Google Pixel 5 review: No frills? By Android Authority

So google's got a new flagship pixel this year, the pixel 5, and it might be kind of hard to stomach for some people, because the thing is it's not competing in specs, but the thing about the pixel line is they don't really have to there's a lot of android manufacturers that go for big flashy features in their flagship smartphones. You could have a huge 108, megapixel camera or a 144hz display or even a whole second screen, but Google's perfect at making a really intelligent, smartphone experience or really the default android experience. If you're someone who just want a phone that works and works really intelligently, I think that's who google is making the pixel for you know what I'd wager that way more people than you think want that kind of phone. But before now google kind of priced its smartphones out of the reach of most people- or at least it didn't, give them a monetary incentive to pick the pixel over something like the iPhone. But the pixel 5 takes all the core aspects of what make a good android smartphone, and it refines them, and that's not really something that any other flagship pixels could do very well. If we're going to talk about basics, let's start with the display.

Now the pixel 2 XL was the first pixel to use an OLED display, and it was kind of bad. It had a lot of blue shift issues, and just wasn't that good-looking of a screen, but every pixel since then has refined and refined, and now the pixel 5's display is absolutely gorgeous. It is vibrant and colorful, and one of the best displays that we've tested this year, it's also 90 hertz, and why? I don't think a high refresh rate display is strictly necessary in a smartphone. It's just one of those quality of life. Improvements that make the pixel feel perfect to use makes it feel more fluid and makes it feel like it will.

Probably last you a little longer than just a year or two I'd say. The only real complaint that I have with the pixel 5's display is that it just doesn't get quite bright enough outside. It was definitely bright enough for most situations and I can still use it outside. But, for example, when I was trying to film this phone, it was pretty hard to film against the sun. So I would love for Google to make it a little brighter in the future.

The second basic we can talk about is performance and because Google is making the pixel 5 for most people, it doesn't have to have the absolute fastest chip available for smartphones google's using the snapdragon 765g from Qualcomm, which is an upper mid-range chip that has 5g capabilities. You know what, for most people, this chip is going to rock. I didn't see any slowdowns and daily use of this thing and yeah. Of course, it's not going to open apps, quite as fast as something like the snapdragon 865, but for most people it is a great chip. If you're someone who plays a ton of heavy games on your phone you're, probably going to want the best of the best- and there are plenty of android smartphones that offer the snapdragon 865 a super high, refresh rate display and other dedicated gaming features, but for most people this is going to handle light games.

Just fine. We can move on to the third basic and a good smartphone experience battery. Now google stuck a 4080 William hour cell in this phone and yeah. That's not the absolute highest, that's available on the market, but for context. The pixel 4 last year had a 2 800 William hour cell and that phone had some of the worst battery life that we saw all year last year in the pixel 5, I'm getting closer to two days of use.

Out of this thing, that's about eight hours of screen on time. On really heavy days. I did get closer to six and a half hours of screen on time, but most of the time I hit around that eight hour mark, and that is perfect, especially for a pixel phone. The fourth basic of what makes a good smartphone for most people is the camera, and this is a long one. So you might want to skip ahead.

If you don't care about the cameras on your smartphone now look. This is a spec in the pixel 5 that I'm a little mixed on Google's been using close to the same 12 megapixel sensor in this phone. Basically, since it started making pixel phones, and I'm the last one to say that more megapixels equals a better camera. But what I will say is that a larger sensor equals a better camera and the pixel 5 hasn't done that it's google's processing and computational photography, smarts that have kept it in front of all the competition for all of these years. But the thing is, everybody else is finally starting to catch up, we're seeing 10x optical telephoto lenses and huge sensors on all of these smartphones and Google is just kind of hanging out in its lane doing what it knows best.

If Google wants to be the best in the business again, they're probably going to start to need to use a bigger sensor. Pretty soon here, but the thing is they were the best up until maybe this year. So this isn't to say that the camera on the pixel 5 is bad. It's just not substantially better than everybody else. Here's kind of a comparison I can make, because google relies so much on computational photography, smarts for its camera.

It can still mess up where physics just can't now. Google did add this cool new night sight, portrait mode to the pixel 5, which allows it to use long exposures to kind of cheat having a large sensor. But you can compare that directly against something. Like the Galaxy Note, 20 ultra, which has a huge camera sensor, you kind of start to see where physics pull ahead. The pixel, 5's computational photography, version of a nighttime portrait mode still can look pretty great, but it can also mess up, whereas the note 20 ultra kinda just looks pretty good.

All the time semantic segmentation can make faces, look a lot better than they do right when they're coming into the sensor, but again, that's only if they notice a face in this photo of Brandon in the trees, when it didn't recognize that he was a person, it kind of just processed him like everything else, and it didn't look quite as good. Now again, I'm not saying that the pixel 5's camera is bad. It's still really, really good, and I think that most people are going to love it. It's just not far better than every other phone on the market anymore. Also, I think the biggest bummer for me.

As far as the camera goes this year is googled taking out pixel neural core and what pixel neural core used to do was process images a lot faster than it could directly on the chip. Now, in recent years, socs like the snapdragon 865, have image signal processors that are so fast. You basically don't need that neural core anymore, but it's pretty evident that the image signal processor in the snapdragon 765 isn't nearly as fast as the pixel neural core was, and it takes a little longer to process images again, if you take a selfie and then immediately look at it in the gallery. You're going to see what your face looks like before. All that semantic segmentation is actually applied and there you can see the computational photography work that google is doing.

