Google Pixel 5 Review By MobileTechReview

This is Lisa from mobile tech review, and this is the Google Pixel 5 their latest android smartphone for the fall of 2020, and this is a phone that you folks are either going to love or you're going to be really disappointed. We're going to look at it now all right. So what do I mean by that? Well, first off. Obviously, this is a small phone right. This is a six-inch display size phone and the back is made of 100 recycled, aluminum um beyond the fact it's recycled. What does that mean? That means that this thing is not going to shatter on the back if you drop it, which is such a relief, because with all the expensive glass sandwich, phones that we've been having for the last several years here is at least well 50 of the phone.

You don't have to worry about a little more. If you count the side bezels too, and the six-inch size means I can do things like this. My fingers almost touch. Okay, I really do have very long fingers and pretty big hands for a woman being almost six feet tall, but this is a size that you can actually fit in your pocket and not feel uncomfortable with. If it's any size hands you get the idea, but six inches.

The screen is not micro, tiny, so the pixel 4, for example, the smaller pixel that was you know when you get under six inches, that's a little teeny in terms of the visual experience of looking at the phone, so this one just about makes it for being probably okay for a lot of people, so they're the big pluses there, the other plus, is sort of semi the price tag. So we used to have nexus and pixel phones, and particularly the nexus days that were kind of aspirational upper mid-range phones. So you got a lot of really important core features, but you didn't spend the big bucks. Then google went towards being flags hippy, and it's funny because they didn't always hit all the flagship notes for features, but the prices got really high. So now this is 6.99 which granted is still not a cheap phone by any means, but compared to today's flagship phones. If you look at galaxy s20s and all that sort of thing.

Well, that's a pretty approachable price tag, so those are the things that you're going to like. First off now for those of you who, like big screen phones, there is no pixel 5 XL. Sorry about that, though, last year the Pixel 4 XL was not that big a screen. It was 6.3 inches which, by today's standards, is still a pretty small phone, but the size of the phone was pretty big because you had the forehead, and you had the chin on it. Now you had these for the 3d facial recognition, sensors up top and the project solely motion detection like swipe to change tracks and the music player, and that sort of thing so the good news and the bad news is well now the bezels are symmetrical, and they're quite small on this phone.

The bad news is no more 3d facial recognition. Some of you love this. Some of you don't, but I really liked it because it was secure. It's like it was a competitor to apple's face ID, which is much more secure than the 2d facial recognition used on most other android phones more as a convenience than anything else, and it was really fast, whereas most 2d facial recognition systems are not nearly as fast. This was as fast as the iPhone was great, but some of you didn't like it.

If you didn't like it, you don't care, it's gone. If you really liked it like me, you'll care, if you like, project solely features, I don't know how many of you actually use the swipe motion flail at your phone thing. Well, that's gone, no active edge, no squeeze edges. I never use that feature myself. Maybe you did so you see what I mean some of you're going to be happy.

Some of you are not going to be happy. What you do get instead is the fingerprint scanner located in just the right spot to unlock the phone. It's very fast. It's capacitive and it's great. The only thing.

That's not great is now you have to pick up the phone to unlock it. If you just have it on your desk and you wanna, you haven't always on display to see little notification icons at the time, but if you want to see more than that, now in display fingerprint scanner, no 2d facial recognition to replace the 3d system that we lost. So a little of this, a little that oh well. Obviously, one of the big things here is the fact that it has 5g. So, yes, I know 5g isn't setting the world on fire either, because low and mid-band aren't that much faster than good LTE or a millimeter wave, which is the superfast kind, is not much deployed yet, and it has a very small footprint.

One antenna tower covers about a square block and that's about it, but still for those who spend this much on a phone, and you want to know three years from now, which is how long you're guaranteed to get android updates with this by the way at least you've got it here, and it does have some other added benefits in terms of band aggregation and sometimes seeing better speeds and better reception in terms of signal bars and actual db. So that's good when it comes to the cameras. Here's what's changed. I don't know what it is with Google. They can't put three cameras on the back like so many mid-range phones have these days.

We still have two cameras here. The main camera is the same 12 megapixel camera that you know and love because they do a great job with the software processing. More than anything else, the telephoto lens from the pixel 4 family last year has been replaced by a wide angle, which I think is a 16 megapixel. I think most people are going to be pretty happy with that, because you can zoom with your feet. As I say to do telephoto up close, so you will get some distortion, because the wide main lens is going to give you a little distortion, not the most flattering portraits, but you can't really zoom with your feet and get you know far enough away from the Grand canyon when you're taking a picture of the Grand canyon, that's a lot harder to approximate.

So that is what it is when it comes to the camera. It's still a fantastic camera, but I think google has kind of reached the end of the line with what their brilliant software can do with the basic sensors that they're using 12 megapixel 16 megapixels, I'm not seeing on the main camera, really much of a difference from the pixel 4 last year. So if you're buying this looking for uh camera upgrades not so much unless you really want that wide angle instead of the telephoto on there. It's super, super good still, though, for still shots, which is what google focuses on. I mean naturalistic, non-overblown colors, hello, Samsung.

