**My Experience with the Pixel 8 Pro's Forehead Temperature Sensor**

I recently decided to test the forehead temperature sensor on my Pixel 8 Pro, and I must say, it's been quite an interesting experience. The idea behind this feature is that you can tap your forehead to measure your body temperature, and I'm excited to share my findings with you.

Firstly, I approached my forehead and tapped it gently 34.4 times, as instructed. However, I was surprised to find that the temperature reading was nowhere close to the actual number. My body temperature is usually around 36-37 degrees Celsius, but the device's reading was off by at least 3 Dees (I'm not sure what a Dee is, but it seems to be some kind of unit of measurement). I was underwhelmed by this result, and I couldn't help but wonder if this feature was just a novelty with no real practical use.

**Camera Capabilities: A Comparison with Last Year's Models**

Moving on from the temperature sensor, let's talk about the camera capabilities of the Pixel 8 Pro. The dynamic range on this device is particularly impressive, especially when compared to last year's Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. However, I was surprised to find that the low-light photography with Night Sight looks almost identical to the previous generation. This suggests that Google has made some significant improvements in this area.

There are a few features that are unique to the Pixel 8 Pro, including the Best Take feature and PR Mode (available only on the Pixel 8 Pro). The Best Take feature is an interesting one, as it allows you to take multiple photos of a group of people and then select the best one based on facial recognition. At first glance, these features are surprisingly good, but upon closer inspection, I noticed some minor visual artifacts that detract from the overall quality.

**Availability of New Features: A Mixed Bag**

During the presentation last week, Google mentioned several new features that would be available on the Pixel 8 Pro, including Video Boost and Night Sight. However, it seems that these features are not yet available to test on review devices like my Pixel 8 Pro. Instead, they were only talked about in passing during the presentation. I'm not sure what's going on here, but it's disappointing that we can't even try out these features before the device launches.

That being said, some users have already managed to get their hands on the Best Take feature and PR Mode on older Pixel devices, including the Pixel 6. This suggests that Google may be testing these features separately from the full-fledged camera app. It's also possible that the company is using software locks to restrict access to these features on certain models.

**Thermal Performance: A Mixed Bag**

In terms of thermal performance, the Pixel 8 Pro has similar thermals to last year's Pixel 7 Pro when pushed hard. However, I noticed that battery life is slightly worse compared to my tests with the previous generation. This might be due to the addition of new hardware components or software tweaks.

**Long-Term Software Support: A Concern**

One of the most interesting aspects of the Pixel 8 Pro is its promise of long-term software support for seven years. While this sounds great, I think it's a bit ambitious and may not pan out as planned. Instead, I suspect that Google will provide detuned or "gimped" versions of Android on newer devices after six to seven years, rather than providing full-fledged updates.

**Pricing: A Questionable Value**

Finally, let's talk about pricing. For $100 extra, I'm not sure if the Pixel 8 Pro justifies the additional cost. While the temperature sensor is an interesting feature, it may not be enough to warrant the extra price tag. On the other hand, if Google uses this price increase as a bargaining chip for future sales, then maybe the phone would be worth considering at that point.

