Google Pixel 4 review: One month in By Tech Advisor

I shot an unboxing video when the pixel four and the four XL first arrived in the office here, and it's fair to say, I was a bit disappointed by what we had I've spent the last month or so. Making myself use the pixel for every single day, as my main phone, and I'm afraid to say that a month on made really is the operative word. I, don't hate this phone by any means, but after a month of using it, I don't love it any more than I first did, and this still really feels like a big disappointment and a misstep from Google. Here's. Why she's pretty rare that a battery is the thing I most want to talk about when I'm reviewing a phone, but it's kind of hard to ignore when it comes to the pixel, for especially with this, which is the smaller regular model, not the XL, with a less than 3000 William hour capacity, I'm still only 3,700 in the bigger phone. That's just not enough, and it never looked like enough on paper and then, when I first used the phone for my initial review.

For a few days, I felt like it wasn't enough. The battery was honestly the main reason I wanted to shoot a month on a review video in the first place, because, while that 2,800 William hour capacities seemed tiny at first I wanted to give Google the benefit of the doubt and hope that its adaptive battery tech would save the day. Basically, it claims that it will manage your battery usage throttling and turning off apps that you don't use very much while leaving in that other extra battery power for the stuff that you use all the time. And yet it kind of worked I think the battery life has been better a month in I feel like I'm, getting an extra half an hour an extra hour each day, which is a big improvement from what I was getting before. But it's just still not enough.

It's still the case that the phone tends to die about 11 p. m. every night, or at least it's getting very close to dying by that point. I'm hitting single digits guaranteed at some point in the day and when I went traveling using the phone all day to take photos, check, Google Maps book Hoover's that kind of thing. Fourth, the battery just went I had to top out every single option in without fail, or it would have died before I even made it to dinner, and that's just not good enough from a flagship in 2019.

Now, if you've got the four XL, the bigger model, that's definitely less of a problem. It's still not a phenomenal battery life, but it will be enough to get you through the day most days and on the smaller pixel. For that just isn't the case now, yeah, there's 18 what fast and there's wireless charging. So it is easy to keep the top. So if you just need to sort of plug it in for 20 minutes in the afternoon, you'll get a decent amount of battery back from that which does mitigate the problem slightly.

So, if you're just happy with the idea that you'll have to remember most afternoons to plug it in for a little, then it's fine you'll. Be ok with that for me, I, don't like those compromises. I, don't want to be worrying about my battery all the time. I. Just think that when you're spending this much on a phone having to have battery life anxiety just doesn't make sense in 2019 you could buy a phone for half the price with basically double the battery capacity.

The pixel 4 is a small phone. It's a slim phone! You could make this thing bigger, there's just no reason it couldn't be bigger, still, I, guess that would compromise one of the things I do like about it, which is the design I know it's been a little controversial known. Everyone loves it, but I'm a fan of how the pixel four looks. There's a lot about that design to like I, really like how simple and sort of sparse the back is you get a good sense of that and this sort of glossy black finish, but I actually think the matte, orange and white look a lot better. They really pop they're really distinctive, and it means that black camera cutter really stands out and contrasts against the rest of it.

You obviously still get that kind of color contrasting power button, one of my favorite little pixel touches, and I'm really glad to see it's still there, especially against this new sort of black matte plastic heat bezels. A lot of people I've spoken to uh said they don't like it. They find the fact it's kind of drippy and plastic. He makes the phone feel cheap to them. I'm, actually a huge fan, though it helps me, keep a good grip, almost otherwise.

Just a slab of glass I also feel like it echos the kind of design language you see for him, saying Nintendo where it does feel kind of toy like, but that's no bad thing. The downside of all that is the front I mean we've got omit that in the year when, like you can get totally full screen displays on a phone having this massive bezel at the top is a big downside, especially when there's still a bit of a bezel at the bottom, the sort of asymmetry of it bothers me a little. It's better than the pixel three excels horrible notch, which was a one, the absolute worst and I will say. As someone who normally uses the 1 + 7 Pro, it is a relief every time I go back to that phone, get it out the drawer to test something and I get that screen going all the way up to the top. I do miss that with a pixel, for it doesn't help that a big part of the reason for having that big bezel at the top is because it packs in, or the motion sent stack which well I could really do without its cool.