You know, Google did add a wide-angle camera this year. Thank god. We've been waiting for this forever, and we were really annoyed that they didn't add it in the pixel 4. Now between that and the 2x zoom that you get with Google's AI zoom, you do have a zoom range of a wide to a 2x camera, and this isn't the 5x optical zoom or the 10x optical zoom, that you're going to see in other high-end flagships, but for what it is, I think it'll serve most people just fine, so I probably sound like I'm dogging this camera, but with all that being said, the pixel camera is still really smart. I mean it can take Castro mode photos of the stars.

It can identify objects with Google Lens and this year, there's a new feature called portrait light which will emulate a floating ball of light to change the contour of your face. This works like insanely well, and you don't even have to have taken the photo on your pixel phone or on a smartphone at all. You could have taken the photo on a DSLR or your mirrorless camera and adjust the contour of your face. With this floating ball of light. Honestly, I didn't find an opportunity in which it looked bad or unnatural.

It looked supernatural in like every single circumstance I tested it, and that is really impressive. This year googles also worked to improve video. Now it can shoot up to 4k 60fps, and I'm going to be honest. Video doesn't look great, there's still a lot of noise in the shadows and again, that's because you're not getting a lot of light to that tiny sensor. Hello.

There, hello, but Google did add some stabilization modes which are meant to make video on the pixel 5 look a little better. The flagship stabilization mode on the pixel 5 is probably cinematic pan and basically, what it's doing is cropping in and then stabilizing digitally to give you this really nice almost gimbals like pan that kind of stabilizes on one axis, and it looks perfect. I think that this could be really useful for people that want to use it is just it would be more useful if you had a bigger sensor, all right, we're done with the photography section. I promise let's move on to the fifth and maybe the most important factor that makes a solid smartphone. The software google's got a pretty amazing software experience in the pixel 5 in the form of pixel UI.

It's really simple, and it doesn't bombard you with a bunch of features that you're never going to use. It's actually really intelligent. Furthermore, it has all these different features like call screening, which can tell you who's, calling and transcribe the call for you there's now playing which will show you, the music, that's ambient playing in the room. They've got a new feature called hold for me, which will hold on calls for you, so you don't actually have to wait to get on the call. All of this is in the name of ambient computing.

Google wants to make it really easy for you to use its apps and services without actually having to interact with a device they want to remove that friction between the technology and you and every year google seems to add more features that actually improve your life or save you time or make it easier to get things done. Android 11 has really tight integration with your smart home. Google Assistant can perform tasks within apps for you now I mean pixel phones are kind of just the most intelligent phones that you can buy. Plus you get three years of guaranteed android version updates. You get monthly security patches and Google's now offering this thing called pixel drops, which basically just adds features to your phone randomly when they decide to drop them.

That's pretty cool! Sorry with all that being said, you might find google's pixel lineup this year, a little confusing you've got the Pixel 4a, which was one of my favorite phones of the year. You can watch my full review here. You've got the pixel 4 a5g, which adds things like the 765 chip, 5g, the second camera and a bigger display, and then you've got the pixel 5. So what exactly? Are you getting with the pixel 5 over the pixel 4 a5g? Well, the pixel 5 shrinks the display and the bezels. By a little it adds 90 hertz.

It's got two more gigabytes of ram for quality of life. It's made of an aluminum frame with a bio resin. On top, it's got ip68 water and dust resistance and wireless charging. Now the Google Pixel 5 doesn't really feel like aluminum. It feels like a really high quality plastic, but that's because Google wanted to add wireless charging in here now they had to put a hole cut out in the aluminum where they put the wireless charging coil, and then they put this bioresin material.

On top and honestly I like it, I think it feels really nice and even a little better than the Pixel 4a. I do wish that they made it a little more coarse kind of like the OnePlus one sandstone finish, but that's a personal preference. It's also got this chrome power button, which I think is a nod to the fact that it's aluminum, underneath this bioresonance shell, and it's pretty click, but it's not quite as click as something like the Pixel 4a, either way. I still really like it now. They did remove project solely that radar.

Face unlock feature that they had in the pixel 4 and put the fingerprint sensor right back on the back of the phone. But personally, I think that that's good timing, considering we're all wearing masks right now, so is the pixel 5 worthy 200 over the pixel 4 a5g, when they're so similar. Well, that definitely depends on what you value a lot of the additions in the pixel.5 are just extras that normal people would appreciate, but not necessarily need you've got the 90 hertz display, which is really nice. You've got the smaller bezels, which is really nice. You've got ip68 water and dust resistance, which is really nice and wireless charging, which is really nice if you're into wireless charging.

Personally, I think that 700 is a good price for the pixel 5, but I do think that 650 would have made it an absolute home run. Now a lot of people are going to be comparing the pixel 5 to a lot of other phones in the 700 is price range. You've got the Samsung Galaxy, s20 Fe, you've got the OnePlus 8t, and those phones are great. Those phones are gonna, have way more raw horsepower way, bigger cameras and higher refresh rate displays than the pixel five, but I think that's the ambient computing smarts that just make the pixel 5 such a joy to use- and I think that's worth a lot more than you can read on a spec sheet. Alright guys, I think that's about it, for our Google Pixel 5 review as usual.

Let me know what you think in the comment section down below and make sure you stay tuned to the YouTube channel, because we have a ton, more videos coming in the month of October and beyond. Also, big shout out to my friend Brandon Harvard, who went upstate with me this last weekend to actually shoot the darn pixel. So I couldn't have done that without him and I really appreciate it make sure you check out his channel, and I'll catch. You guys in the next video.

Source : Android Authority