Pixel 4 Impressions - Google and Gaps!

My First Impressions of the Google Pixel 4

As I held the phone in my hand, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and curiosity about this new device. The phone's design is sleek and minimalist, with a smooth glass back that feels premium to the touch. The notch at the top of the screen seems like an afterthought, and I'm not sure I entirely care for it - it's a bit too prominent and takes away from the overall aesthetic of the device.

But what really caught my attention was the phone's ability to recognize hand movements in the notification bar. If you slide down on the bar, the pixel 4 will respond by moving the icon up or down with your finger. It's a clever feature that seems like it could be very useful for quick access to notifications and settings. However, I found that it didn't always work as intended - sometimes it would recognize my hand movement but not provide any visual feedback on what I was doing wrong or how I could do it better.

I also have to give credit to LG for including a similar feature in their last flagship model, which uses infrared to detect gestures. While the pixel 4's implementation is a bit more sophisticated, it still feels like an unpolished product at this point. There's no visual indicator on the screen that shows you what gesture you need to make next - just sort of "get closer" or "get further away" without any clear guidance.

Of course, one feature that I was very excited to try out is the phone's 90Hz display. And let me tell you, it's a game-changer. The screen feels incredibly smooth and responsive, with crisp colors and a high level of detail. It's a major upgrade over last year's pixel 3, which had a more standard 60Hz refresh rate.

But while the display is certainly impressive, I did find that it's not as bright as some other phones on the market - especially in outdoor environments. That could be a major issue for people who plan to use their phone outside on sunny days. On the plus side, however, the screen does have a high resolution of 3200x1800 pixels, which should make everything look sharp and clear.

The rest of the specs are similarly impressive, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chip that's significantly faster than last year's model. The phone also comes with six gigs of RAM and either 128 or 256 gigs of storage, depending on the model you choose. And while the battery life is definitely one area where the pixel 4 falters - both the standard and XL models have smaller batteries than their predecessors.

But what really sets this phone apart is its Android 10 operating system. While it's not drastically different from the beta builds we've seen on other phones, there are some nice touches that make a big difference in terms of performance and user experience. For example, Google Assistant is now faster and more responsive than ever before, with the ability to speed up conversations even further using hand-free mode.

And then there's the new voice memo app, which is actually quite impressive. It transcribes everything you say in real-time, allowing you to see exactly what words you're speaking and where in the conversation they were said. It's a feature that could be very useful for people with speech or hearing impairments, and it's also just a lot of fun to use - I found myself using it constantly during my testing.

Of course, not everything about the pixel 4 is perfect. The lack of an ultra-wide-angle camera is a major disappointment, especially given how much hype was built up around this feature before launch. And while the phone starts at $699 for the standard model and $799 for the XL, that's still a pretty steep price to pay - especially when compared to competing flagships from Apple and Samsung.

In the end, I think the pixel 4 is definitely worth checking out if you're in the market for a new Android phone. The display is incredibly impressive, and the performance and camera capabilities are top-notch. But it's also clear that Google has some work to do in terms of polishing off the rough edges - especially when it comes to features like gesture controls.

