Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL hands-on By The Verge

Hey everybody, I'm Dieter Bohn here at Google's hardware event, holding as you can see, the all new Pixel 3 and the Pixel 3 XL. So there's a lot to talk about with these devices. I'm just gonna start with price, This one starts at $799 for 64GB of storage. It's an extra hundred bucks to double that. And then this is a hundred bucks more so it starts at $899, and then a hundred extra bucks to double the storage on this one as well. In terms of design, they feel pretty much identical to the last ones.

So this is my Pixel 2 XL, and you can see they're pretty much identical in size. The difference of course, is that this has that big 'ole notch on the front. And as I was expecting, as I was hoping, the notch actually doesn't look that bad in person. It looks way better in person than it does in photos, but it is still a gigantic notch. Now in terms of specs they are exactly what we expected.

So we are looking at a Snapdragon 845 processor, 4GB of RAM on both models. And a 12.2-megapixel camera on the back, which has an f/1.8 aperture on it. On the front you have two lenses, they're both 8 megapixels, one of them is f/1.8 and it has a 75 degree field of view. The wide is a 97 degree field of view. And the wide mode is one of the first features I'm gonna talk about here.

So what you do here, is you're just looking at a regular selfie, but then you can slide it out, to get more, Or slide it in to zoom. So, it's a nice wide-angled selfie camera. But really the story here is they've added a ton of other features on it. So, there's Dan Seifert over there, I can zoom in on him, and Google says that they have a better zoom feature, that's using the same technology that astronomers used to fix zoom. We will have to really see if this is any good, because digital zoom is traditionally bad, but Google's talking a big game about it.

So another feature they've talked about is Top Shot, which is supposed to pick the best photo if you are not smiling in a photo. So I'm gonna take a picture here and blink, and whatever. So there, I took a photo. And if we tap into the photo you can see it's blinking. And it says pick a better shot here, so I can tap that, and so it slides over to what it thinks is a better shot.

I don't know if that's a better shot or not, but there's a bunch of stuff here, so you can just go through to the best one. Obviously, the best one is where I look like a goon. And then we'll just save a copy of that shot, in addition to the original shot. The other thing they've done, is they've added a whole bunch of new AR stickers. They've called it Playground, so we can go to Playground here and there's Nilay and there's Dan.

I'll tap here, and we'll just throw Iron Man in the frame. He's just super in their way, but I'll slide him over there. Now he's out of their way. There's those guys, There's Iron Man. He's just chilling, doing his Iron Man thing.

It will also work in selfie mode, so I can take a selfie here. And I can, have Iron Man. There he is, just creeping on me. He's a creeper! Another feature they've talked about is, Night Shot, or Night Mode, or Night something. It's able to do really incredible low-light photography, that brightens up the entire scene.

So much so that it doesn't even look real. And so we're really excited to give that a shot. I have taken just a couple photos with this, we haven't had it for very long. But it does seem like a very fast camera, it seems like a very good camera, and it was able to pull off portrait mode, with some back lighting, on that portrait mode and it looked pretty good. So, really excited to try these cameras out more.

Now maybe the most wiz bang new feature they showed, is Call Screening. So if a call comes in, you'll see here there's a new option for screen call. When I tap it, it shows some text here. So the person your calling is using a screening service, and on the other end, this sounds like a pretty regular conversation because it's using Google's Duplex technology. So, I'm just gonna speak to this person, and it's going to hopefully auto transcribe what I'm saying.

And, there, well it's pretty loud in here, and you can see now, it is auto transcribing what I'm saying. And then on this end I can just reply. Yes it's super urgent, please, please, please, transcribe this call. So that's Call Transcription and it's pretty wild. It also happens completely locally.

So that nothing gets sent to Google servers, it's happening directly on the phone. Going back to the design a little bit, it is a glass back. And that allows for wireless charging, and when it's on a wireless charger, it's gonna have a bunch of special features on the screen. So it will wake you up slowly by brightening the screen before the alarm goes off. It'll show you stuff that you can see from across the room.

In order to do that they did have to make it a glass back, but they've maintained a matte finish. So it's a single piece of glass here, but the top is glossy and then they sort of, I don't know, sanded the side down here. Fingerprint sensor of course is still on the back. And it feels a little bit less recessed than before, but it's still, it's a fingerprint sensor. It works fine.

Now since the back is glass, and of course the front is glass, it is Gorilla Glass 5, and so I'm hopeful that it won't be too shatter prone, but we'll see. There is of course, no headphone jack to speak of. There is USB-C for charging, and it can do fast charging as well. Overall, I am happier with the designs than I expected. I'm probably tempted to get the smaller one, because it does have a bigger screen than the last Pixel.

Because they made the bezels smaller, and I'm not offended by the notch, but I think it's time for me to go to a small phone. I'll be interested to see what more people wanna get. So both of these phones are available for pre-order right away! And in the US they're gonna be exclusive to Verizon, but of course you can go ahead to Google and get them unlocked. We're gonna have much more about these phones in the coming days and weeks so keep it locked to The Verge. Thanks so much for watching.

Source : The Verge