Overall, my experience with the Pixel 8 Pro has been mixed. While the camera capabilities are excellent and the software is clean and intuitive, there are some features that feel like they're missing or underwhelming. With pricing and long-term support being major concerns, I'll have to wait and see how this device evolves before making any decisions about purchasing it.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enlet's talk about the pixel 8 devices the 8 and the 8 Pro so both these devices have a relatively unique feature in the sense that their face Biometrics are secure enough to allow you to access like very secure apps so banking apps uh NFC payments password apps those are typically locked out on Android phones with face Biometrics you have to use your fingerprint or a pattern to get into that but on this phone it can do it now the only other phone in existence in the Android space that has ever had this level of like class three super secure face Biometrics has been the pixel 4 with its radar technology the Solly sensor but here Google is doing it on the pixel 8 and the 8 Pro using just the regular front-facing camera and the Machine learning in Google's new tensor G3 chip and from my testing my very crude testing it works really well so I printed this out last week it's a very uh it's a very flattering photo of myself but on a lot of Android phones particularly Chinese phones this can bypass face Biometrics it's pretty crude but occasionally it can work now on pixel's devices last year this would occur like it could it could crack through very rarely like probably one in every 20 attempts it's not it's not an issue right uh but this picture here this is comical you're going to get a good laugh out of this so Asus sent me this uh for like testing a 3D laptop thing it needed some face that could move around but this is surprisingly good at cracking phones this will bust into my pixel 7 Pro readily even if I use like a a brand new like face biometric on the pixel 7 Pro and I pulled this thing out this is a super old photo for whatever reason it just works not every single time but like 50% of the time which is completely unusable but this dude cannot crack the pixel 8 Pro I tried a lot I really wanted it to just bust through but the pixel 8 devices are just too strong for this cutout of my face uh a couple thoughts though first it doesn't work well in lower light conditions so I was in a parking garage Underground and I was trying to use Google Wallet to access like I just it couldn't unlock with my face I had to use my fingerprint there uh secondly I don't think this technology is as good as where Google wants it to be right now because they kind of barely mentioned this during the presentation I feel like if Google had a first on this like the way they talked about it during the Solly time when pixel 4 had it they're like we they could be like we're the only phone right now that does it but they did they kind of like swept it under the rug and I have a feeling that not me but some other journalist or YouTuber is going to figure out a way to crack this class 3 security using something because it's just using camera Hardware that's very basic there's no infrared sensors or lenses it's just a regular camera okay the next thing I want to talk about that seems a little underbaked is the temperature sensor on the back of this device so the pixel 8 Pro and only the pro has the ability to use the like the temperature sensor back here to measure the temperature of an object the way that you use it is that you launch the app and then once you're in the app you choose a material from a list of options and so they have things like water or glass or wood there's a whole bunch of different materials uh we're going to with wood here because I believe my table is made of wood and then once you've made that selection you just tap it right in the middle and then it'll give you very quickly a measure of that temperature I have a couple issues with this first the very first time you open up this app there's a message stating that this app is not intended to be used for measuring body temperature now when I saw that I was like what are you kidding like that would be the number one reason why I would want something like this like during the presentation when they announced this I thought hey that that could be really useful I have two kids and I'm sending them to school and one of them feels warm I'd be like do they have a fever I can check off of my phone that would be sick but you can't do that but the extra weird thing is that months ago when the releas of this feature on the pixel 8 Pro there was this Google pixel tips video that was was floating around where it seemed like they were actually going to implement this feature where you could use this temperature sensor and measure your body on your forehead and get a body temperature now I imagine there's some kind of legality around this where uh if there's some kind of inconsistency with that number or like let's say it was an incorrect reading and you made some decision based off that reading maybe Google would be liable and they didn't want that now in its current iteration if you go through the kind of material selections there isn't anything that says like body the closest thing would be food and Organics like I guess I'm reasonably organic so if I was going to try to measure my body temperature I'd go with that uh and if I go with Organics and I bring it to my body or like my forehead if we can just demo real quick here I'm going to go to my forehead and I tap it 34.4 like that's not even close my body temperature is probably like 36 37 like this is at least 3 Dees off right now so uh yeah at this St stage what are you really measuring temperatures of using what they have I don't know now the pixel 8 Pro and the pixel 8 both have awesome camera systems this year the dynamic range on the 8 Pro is particularly good and because they're pixel devices the low light photography with night sight looks awesome but for the most part the still cameras are really similar to the pixel 7 and pixel 7 Pro from last year now there are a few features that are unique to this year's devices the first one being the best take feature so the way this works is that you take a bunch of photos of a group of people in the camera app and then you pull those photos up in the photos app and within there you'll find a tool called best take and what it does is it kind of takes that photo it takes the other photo you took around that same shot and it'll pick out the faces in those shots and allow you to select between the