That said, I'm excited to dive deeper into the review process and see how the pixel 4 holds up over time. Whether or not it ends up being a top contender in the smartphone market remains to be seen - but one thing's for sure: this phone has some serious potential.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what is up guys mkbhd here and this is finally the pixel 4. the most leaked phone in history probably is finally revealed and i feel personally attacked so the title of this video is google and gaps so the pixel 4 we already kind of knew almost everything about it but now that it's actually out it's been on stage and the details have all sort of been filled in it's kind of what we expected it's a very google phone android 10 and the google assistant and some new features and all that but also there's some head scratching gaps some things missing with this phone let's get into it so the design similar to other pixels is definitely the tamest part of this new phone it's not a flashy design at all to the point where it's kind of funny it's got this big forehead it's bigger than the chin it doesn't have the thinnest bezels it has a flat display which i actually like and there's three colors black white and orange i like they're still doing the colored power buttons so the panda one has i'm calling it panda the panda one has an orange power button and the orange one here has this sort of pink power button that's okay i wish it was white and they all have a matte black metal rail around the whole phone around the top the sides the speakers at the bottom and the usb type c port matte black all the way around everything and it's a nice weight of the whole phone and i really like the soft touch matte finish on the backs seems like 2019 has really become the year of matte black finishes except except for the fact that the black phone is the only one that's not matte finish so this orange one is matte on the back the white one matte on the back and the all black phone which could have been matte black everything is glossy for some reason so i don't know i feel slighted but you can see what i mean it's a pretty simple design flat display instead of curved over the edges a solid pair of speakers with the second one being up in the earpiece at the top and on the back you of course have your camera square bump the infamous design trend to 2019 but it isn't triple cameras up here it's dual cameras a flash and laser autofocus so it's one standard camera and one telephoto a 2x telephoto so they didn't include an ultra wide camera on the pixel 4. and i don't know i was kind of waiting this was something we've been waiting for for a long time to see finally multiple cameras in a pixel they've always done the best they could with software with one camera but the one thing you can't fake with software is an ultra wide so now that every other phone in this class has an ultrawide i was pumped to see it i was excited to see what they could do with an ultra wide camera on the pixel and then they didn't do it that's a bummer i feel like it's actually a bigger deal that they didn't include it than if they had just put it in anyway so you have a standard camera and the 2x telephoto and this will be better for some things like portrait mode which now only works with the telephoto you can't take wide portrait photos anymore and the rest of everything else with the normal camera should still be fine i mean this is one of those things i got a test of course for the full review to see if it's actually better than the legendary pixel 3 or if there are instances where maybe just night mode is better or if astro photography or those things they showed on stage with the stars and the moon at night look better but so far from what i've seen it looks to be another great smartphone camera you can follow me on twitter if you want to see the sample photos i post and of course that'll make its way into the full review but yeah so far so good so while wide angle can be fun we think telephoto is more important yeah i definitely feel personally attacked all right so why does the pixel 4 have such a big forehead it's bigger than the chin it's like notable uh i guess it's better than the bathtub notch but what's the big deal here pixel 4 now has an entire suite of front-facing sensors up at the top including infrared and radar which is new in smartphones to do what they call the fastest facial recognition unlocking in any smartphone and they're so confident in it in fact that they've gotten rid of any other biometric authentication which means no fingerprint reader anywhere else on this phone not under the glass not on the back just face unlock so this all falls under motion sense parts of it seem pretty cool other parts of it a little rough so when motion sense is on it uses the radar to sense when you're coming near the phone to pick it up and then it preps the cameras and the sensors to read your face and unlock it immediately as you're picking the phone up so i tried it out at the event i put my face data in with the new ui for that and gave it a shot and it worked pretty well i picked up the phone from a flat surface and it was on and unlocked by the time i even got it up to my face and i didn't even have to press the power button so that is pretty cool i don't really think anything about the actual reading of your face is anything crazy proprietary it's still infrared it still works at a decent amount of angles but it's using that radar to sense when you're coming and picking up the phone and turning it on early that's the cool part and then they use radar also to do a couple of other gesture based things and these are much more hit or miss i actually like the one where you have a timer or an alarm clock going off and when it starts beeping as you reach for the phone the radar sees your hand coming and quiets down the alarm and that's pretty cool then you can swipe it away and it silences it now i got the alarm quieting down as i reach for the phone to work every single time flawlessly but the whole swipe away thing that didn't always work for me every time and this was a theme in general with the whole swiping thing it's hard to get it right which you know could be rough in the morning if you're trying not to hit things on your desk as you swipe your nightstand over and over but it's also supposed to work for accepting or denying a call and moving forward or backward in media and this was way harder to get it to work than it should be when you're in a place where swiping over the phone is supported you see this glowing happening at the top in the notification bar and you can see it move to the left or right when it works and it recognizes your hand movement but i honestly think i got it to work like 10 of the times that i actually tried to swipe it there was no real feedback about what i was doing wrong or how i could do it better so this seems like something i'm probably never going to use you might remember lg did this too on their last flagship with infrared but i gotta give them credit because they actually had a little visual on the screen of at least how to do the weird hand gesture better like get closer or get further up top there's no such indicator