Google Pixel 2 XL review (Liliputing) By Liliputing

This is Brad Liner with little painting, and this is the Google Pixel to excel it's one of two pixel phones that Google released in October 2017, and the key difference is really that this version has a 6-inch display with a 28 80 by 1440 pixels resolution and slim bezels and sort of curved glass design. The smaller model has a more traditional design with larger bezels, and it's a 1080p five inch display. The extra screen size here also gives Google room to put larger battery on the in the device, and so this version also gets an extra hour or two of screen on time and several hours of additional standby time. So in a lot of ways, this is the better of two phones and, if you're wondering why I'm not holding them both my hand right now, it's because I'm actually shooting this video on the Google Pixel 2, with the 5-inch screen. So the cameras on the 2 phones are pretty much identical. Processor memory, storage- all those things are pretty much identical on both phones, I, basically just told you all the differences between the two of them.

So if you want to know what this phone can do in terms of video recording just take a look at this video in terms of size, I will show you compared to the Google Nexus 5x. From a couple of years ago we have a 5.2-inch screen versus a 6-inch screen, and you can see because of the change in bezels and aspect ratio. The pixel to Excel is not that much larger. It is enough larger, though, that I personally prefer the smaller phone, and the reason for that is when you're doing things that were sort of require, holding the phone in one hand, reaching from one part to the other. I can't reach the top of the screen here.

I just can't do it, so it sort of becomes a two-handed phone when I want to try and do things like reaching the top to say hit the URL bar basic activities. You know for scrolling and whatnot it's fine, and it does have a higher resolution higher pixels per inch display. So, in a lot of ways to display it looks better, except you may have heard one of the biggest complaints people have about this phone. It is related to the display, and I'm going to try and show you a little of that head-on. You sort of got this bright.

You know white color tilt it, and it goes a little more blueish I'm actually going to go ahead and lock the, so you can see a little better here, because I'm locking the exposure so at different angles. The screen quality looks a little different and that can be kind of jarring. If you're not expecting it. You notice this most I think on things with a light or like background and just a fairly small tint, basically changes the perceived color of the screen. It's an AMOLED display and a lot of AMOLED displays have some sort of color variation, but this one has a more significant one than a lot of phones.

Google says that's just sort of something: that's going to happen on this sort of display and has no plans to fix it. There are some other issues with the display that some people don't love. For instance, it's locked into the RGB color gamut by default, and it's a little more muted when showing pictures than some other phones. Google is working on a software update, I'm recording this video on Friday, October 27th, as you can see in the widget on top here, Google is working on a software update that will give users the ability to enact more saturated colors if they prefer that, once I got used to the way colors are displayed on this phone I actually kind of liked it. It does seem a little more natural and that really comes in handy VIR, so taking a picture and want to get a color accuracy, that's pretty close to what you would get if you printed so here's a nice little cloth, it's got a little forest theme on it, and you can see pretty much exactly what it's gonna look like by looking at the camera preview.

Speaking of the camera, that's really by far I think the best thing about both this phone and the smaller model. It's got an amazing camera that can take some excellent shots. There's a portrait mode that lets you sort of selectively focus on one part and blur the background. It's a little hard to do on this sort of thing. Let's go ahead and put this in the background and then say focus on foreground, and you can sort of see it.

It works best with faces, so you can find some samples at Lulu, p-ting comm, where you can see sort of cat pictures and people pictures and some other things like that to get a sense of how that works. So the camera is really pretty stellar and overall performance is pretty great. It does have a more unique design than the pixel ?, as I mentioned. You've got slim bezels here, and it has this curved glass feel which I really like when you're doing things like swiping from the sides of the screen. It has a very nice feel to it.

The phone offers pretty stellar performance and the wide screen does allow you to do some interesting things like open up to applications in side by side, windows, and they're equally sized because it basically has an 18 by 9 or a 2x1 aspect ratio. So this is not necessarily the best example. I've got a music player and web browser, but if you'd say had a chat window, and you wanted to chat while you're surfing the web or watching the video this would. This would make that work pretty. Well speaking of media players, I'm just going to play a little of music here, so you can hear the speakers.

