtle so i just left it off it's not nearly as dramatic and overall it's just it's not the flashiest or most eye-catching or dramatic display on any smartphone it doesn't curve over the edges or anything but it's 90 hertz it's 1440p it's oled and it's flat but listen we all know what the pixel 4 is about it's what the pixel 3 was about and it's what the pixel 2 is about it's the cameras and we got some new cameras on the back of the pixel 4. there's dual cameras back here it's a 12 megapixel primary camera and a new 16 megapixel 2x telephoto camera um okay if you told me the pixel 4 would have the first second camera of any pixel phone and asked me what would be the most useless second camera they could put in the pixel right behind like a black and white depth sensor or a time-of-flight camera i would have put like a 2x telephoto lens just behind like an ultra wide clearly being way more fun or a 3 or a 5x telephoto or any of that other stuff but that's what we got we got 2x telephoto but you know what specs are just one thing i gotta actually use it in person that's what i've been doing maybe it'll change my mind yeah it didn't really change my mind typical photos from the pixel 4 are very similar to pixel 3. great dynamic range great sharpness and detail very contrasty and punchy and dramatic and biasing a little bit towards cooler tones typically if anything but they're excellent photos they've got this image processing pipeline and their hdr down to a science and that didn't shock anyone thankfully so that's good and the improvements in the viewfinder are cool too you now have real-time approximation of the hdr effect you're going to get applied before you even snap the photo so there's no guessing you can pretty much just see what the final photo is going to look like as you're taking it plus there's new sliders for exposure and shadow adjustment that can be really cool and you can mess with if you want but then having a second lens should mean portrait photos are better now because you have two lenses and you can finally do depth data between them i found that they're about the same matter of fact some of the ones i took of mac here look worse than any i ever took on the pixel 3. just look at that cutout failure that's pretty terrible maybe i shouldn't depend on pet photos for my testing and portrait mode but i'm not exactly convinced by that but generally on photos of people it's doing about the same job with that aggressive cutout and then speaking of portrait mode you actually can't do wide portrait photos anymore which the pixel 3 took some of the best wide portrait photos but it gets even more double weird when you actually look into it so pixel 3 took some pretty great portraits with one wide camera right when you switch to portrait mode on the pixel 4 it automatically zooms in but not quite to 2x to about 1.7 or 1.8 x but then it doesn't let you zoom out and take wide portrait photos like the iphone does but as i'm messing with this i realize if i cover the telephoto camera while i'm in portrait mode nothing happens it's still using the main camera for portrait mode photos it's just using the second camera for depth approximation so why does it zoom in i have no answer for that so basically the best thing about having a telephoto camera is for zoomed in photos i don't take a lot of zoomed in photos but i did notice them higher quality so if you're someone who likes to go 6 8x zoomed in you'll appreciate the better super resume there you go anyway the question still is is this the best camera in any smartphone uh because i think we can all agree pixel 3 was top of the stack last year but now the field is catching up especially iphone 11 pro so which is better okay honestly in daylight for most photos i prefer pixel photos i definitely like that contrasty punchy detailed look same with wide angle selfies punchy detailed i'm a fan in lower light though i actually start to prefer iphone photos and i know the pixel you know just got astrophotography capabilities that are really cool and night sight has always been great for well over a year now but they get a little more dramatic and as a result a little more noisy and iphone's new night mode and deep fusion i think stay truer to life and as a result better in quality fun fact i actually did a collab that's live now with supersaf in one of his legendary side by side photo comparisons so that's the best way to see the differences between the two so you can see iphone 11 pro versus pixel 4 side by side in all of our glory i'll leave a link below to that so is this the best camera in any smartphone sometimes i'm going to say it's a toss-up depending on the scenario and that's not a cop-out i gave my reasons um but if i could only pick one which is sort of a different question i would pick iphone 11 pro because it's more versatile it has the ultra wide and it absolutely crushes it in video like video is just not as much of a focus with the pixel 4's camera anymore no pun intended it tops out at 4k 30fps which google tweeted is because it would basically take up too much storage but then like you could have still enabled it in settings if you really cared right and that also doesn't explain why it doesn't have 24fps video which would have been a cool addition and it also tops out at 1080p from the front-facing wide camera so just generally if you're in it for video you shouldn't be looking at pixel you should be looking at iphone 11 pro my pixel versus iphone camera graph is like this pair of lines where the middle is where most photos are taken most of the time and that's where i prefer pixel but on the edges of photography like low light or ultra wide then the iphone does better so there hopefully that explanation makes sense and then you can't forget android 10 which gets the special treatment on the pixel since it's google's baby there are some good features here that add to how smart it is as a smartphone you already heard about the radar bubble and the smart unlock features they move the text-to-speech offline local on the phone so text-to-speech is way faster and way more consistent i love that you can talk as fast as you want and it just works and there's a new voice recorder app that takes advantage of that to live transcribe everything you say and then indexes that text to make it searchable that's like an s pen level feature i personally probably won't use it too much but i can see how people who use that would find it a really big deal but yeah the best part of the pixel again is how refined android is if you want the latest version of android if you want to be first with updates if you want the coolest edge features and the assistant and all that is the phone to get so overall many of the conclusions about pixel 4 are of course about how disappointing it is which i think is an easy conclusion to reach if you followed all the leaks and nothing really surprised you and there are things that are let down i personally really enjoyed using pixel because of the punchy confident excellent camera for still photos and the 90 hertz display which a lot of phones don't have yet and of course the extra ram finally a smooth pixel phone but this isn't a phone i'm going to go around recommending to everyone it still needs a bigger battery still needs more storage and it's just generally not complete for most people so i guess if you're like me which is in a tiny group of people who really like high refresh rate screens of course value the camera and want the latest version of android and these quick updates and things like that and you're willing to overpay because we all know the pixel is a bit overpriced for the storage you don't get then sure i recommend the pixel it's great for people like that but for most people i'm not going to end up recommending the pixel 4 mainly because of the battery but also because there are just better deals out there right now including the cheaper iphone 11 weird to save but it kind of hits the ear funny but it's true so there you have it the pixel 4 possibly a victim of the hype machine of being the most leaked phone of all time i kind of wouldn't be surprised if it happens again next year but either way now you know what it's like to own it and i'm curious are you in this tiny group of people who would like this pixel experience let me know either way thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace\n"