on the pixel so it's frustratingly difficult anyway my favorite feature about the pixel 4 without a doubt easy is a 90hz display love that my first impression is it looks great it's nice and smooth as you'd expect from a high refresh rate display and it's a high resolution too it's 3200 by 1800 so my first impressions of this oled are it's pretty color accurate sharp but not very bright i definitely struggled outdoors to get bright enough um but it that's going to be its weakness we'll learn more about this as i use the phone more for the review and then the rest of the specs snapdragon 855 not a 55 plus uh then you're looking at six gigs of ram starting at 128 gigs of storage and 2800 or 3700 milliamp hour battery i think that smaller battery might be something to keep an eye on for the pixel 4 especially with that 90 hertz screen um but the bigger one which i'm testing the xl 3700 milliamp hours seems fine i will find out as i test the phone but uh yeah that's something to keep an eye on and then it's android 10. so mostly what we've seen in android 10 is the same as previous betas on other phones uh there's the new face unlock ui like i mentioned along with some camera app improvements an improvement to google assistant that speeds it up even more and let's use it hands-free more often and there's also now a pretty sweet built-in voice memo app that's actually impressive it now transcribes everything you say in real time on the device and records it all in text as well so you can see it marking down all your words as you speak and then you can go back into search and use the text to search for each word you say and it'll show where in the voice memo you said that word so that's pretty impressive if i was a big voice memos guy i'd be super into that so look a lot of the stuff it's better it's not drastically impressive like nothing really wowed me and maybe that's because everything leaked like we saw everything that was going to be coming so it's impossible to get surprised by the event but yeah it's felt like there were some serious gaps too like okay the no matte black version of the phone okay i get it you want to mix it up have a little glossy fingerprinty back with the matte black okay and then the specs are better and you have extra ram but no snapdragon 855 plus it's kind of sort of this weird time of year where phones are starting to come out now with the snapdragon 855 plus and this phone for more money doesn't have it so it's kind of tough and then the lack of the ultrawide was really that's tough like i was so looking forward to having like what could they do with an ultra wide pixel camera how good could it be and now we don't have that and it seems like google might not even really care super much about that either there's no 2x button in the camera app it's just kind of there i thought it would be mandatory if you adopt this whole square thing like you have to have triple cameras we'll see i don't know for 7.99 i think the pixel 4 that smaller one that's gonna be a tough sell because that's a hundred bucks more than the iphone 11 and uh well that's just a regular pixel four but for the xl that starts at 8.99 i think that'll be more compelling interesting buy and that's the one i'm testing so that's one to stay tuned for the full review of but let me know what else you want to see in the comment section below if you have any concerns battery life maybe the cameras maybe there's video quality things you definitely want to see in the review let me know but no matter what you do make sure you subscribe to be the first to see that when it comes out techtobra rolls on lots of stuff happening this has been your first impressions of the pixel 4. thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace youhey what is up guys mkbhd here and this is finally the pixel 4. the most leaked phone in history probably is finally revealed and i feel personally attacked so the title of this video is google and gaps so the pixel 4 we already kind of knew almost everything about it but now that it's actually out it's been on stage and the details have all sort of been filled in it's kind of what we expected it's a very google phone android 10 and the google assistant and some new features and all that but also there's some head scratching gaps some things missing with this phone let's get into it so the design similar to other pixels is definitely the tamest part of this new phone it's not a flashy design at all to the point where it's kind of funny it's got this big forehead it's bigger than the chin it doesn't have the thinnest bezels it has a flat display which i actually like and there's three colors black white and orange i like they're still doing the colored power buttons so the panda one has i'm calling it panda the panda one has an orange power button and the orange one here has this sort of pink power button that's okay i wish it was white and they all have a matte black metal rail around the whole phone around the top the sides the speakers at the bottom and the usb type c port matte black all the way around everything and it's a nice weight of the whole phone and i really like the soft touch matte finish on the backs seems like 2019 has really become the year of matte black finishes except except for the fact that the black phone is the only one that's not matte finish so this orange one is matte on the back the white one matte on the back and the all black phone which could have been matte black everything is glossy for some reason so i don't know i feel slighted but you can see what i mean it's a pretty simple design flat display instead of curved over the edges a solid pair of speakers with the second one being up in the earpiece at the top and on the back you of course have your camera square bump the infamous design trend to 2019 but it isn't triple cameras up here it's dual cameras a flash and laser autofocus so it's one standard camera and one telephoto a 2x telephoto so they didn't include an ultra wide camera on the pixel 4. and i don't know i was kind of waiting this was something we've been waiting for for a long time to see finally multiple cameras in a pixel they've always done the best they could with software with one camera but the one thing you can't fake with software is an ultra wide so now that every other phone in this class has an ultrawide i was pumped to see it i was excited to see what they could do with an ultra wide camera on the pixel and then they didn't do it that's a bummer i feel like it's actually a bigger deal that they didn't include it than if they had just put it in anyway so you have a standard camera and the 2x telephoto and this will be better for some things like portrait mode which now only works with the telephoto you can't take wide portrait photos anymore and the rest of everything else with the normal camera should still be fine i mean this is one of those things i got a test of course for the full review to see if it's actually better than the legendary pixel 3 or if there are instances where maybe just night mode is better or if astro photography or those things they showed on stage with the stars and the moon at night look better but so far from what i've seen it looks