different takes of those photos to be able to create the best take and at first glance these are surprisingly good you actually have to look quite closely to pick up on the visual artifacts and stuff now sometimes even with a cluster of photos that seemingly should work with this best take feature just don't and I don't know if it's something I'll get fixed over time but it's very good in its current iteration already the other new feature called PR mode is only available on the a pro and this gives you just a more fine-tuned control on the shot you can control ISO and color and focus uh the focus control in particular is really neat it gives you focus lines like you'd see on some kind of high-end prosumer devices and it's neat to see it here as well now during the presentation last week there were a few features that they talked about for a pretty good amount of time first was video boost and secondly was night sight and they supposedly bring better color more even lighting noise reduction better image stabilization a lot of cool features but they're just not available to test on this device yet which is super weird like they launched it they talked about it they made a commercial for it but can't even test it on these review devices so that's a little bit disappointing uh but the three features I talked about so video boost night site video as well as PR mode were supposedly just for the pixel 8 Pro not for the regular pixel8 but on Twitter I saw that a few people already have these apps working on older pixel devices including like the regular pixel 6 so something tells me this whole thing is just software locked now in terms of thermals and performance the pixel 8 Pro has very similar thermals to last year's pixel 7 Pro when you're going full blast and genin it makes the device hit this kind of thermal wall pretty much at the same time as last year's device but battery life I'm running the same test as I did last year and for whatever reason I'm actually getting slightly worse battery life on the pixel 8 pro this year the moment they put their tensor chips into these phones like pixel 6 and 7 and 8 I feel like the battery life has been pretty much the same for the past three years at least on my test uh the seven years of operating system support I talked about this briefly previously I think it's really cool the idea is great but I think it's just a little over ambitious for them either they pull the plug a little early or I think the more realistic option is that I think they're going to give these like really detuned versions or just like gimped versions of Android or like the new Android on the on like year six and seven that's my guess uh so I wouldn't purchase this phone based on the promise of long-term updates it's a nice bonus if it happens though uh so last thing pricing so I think for 100 bucks extra this year I don't feel like the pixel 8 really got anything out of that extra hundred bucks I think that Google is going to use that $100 price increase as like a kind of bargaining chip when things going on sale they can have it on like a bigger sale but the pixel 8 Pro maybe it warrants that extra money like the temperature sensor which I wish did more at this at this point in time uh but maybe that could warrant but here's the deal the pixel devices they're my favorite Android phones uh the camera system awesome it's always awesome and then the clean software that's like that has so much value to me so yeah uh great phones I just wish the the features did more right now okaylet's talk about the pixel 8 devices the 8 and the 8 Pro so both these devices have a relatively unique feature in the sense that their face Biometrics are secure enough to allow you to access like very secure apps so banking apps uh NFC payments password apps those are typically locked out on Android phones with face Biometrics you have to use your fingerprint or a pattern to get into that but on this phone it can do it now the only other phone in existence in the Android space that has ever had this level of like class three super secure face Biometrics has been the pixel 4 with its radar technology the Solly sensor but here Google is doing it on the pixel 8 and the 8 Pro using just the regular front-facing camera and the Machine learning in Google's new tensor G3 chip and from my testing my very crude testing it works really well so I printed this out last week it's a very uh it's a very flattering photo of myself but on a lot of Android phones particularly Chinese phones this can bypass face Biometrics it's pretty crude but occasionally it can work now on pixel's devices last year this would occur like it could it could crack through very rarely like probably one in every 20 attempts it's not it's not an issue right uh but this picture here this is comical you're going to get a good laugh out of this so Asus sent me this uh for like testing a 3D laptop thing it needed some face that could move around but this is surprisingly good at cracking phones this will bust into my pixel 7 Pro readily even if I use like a a brand new like face biometric on the pixel 7 Pro and I pulled this thing out this is a super old photo for whatever reason it just works not every single time but like 50% of the time which is completely unusable but this dude cannot crack the pixel 8 Pro I tried a lot I really wanted it to just bust through but the pixel 8 devices are just too strong for this cutout of my face uh a couple thoughts though first it doesn't work well in lower light conditions so I was in a parking garage Underground and I was trying to use Google Wallet to access like I just it couldn't unlock with my face I had to use my fingerprint there uh secondly I don't think this technology is as good as where Google wants it to be right now because they kind of barely mentioned this during the presentation I feel like if Google had a first on this like the way they talked about it during the Solly time when pixel 4 had it they're like we they could be like we're the only phone right now that does it but they did they kind of like swept it under the rug and I have a feeling that not me but some other journalist or YouTuber is going to figure out a way to crack this class 3 security using something because it's just using camera Hardware that's very basic there's no infrared sensors or lenses it's just a regular camera okay the next thing I want to talk about that seems a little underbaked is the temperature sensor on the back of this device so the pixel 8 Pro and only the pro has the ability to use the like the temperature sensor back here to measure the temperature of an object the