This is from my band from 20 years ago in high school, so it's royalty-free music and the audio recording quality wasn't stellar, but you can hear how loud the speakers get so overall, really nice loudspeakers stereo, front-facing speakers, the top and bottom speakers. Some people have noted are not exactly the same volume and if that's going to bug you, then it's going to bug you I personally can barely tell the difference because, having stereo speakers on a device, that's generally held a little away from you, but they are so close together, I kind of find it hard to notice video playback. That works pretty nicely again. With the caveat that you know it might look a little different depending on sort of how you tilt the screen. This is a video shot on the phone itself.

It also supports slow-motion video 4k video 1080p 60 frames per second video, which is what I'm recording this in and then there's an image stabilization, both optical and electronic and in Google photos there's sort of this tool to add additional stabilization. So, overall, as a camera, it's pretty great as a phone, it's pretty nice, it handles multitasking. Well, does gaming pretty nicely! This isn't necessarily the most resource intensive game, but it's nice-looking one so, and I keep fading I need to slow down in that level. So yeah, overall in terms of performance in terms of build quality, I think it's a really nice phone. It's got an aluminum unibody design here with a glass cover on the top of the back area and a fingerprint sensor, which is kind of far up the phone, but I find it's actually pretty easy to reach when you're sort of just holding the phone like this.

So even though it's a larger phone than the 5-inch pixel I find that the fingerprint sensor placement is really pretty nice. The camera placement is decent, I mean it's down there in the corner, so it's a little off-center compared to what it is on the smaller version. The only things that you really have around the side here are volume buttons and a USB type-c port volume and power buttons. Here there is a SIM card slot on the left side of the phone I'm, not actually using that, because the phone does have an e SIM, and I've been testing with Google's Project Phi Network, which is one of the few networks, actually very much the only network at the time. I'm recording this video that supports IOM, so I was able to activate the phone without even inserting a SIM card.

The fact that there's only the C USB type-c port on the bottom does mean that if you wanted to plug in headphones, you'd need to use an adapter. Fortunately there is one included, so you just plug this in plug in regular headphones and that works. Fine. You can use Bluetooth headphones as well, and I tend to use it with a Bluetooth speaker because, as you probably noticed before, well the built-in speakers are loud enough that you could listen to say, add on a talk, radio or certain podcasts. If you want to listen to music I, think you're going to want a little more bass than you get from this device.

It has a really nice sort of texture feel to it, because coding the metal is something that's got. A sort of textured polycarbonate feel it's nice and drippy and, generally speaking, feels pretty Pleasant and a little, maybe less cool to the touch than a plain metal phone it. It feels pretty sturdy, and it is waterproof with an ip67 water. Resistance rating comes with this rapid charger, which does charge the phone pretty quickly, and it's USB type-c to type C, but you can use it pretty with pretty much any USB type-c charger and overall it gets pretty good battery life. I'd say that in a typical day, I've been able to get more than four hours of screen on time and still have 30 or 40 percent battery capacity left at the end of the day, so I'm pretty impressed with the battery life and that's the main advantage for me personally that this larger model has over the smaller model.

It has a 30, 500, William power battery comparative about 2,700 William hour on the smaller version. I do prefer the smaller version just because I find it easier to hold and, most importantly, the price. The pixel 2 with a 5-inch screen sells for 649 and up this model sells for 849 and up for 849 you're, getting a better display better battery life. But otherwise almost everything is the same. Both phones have a Qualcomm, Snapdragon, 835, processor or 4 gigs of RAM 64, gigs of storage, or you can pay an extra hundred dollars to get 128 gigabytes and really you're paying more for the design, the display and the extra battery life and in terms of that display, as I mentioned, it's a little problematic because you do sort of have that color shifting.

There are some other issues that people have reported. Some of them are things that Google can address via software, but in terms of the blue shifting tinting colors, that's something that software updates are not going to be able to fix. Google did note that the phone now has a two-year warranty. It originally was going to have a one-year warranty, but if you do have problems with things like screen burning, some people have noticed that the navigation buttons, for instance, show after images when, when you're not showing this screen, you can show sort of a full, solid color, and you might see sort of the echos of those devices and those buttons if they got some. If that gets awful and your phone's still under warranty, then you might be looked at it replaced, so that is sort of a nice bonus feature to have.