It works, but it's completely unnecessary, so yeah. It will help you face on up the phone, a tiny bit quicker when you pick it up great I, not even sure I could tell the difference to be honest and Apple already does that with an accelerometer, and it works fine and doesn't need all that chunky, bezel space. You can, you know wave at Pikachu on the wallpaper fun, I love it I've got the Pikachu wallpaper completely unnecessary and actually the sort of actual motion controls. Like waving your hand to silence an alarm or skip tracks, I never use some people might I guess if you're, cooking or something but knowing times out of 10 you're, still going to be better off just using the touchscreen and I. Don't really feel these are better or more reliable or faster in any significant way than LG's camera based implementation in the g8 yeah, it's a little better, but not enough to actually make me every use it.

Of course. The other thing that that big chunky top bezel contributes to is the biometric stuff. The face unlock, there's a lot more tech in there than just a camera, and that's part of what's useful. What is a genuinely very secure, very impressive, face unlock system comparable to what Apple offers there is one obvious downside which is it working when your eyes are shut, I can't believe Google, let that in I know they said it's probably going to get patched, but it is still wild, but anyone could point my phone at my face while I'm asleep and get into it if that gets fixed when that gets fixed. This will be a great system, though downside is I, do still miss the fingerprint sensor sometimes the face on what doesn't work for some reason, and then I'm stuck putting my pen in, and I miss having a fingerprint sensor as a backup for exactly that situation.

That's especially shamed because, while putting one in on the back would have disrupted that nice sweet unbroken finish in screen, tech is mostly good enough now that they feel like they could have fit one into the display and that would've been the life thing. I appreciate that could have driven the price up and maybe not enough people would have gotten use out of it, especially with the really genuinely very fast face unlock there. But for me giving up on a fingerprint entirely, isn't where I want to be right now. So there are a couple other big new things that are totally new to the pixel, for one is the 90 Hertz smooth display, I mean I, say it's you to the pixel for is new for the pixel series. This isn't the first phone with a 90 years display you can even get ones with a faster 120 Hertz display, but still the 90 helps refresh rate is really, really lovely.

It's one of my favorite things about this phone. Even if I know, sometimes it doesn't run all the time, and it's triggered by brightness when it turns on and off, but that kind of makes sense, because I love, brightness I, can't tell if it's on or off anyway. That's the whole point and I wouldn't want it on all the time, because that would make the battery life even worse than it is I appreciate that, where I'm in a nice bright condition when the brightness is turned up, animations- and this thing look really, really beautiful- it's really fluid it's really nice to use. Ninety hurt is one of the biggest upgrades you can get in a flagship. At the moment, it's one of my favorite thing.

That's been rolling out across more and more brands, it's very hard to describe it's very hard to show on video when you use it, it is hard to go back, and it's great. The Google house packed back into the pixel, for it's part of what makes this display really, really lovely I just wish it was a display packed into a phone that as a whole, I loved more the other big new thing here that I haven't thought about. Yet is the new Google Assistant? That's because I don't use it. That's because I can't use it. We've got a whole video dedicated to helping you set up the Google Assistant on the phone.

In case you don't have the new one, because if you're like me, you might set the pixel for up and find out that the new assistant isn't even there. That's, because, in addition to using gesture controls which I do you also need to set the assistant language to us English rather than my normal UK English and worst of all, you have to log out of any G suite accounts for me that just isn't an option. I use G suite for work, and it is wild. But one of the headline features in this new phone, one of the most talented things not only isn't available, UK English, oh, that is understandable, and it were all out eventually, but it's not compatible with Google's massive b2b product. It's like huge work suite that so many people use and if you have a G suite account on your phone, that you use for your work, email address or anything like that.

You just can't get the new assistant for me. I have to make the choice between accessing my work, emails literally and necessary part of my job or having a slightly faster assistant, and yet the assistant lost out. It is good. It is faster, it is cool. Having continued conversation is great not enough to justify the fact that is basically broken in its current implementation, and the thing that you might argue should be first for a pixel, but I think it's telling for the four that it's the last thing I want to talk about if the camera, so pixel phones have always been on for the cameras, that's been the thing that Google has pushed computational.