to be another great smartphone camera you can follow me on twitter if you want to see the sample photos i post and of course that'll make its way into the full review but yeah so far so good so while wide angle can be fun we think telephoto is more important yeah i definitely feel personally attacked all right so why does the pixel 4 have such a big forehead it's bigger than the chin it's like notable uh i guess it's better than the bathtub notch but what's the big deal here pixel 4 now has an entire suite of front-facing sensors up at the top including infrared and radar which is new in smartphones to do what they call the fastest facial recognition unlocking in any smartphone and they're so confident in it in fact that they've gotten rid of any other biometric authentication which means no fingerprint reader anywhere else on this phone not under the glass not on the back just face unlock so this all falls under motion sense parts of it seem pretty cool other parts of it a little rough so when motion sense is on it uses the radar to sense when you're coming near the phone to pick it up and then it preps the cameras and the sensors to read your face and unlock it immediately as you're picking the phone up so i tried it out at the event i put my face data in with the new ui for that and gave it a shot and it worked pretty well i picked up the phone from a flat surface and it was on and unlocked by the time i even got it up to my face and i didn't even have to press the power button so that is pretty cool i don't really think anything about the actual reading of your face is anything crazy proprietary it's still infrared it still works at a decent amount of angles but it's using that radar to sense when you're coming and picking up the phone and turning it on early that's the cool part and then they use radar also to do a couple of other gesture based things and these are much more hit or miss i actually like the one where you have a timer or an alarm clock going off and when it starts beeping as you reach for the phone the radar sees your hand coming and quiets down the alarm and that's pretty cool then you can swipe it away and it silences it now i got the alarm quieting down as i reach for the phone to work every single time flawlessly but the whole swipe away thing that didn't always work for me every time and this was a theme in general with the whole swiping thing it's hard to get it right which you know could be rough in the morning if you're trying not to hit things on your desk as you swipe your nightstand over and over but it's also supposed to work for accepting or denying a call and moving forward or backward in media and this was way harder to get it to work than it should be when you're in a place where swiping over the phone is supported you see this glowing happening at the top in the notification bar and you can see it move to the left or right when it works and it recognizes your hand movement but i honestly think i got it to work like 10 of the times that i actually tried to swipe it there was no real feedback about what i was doing wrong or how i could do it better so this seems like something i'm probably never going to use you might remember lg did this too on their last flagship with infrared but i gotta give them credit because they actually had a little visual on the screen of at least how to do the weird hand gesture better like get closer or get further up top there's no such indicator on the pixel so it's frustratingly difficult anyway my favorite feature about the pixel 4 without a doubt easy is a 90hz display love that my first impression is it looks great it's nice and smooth as you'd expect from a high refresh rate display and it's a high resolution too it's 3200 by 1800 so my first impressions of this oled are it's pretty color accurate sharp but not very bright i definitely struggled outdoors to get bright enough um but it that's going to be its weakness we'll learn more about this as i use the phone more for the review and then the rest of the specs snapdragon 855 not a 55 plus uh then you're looking at six gigs of ram starting at 128 gigs of storage and 2800 or 3700 milliamp hour battery i think that smaller battery might be something to keep an eye on for the pixel 4 especially with that 90 hertz screen um but the bigger one which i'm testing the xl 3700 milliamp hours seems fine i will find out as i test the phone but uh yeah that's something to keep an eye on and then it's android 10. so mostly what we've seen in android 10 is the same as previous betas on other phones uh there's the new face unlock ui like i mentioned along with some camera app improvements an improvement to google assistant that speeds it up even more and let's use it hands-free more often and there's also now a pretty sweet built-in voice memo app that's actually impressive it now transcribes everything you say in real time on the device and records it all in text as well so you can see it marking down all your words as you speak and then you can go back into search and use the text to search for each word you say and it'll show where in the voice memo you said that word so that's pretty impressive if i was a big voice memos guy i'd be super into that so look a lot of the stuff it's better it's not drastically impressive like nothing really wowed me and maybe that's because everything leaked like we saw everything that was going to be coming so it's impossible to get surprised by the event but yeah it's felt like there were some serious gaps too like okay the no matte black version of the phone okay i get it you want to mix it up have a little glossy fingerprinty back with the matte black okay and then the specs are better and you have extra ram but no snapdragon 855 plus it's kind of sort of this weird time of year where phones are starting to come out now with the snapdragon 855 plus and this phone for more money doesn't have it so it's kind of tough and then the lack of the ultrawide was really that's tough like i was so looking forward to having like what could they do with an ultra wide pixel camera how good could it be and now we don't have that and it seems like google might not even really care super much about that either there's no 2x button in the camera app it's just kind of there i thought it would be mandatory if you adopt this whole square thing like you have to have triple cameras we'll see i don't know for 7.99 i think the pixel 4 that smaller one that's gonna be a tough sell because that's a hundred bucks more than the iphone 11 and uh well that's just a regular pixel four but for the xl that starts at 8.99 i think that'll be more compelling interesting buy and that's the one i'm testing so that's one to stay tuned for the full review of but let me know what else you want to see in the comment section below if you have any concerns battery life maybe the cameras maybe there's video quality things you definitely want to see in the review let me know but no matter what you do make sure you subscribe to be the first to see that when it comes out techtobra rolls on lots of stuff happening this has been your first impressions of the pixel 4. thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace you\n"