way that you use it is that you launch the app and then once you're in the app you choose a material from a list of options and so they have things like water or glass or wood there's a whole bunch of different materials uh we're going to with wood here because I believe my table is made of wood and then once you've made that selection you just tap it right in the middle and then it'll give you very quickly a measure of that temperature I have a couple issues with this first the very first time you open up this app there's a message stating that this app is not intended to be used for measuring body temperature now when I saw that I was like what are you kidding like that would be the number one reason why I would want something like this like during the presentation when they announced this I thought hey that that could be really useful I have two kids and I'm sending them to school and one of them feels warm I'd be like do they have a fever I can check off of my phone that would be sick but you can't do that but the extra weird thing is that months ago when the releas of this feature on the pixel 8 Pro there was this Google pixel tips video that was was floating around where it seemed like they were actually going to implement this feature where you could use this temperature sensor and measure your body on your forehead and get a body temperature now I imagine there's some kind of legality around this where uh if there's some kind of inconsistency with that number or like let's say it was an incorrect reading and you made some decision based off that reading maybe Google would be liable and they didn't want that now in its current iteration if you go through the kind of material selections there isn't anything that says like body the closest thing would be food and Organics like I guess I'm reasonably organic so if I was going to try to measure my body temperature I'd go with that uh and if I go with Organics and I bring it to my body or like my forehead if we can just demo real quick here I'm going to go to my forehead and I tap it 34.4 like that's not even close my body temperature is probably like 36 37 like this is at least 3 Dees off right now so uh yeah at this St stage what are you really measuring temperatures of using what they have I don't know now the pixel 8 Pro and the pixel 8 both have awesome camera systems this year the dynamic range on the 8 Pro is particularly good and because they're pixel devices the low light photography with night sight looks awesome but for the most part the still cameras are really similar to the pixel 7 and pixel 7 Pro from last year now there are a few features that are unique to this year's devices the first one being the best take feature so the way this works is that you take a bunch of photos of a group of people in the camera app and then you pull those photos up in the photos app and within there you'll find a tool called best take and what it does is it kind of takes that photo it takes the other photo you took around that same shot and it'll pick out the faces in those shots and allow you to select between the different takes of those photos to be able to create the best take and at first glance these are surprisingly good you actually have to look quite closely to pick up on the visual artifacts and stuff now sometimes even with a cluster of photos that seemingly should work with this best take feature just don't and I don't know if it's something I'll get fixed over time but it's very good in its current iteration already the other new feature called PR mode is only available on the a pro and this gives you just a more fine-tuned control on the shot you can control ISO and color and focus uh the focus control in particular is really neat it gives you focus lines like you'd see on some kind of high-end prosumer devices and it's neat to see it here as well now during the presentation last week there were a few features that they talked about for a pretty good amount of time first was video boost and secondly was night sight and they supposedly bring better color more even lighting noise reduction better image stabilization a lot of cool features but they're just not available to test on this device yet which is super weird like they launched it they talked about it they made a commercial for it but can't even test it on these review devices so that's a little bit disappointing uh but the three features I talked about so video boost night site video as well as PR mode were supposedly just for the pixel 8 Pro not for the regular pixel8 but on Twitter I saw that a few people already have these apps working on older pixel devices including like the regular pixel 6 so something tells me this whole thing is just software locked now in terms of thermals and performance the pixel 8 Pro has very similar thermals to last year's pixel 7 Pro when you're going full blast and genin it makes the device hit this kind of thermal wall pretty much at the same time as last year's device but battery life I'm running the same test as I did last year and for whatever reason I'm actually getting slightly worse battery life on the pixel 8 pro this year the moment they put their tensor chips into these phones like pixel 6 and 7 and 8 I feel like the battery life has been pretty much the same for the past three years at least on my test uh the seven years of operating system support I talked about this briefly previously I think it's really cool the idea is great but I think it's just a little over ambitious for them either they pull the plug a little early or I think the more realistic option is that I think they're going to give these like really detuned versions or just like gimped versions of Android or like the new Android on the on like year six and seven that's my guess uh so I wouldn't purchase this phone based on the promise of long-term updates it's a nice bonus if it happens though uh so last thing pricing so I think for 100 bucks extra this year I don't feel like the pixel 8 really got anything out of that extra hundred bucks I think that Google is going to use that $100 price increase as like a kind of bargaining chip when things going on sale they can have it on like a bigger sale but the pixel 8 Pro maybe it warrants that extra money like the temperature sensor which I wish did more at this at this point in time uh but maybe that could warrant but here's the deal the pixel devices they're my favorite Android phones uh the camera system awesome it's always awesome and then the clean software that's like that has so much value to me so yeah uh great phones I just wish the the features did more right now okay\n"