Photography is something that it's really thrown into the limelight as a company, and it's made a big fuss in the past about how it can do with software. What everyone else throws four lenses up. That's why it was a big deal that it threw our second lens into the pixel for a telephoto lens. What disappointing is actually the telephoto lens is yeah. It's there.

It's fine, it's good! Furthermore, it gives you a roughly two times optical zoom and then there are all sorts of digital zoom stuff going on beyond that computational photography again. That gives you much better results on that up to eight times it, and it is really impressive. Well, it's a shame. Is it's not better than what other people are doing in what way is p30 range and in the Oppo or we know 10 times, zoom, there's similar tech going on, and these other companies are doing it just as well as Google, if not better, plus they're, actually throwing in more powerful sort of optical zoom Hardware as a starting point to get even better results. So yeah the telephoto is nicer, but it's by no means the surrounding best.

Doesn't help that the color consistency just isn't there between the two lenses, when you shift between the main so shooting with mainland's and shooting, with the combo of the main lens and the telephoto, you will see that the exposure is different. The HDR effects are different. You'll get different tones to the photos you take other than that. The camera is great, I mean it's phenomenal. It's a pixel camera.

Of course. It's great. It's still one of the best on them. Adam from the channel. Just did a big camera comparison with the pixel for weighing it up against the iPhone 11 Pro and the Galaxy Note 10, and while weighs P 30 Pro from earlier this year.

The pixel foot didn't come out on top, though, but it did do very well, it's still a phenomenal camera, even without even with the fact that I think the telephoto underperforms just a little. The big addition for me is the dual exposure: sliders, that let you adjust the exposure parts of the image separately, which lets you get some really nice effect balance stuff out, sometimes better than what the AI does by itself and also get some artistic finishes to stuff that the algorithm just doesn't know you might want. Portrait mode is still here still phenomenal. Still for my money, the best portrait mode on the market night sights still here, still phenomenal, still potentially the best night mode on the market, though the competitions really caught up there. It's also after a photography mode that has been hyped a lot by Google.

It's telling that in a month with the phone I haven't used it once that's not actually for lack of trying. Furthermore, it's just I live in central London. The light pollution is real guys. I cannot get a single shot of the night sky without light flowing up from the city clouds covering the whole way. I, don't see, stars I, never see stars.

This phone won't help with that. But if you live out in the countryside or just somewhere, that's not quite as bad as London, it's a cool mode, but it is something you're, probably gonna, use once or twice and never again, unless you are a photographer who's really focused on that kind of stuff. Finally, the other bigger mission that people have talked a lot about is video I. Don't personally shoot a lot of video with a phone but I. Think if you do, it is gonna, be a real downside that the pixel 4 just can't compete with others in terms of the frame rates it handles the slo-mo it offers I think 4k.

Well, this is not a video from it would do what you need for snaps you out of a video chair for stuff like that, but if you want to actually record really beautiful professional-looking video footage, this isn't the right phone for that, and it's a shame, I think it's something Google we're really going to have to push on next year and catch up on, because other brands, Apple and Samsung have both made huge pushes into the quality of their video footage with their cameras and Google. Right now is lagging very far behind it's a very competent phone in a lot of ways: it's an incredibly incompetent phone in a lot of other ways. It's made some advancements in camera, but not enough to match the fact that everyone else in the industry is chasing Google as fast as they can and have caught up or gone past them in a few key areas, and it all just comes down to me into that battery life. It's just not good enough, and I cannot recommend that anyone buy a phone for seven hundred pounds, eight hundred dollars that cannot last a single full day on one charge. So yeah a month in I still don't know the pixel.

For but hey you might, we've got a pixel for tips and tricks. Videos where I show you how to make the most of the phone if you have bought one and if you are a fan of it otherwise, like subscribe, hit the notification bell, you know the drill we've got more stuff coming so stay tuned.

Source : Tech Advisor