Google Pixel 5 Impressions: A New Strategy? By Marques Brownlee

Hey, what's up MHD here, October is getting pretty real right. This is my very first like really truly. First look at pixel 5. yeah, FedEx took their dear sweet time with this one. I don't know how they always managed to find the worst possible package to lose and lose that one, but anyway one loss package and a lot of waiting later, let's get into it. So the story with this phone is that it's a flagship but not a flagship.

So what do I mean by that? Well, this is the highest end. Phone google is putting out this year. We saw the Pixel 4a, we saw the 4a 5g and this is the pixel 5 and there will be no pixel 5 XL. This is it. This is the best phone they'll offer, but at the same time it has a snapdragon 765g.

Instead of the highest end available chips, it's got 8 gigs of ram and 128 gigs of non-expandable storage. It doesn't have tons of bells and whistles and there's a 90 hertz display again instead of 120. And so the result, maybe the most interesting part about this is the price 6.99. So yeah, okay, in a world of all these phones flying north of a thousand two thousand dollars uh the highest end, pixel phone, seven hundred bucks, so my question going into it is: will I care or even notice that the flagship bells and whistles type stuff are missing from this phone, because Google is going to put the best they can in this phone for the price, because they don't make a better one that they have to protect? How good is it and do I care about the differences? So this video is just my first look and impressions of the trade-offs that they've made they're. Actually, I'm not going to call them trade-offs, I'm going to call them cuts, they're intentional cuts.

The last version high end was 900 bucks. This one is 700 bucks, they've made cuts so getting my hands on it for the first time, it's already a little different from most of the other phones coming out, and that number one thing is: this body is made entirely of recycled aluminum, so it's unibody metal, and then it has. This soft touch feel to it in this sage, green color. You can see here and so that to me feels like this sort of coating over the top of the metal. So technically the build is a metal body and that's sweet.

No seams unibody, just one piece shiny button, but it doesn't necessarily feel like metal like it's not cold to the touch or anything. It feels like hard plastic which isn't a bad thing and there's even a tiny little of texture. You can feel on the back if you rub your finger across it, but it's subtle, but there's a couple more interesting things about this metal build one is: it still has wireless charging and reverse wireless charging. Now, as you may know, wireless charging works through glass and through plastic, but not through metal. So it seems like there's got to be some sort of cutout back here on the back of the phone to allow that to happen and then number two.

There is water resistance on this phone, so this phone will survive a little rain or a splash and then number three there's also no more squeeze sensitivity on the metal body so that squeeze for assistant feature from the previous two years of pixel is cut, and you know what else is cut. Solar the radars and those sensors that were up in the front of pixel, 4 and 4 XL are gone so the face unlock and the gestures that you would have had beenn't here anymore, but that that's a good cut. I feel like we got some things back from that now they did toss back a fingerprint reader on the back of the phone which to me, has been the safest, best place to put a fingerprint reader, and it is superfast love that and then cutting all that hardware out of the top has also left us with thin uniform bezels all the way around the phone which look way better. This is honestly I'll, say it's the best looking front of a pixel phone in years, which maybe that's not saying much coming from the line that gave us asymmetrical bezels and the bathtub notch, but pixel 5 is a good-looking clean front of a phone for 20 20. Only caveat here is you'll notice.

If you look very closely, there is no normal earpiece speaker at the top of pixel 5. , and we've seen this before so pixel 5 looks to be doing that vibrating speaker underneath the glass thing, so my first impression of hearing and feeling it because you can sort of feel it vibrate the top of the phone. Is it isn't as strong of a stereo image with that bottom speaker? If you really like listening to music very loudly, but it's not the worst thing in the world, and it works just fine, especially as an earpiece and then last but not least, getting rid of that solar sensor array also made room for more battery inside the phone, so pixel 5, despite being smaller than the Pixel 4 XL, has a much bigger, 4080 William hour battery up from 3700. Now again, this is my first impression it's my first two days with the phone, so my battery has been pretty good so far, but that's something I'll be keeping an eye on, but yeah I can't be mad at more battery like that is significantly impressive for a phone, that's actually smaller than the previous footprint. But we all know the cameras are the real draw of the pixel phone, and they have been for a few years.

We have again here the same 12 megapixel sensor from the last few years of the pixel, and it's joined this time by an ultra-wide, so they've doubled back on the whole. Ultrawide are fun, but telephotos are more useful stance, so we finally get a pixel ultra-wide now, and I've been looking forward to seeing what pixel 5 cameras could do both on the regular camera, because they've stuck with this winning formula for so long that the rest of the smartphone world is kind of starting to catch up. So I was looking to see. Would they have anything changed to stay ahead and then the ultra-wide, because I was waiting for so long to see what google could do with an ultrawide and night sight and all their image processing on an ultrawide, because, frankly, I thought they'd do it best? So definitely some perfect photos coming out of this phone so far, but stay tuned, especially on Twitter and then for the full review for those photo samples, as I take them, and really the biggest changes that they've actually promised from this camera were for video and so far I'm mostly noticing just stabilization smoothing like a lot of it, and this, of course, will get more testing. But for as long as photos have been a high point for pixel cameras, video has been a notoriously lower point, so my attention is definitely peaked here, but yeah.

This is the daily now my sim card is in it. I can test it, and we'll see if I can be totally fine living daily with a 765g phone without all the bells and whistles of the flagships, with in-screen fingerprint readers and 120 hertz, and then also as I got this phone in the mail from FedEx. Finally, I asked you guys what you wanted to know on Twitter and I got some interesting ones. So, what's the feel in the hand, and does it feel like aluminum or not, and how's the size? I keep saying this is a- is a small phone, it's smaller even than the smaller iPhone 11, so it's not mini or anything, but it's a small phone and yeah like I said it doesn't feel like aluminum, it's not cold to the touch or anything it. You feel the plastic.

How does it feel to be the last tech reviewer to receive it? FedEx man FedEx express if camera doesn't exist in any phone, then pixel can be seen as a better competitor. Oh, I think, okay, I think what they're asking is. Basically, if, if you took away the cameras like, would the rest of the pixel be competitive with the rest of phones, which that's an interesting question, I actually think that's part of why Google is leaving that thousand dollar flagship space like they tried for the last few years that 900 000 phone things didn't really compete very well, didn't sell very well. I think this is their admission, that they can't compete up there and that they need to try a six seven hundred dollar phone and do well there. Now.

I still wish- I think I'm gonna still wish this by the end of my review, but I still wish that they made a beefier flagship version with 120 hertz and the biggest baddest chip and the most ram and some extra features tossed in there, but we'll see, oh and how fast is the phone with the pictures and the assistant without pixel neural core? So that's another thing that they took out of the previous pixel. There is no dedicated image processing chip on this phone, so there is a little more time to snap photos and process them again. Here's how long it takes to snap a regular photo which is actually not so bad, but if you're taking a night site or something that requires more stitching, there can be a little more processing which again might not feel as premium. But that's what you get by cutting the neural core, but anyway there you have it we'll get right into the full review process, and I'm sure that will be coming up pretty soon, along with all the other stuff coming out, because it's October, and it doesn't stop but uh. Let me know what you think is this the type of pixel you wanted to see, or would you have preferred to see that bleeding edge high-end pixel happened too? Let me know in the comments below either way, thanks for watching catch, you guys very soon in the next one peace.

Source : Marques Brownlee