But generally speaking, 849 s, a lot of money has been on a phone that doesn't already have a pretty close to perfect display and if you wanted, the version with 128 gigs of storage, and it's 949, and you do have to pay that extra, because there is no SD card slot, there's no other way to add storage. So what you get is what you get another thing. That I should note is that Google sent me this case to test out with a phone, and it's a nice. It's a nice case, sort of has a little fabric finish to it. It took me a little while to get used to the idea of having a case that felt like fabric, but I actually find it pretty pleasant to hold and not too bad to look at, but it does kind of ruin the aesthetic I think in some ways of having the curved glass and the near bezel list design.

Furthermore, it is set up in such a way, though, that you still sort of feel the edges of the phone as you're swiping, though. So it's not a's, not a horrible design, but it's not particularly an expensive case, and there are probably other options out there. Third-Party cases, if you prefer not to get the official accessory. Another thing, that's probably noted, is that this being one of Google's new phones, it does support active edge. You can squeeze the phone to launch the Google Assistant application, and it is a daydream, compatible phone, so Google also loaned me the new version of their daydream, virtual reality headset.

You do need to take it out of the case to do this, but you can slap it in the headset and use it for viewing virtual reality. Games and other experiences, the new Google daydream, headset cost about a hundred dollars. It's a little updated from the first version. It looks very similar, but it's got a head strap on the top, as well as the sides. Furthermore, it's got a little more cooling thanks to the vents here to help keep phones from overheating and overall it's its a nice little improvement.

The one thing that I will note, though, is I. Just don't find myself wanting to use it very much because when you try to say fire up a video and watch a video, it tends to look kind of pixelated or even certain games. So you know some apps I think are really designed to take advantage of the fact that you've got this high resolution display and these special focal lenses that make it look like you're right in the action, but I think it works best with sorta cartoon sort of vibrant games because a work well on the relatively low-powered processor and hardware. They take advantage of the screens good qualities, but they don't necessarily show the same screen door effect that you get when you're trying to do things like watching movies or videos. So I've played a couple of games that look decent, but I'm, not really enough of a gamer to justify buying one of these for $100 myself.

Google loaned me this phone this case this daydream for the purposes of this review, I'll be sending it back after the end of the review, but I have decided to buy the smaller pixel phone for 649 I. Think it's an it's a pretty good buy in terms of performance and especially that camera, because, as I mentioned, I'm actually shooting this video using the camera on the smaller model of the phone and I. Think that I'll get a lot of use out of it, as somebody who frequently has to take pictures and shoot videos for my job, so it's a sort of professional investment and in terms of getting Google's latest. The other thing that's really nice about these phones is that they do include the latest software for Google from Google. So not only are they running the latest version of Android, but they'll be supported for the next couple of years.

So Google is promising three years of software and security updates, which is more than you'll, get on pretty much any other device. Now three years from launch, it's not necessary three years in the day that you buy the phone, so the timer is already starting to tick down on that anyways. That is a quick look. Well, I! Guess we're a 15-minute points. So not so quick! Look at the pixel 2xl! This is a brad Liner, a little feuding, and you can go to little buying comm for more details, photos of the phone photos taken with the phone and more information the pixel to excel.

If it were a little cheaper, it would be a little easier for me to recommend, especially given the display issues. The display issues are not. This is really gonna, be deal-breakers for everybody, I. Think again, if you sort of get used to it, it's not that big a deal. It's just one of those things that once you see, you can't quite unsee the shift, and it's a little disappointing on a phone in this price range, but it does offer excellent software excellent support from Google, and again it now comes with a two-year warranty, which is a nice perk that you don't get a lot get with a lot of Android phones.

So that's the pixel 2xl, the largest of Google's 2017 pixel devices, and it's a pretty nice phone. If you have maybe bigger hands than I do and an extra $200. This is a Brad lender with little buying.

Source : Liliputing