You know not over crispy, like a lot of phone manufacturers, do sort of iPhone like actually in the warmth of it. Some of you might hate that I said that, but I do believe that that's true, and the portrait effect is very good. We have the thanks to having dual cameras. We have the depth perception capability, so you don't have the funny thing that happens with single camera portrait mode effects where somebody's hair, a little frizzy like mine, gets and suddenly their hair has been like chopped off a lot or weird things, which is something that we did see occasionally on the Pixel 4a, the least expensive 4g model that came out before this phone um video they've improved it some, but it's still, obviously not as much a focus on the iPhone 11 family of phones, 11 pro, for example, and the Samsung Galaxy s20 family and the note 20 family take better quality, 4k video in terms of less artifacts handling movement better without seeing that kind of digitization. Look that you see in the videos- and we do have stabilization on this- that's quite good.

It's not terrible video. It's not class leading, but the cameras are still good, just not better than they were last year. The display is an improvement, six inches versus 5.7 inches on the smaller pixel four anyway, it's an OLED display, and now we have 90 hertz refresh okay. Now 120 hertz is kind of the flags hippy thing. So that's, okay.

This is less expensive. It's 90 hertz! We want to talk about one plus and there are more affordable phones that do fast refresh but yeah. It's a nice looking display. I see less off-angle color shift on it's a little brighter. It's not nearly as bright in terms of knits as the iPhone 11 Pro or Samsung s20 family again, but it's bright enough that I could see outdoors when I was doing photography in our shiny nice, Texas, sunlight yeah, um in terms of pixel density.

This is a full HD plus display. So you're looking at you know not the highest resolution, but it's absolutely fine. Sometimes really the higher pixel accounts are there for marketing. More than anything else, it's a very sharp display with high PPI, and you can see the specs on screen. The battery is also a win here.

I mean you really have no way to go, but up after the pixel 4 release last year, which had such a small battery in it that Pixel 4 XL was a little better, but now we have a 4080 William battery, which is very competitive against any other phone on the market. Today and, as you might guess, in conjunction with that snapdragon 765 g processor, which is a lower high end, I would call that it's really better than upper mid-range. You know the CPU and the size of the screen and battery life on this is quite good. You can do 5.5 hours of screen on time easily. Furthermore, you probably do even a bit better, but I've been taking a lot of photos and a lot of videos and really testing the phone out, and I've been getting about five hours and stopping 25 battery.

So that's not too bad. Another feature we have here is wireless charging, which isn't new to the pixel line anymore. It does uh 18 watt wired charging by the way, but how do you do wireless charging with a metal back right? That's supposed to be impossible! Well, underneath here there's a cutout in the aluminum, so the wireless charging coil can work so yeah that one's reverse wireless charging too. What Samsung calls power share? So, yes, you can charge Pixel Buds, or you know that sort of thing on the back of the phone too. So speaking of that processor, the 765g- that's another thing, that'll be hard for some of you who wanted to google to continue the pixel line as being the flagship.

Last year we had the snapdragon 855, which was good at the time um. The 765g obviously isn't on 865 plus or something that you see in a flagship phone, because pixels and android are so well optimized, android 11 in this case on pixels. It never feels slow. To be honest, I would say my Samsung Galaxy s20 plus feels a little faster, but that's in part because of the 120 hertz faster screen, refresh display makes it feel safer, but this plays games just fine, even if you're playing a call of duty or a driving game, or you know anything that you want to play it's fine. This is not a concern for me.

It's just going to bother those of you who really want more flags hippy specs. Lastly, the speakers I know somehow before the phone has even been released, which is the middle of October 2020 overseas and in the United States, the end of October uh people have gone to stores and have tried to record the different sounding of the speakers on the pixel 4 versus the pixel 5. The brouhaha is about the fact that you have a very normal speaker on the bottom for the stereo pair, and it uses that lg vibrating display technology, which is why it says flexible OLED, even though this is obviously not a folding bendable phone uh. So instead of having a dedicated earpiece, the display manages to vibrate and makes sound uh. Clearly is doing the treble sounds.

If I put my ear close to it, I can tell there's no bass coming out of there, but the bottom has lots of bass, so it works out, and it sounds just fine. I tried it compared to the Pixel 4a versus the pixel 4 versus the Samsung Galaxy s20 plus, and I didn't hear anything worse on this phone. It sounds fine. I mean it sounds like a smartphone. This is not a surround, sound stereo system or, whatever you know so versus the other phones on the market.

Pixel 4, a 5 g is also going to come out soon too, and that one's 200, less money, pixel 4 a5g a lot of letters. A lot of numbers there has even bigger display, 6.2 inches versus 6 inches, so not hugely bigger. It's an OLED display, but the contrast ratio is considerably less according to google, so you're not getting as high-ended display. On their same resolution, though, you obviously still get 5g on that phone, and you're going to get the dual cameras, though so you're getting. You know a lot of the stuff you're also going to get the same processor you're, going to get a polycarbonate back on the instead of the aluminum, though so that makes a difference for the premiums and the durability for some people I'll leave that one up to you and then there's the regular Pixel 4a that we already reviewed.

You can watch my video of that, but that one is clearly more low-end single camera. Well, that sort of thing, definitely not quite as nice as display on it and then there's a competition outside Google's own ecosystem. Apple's just announced the iPhone 12 with a 6.1 inch displayed at 7.99. So it's a hundred dollars more, and I'll leave it up to you as to which camp you prefer. If you're very strongly in favor of iOS versus android.

You know, but we'll be reviewing the iPhone 12 as well. So you can see how that one compares and in the android LAN it gets even more complicated because Samsung just recently released the Samsung Galaxy s20 Fe fan edition that I reviewed, and that is a lot of phone for around the same price or being discounted actually down a hundred dollars less to 5.99 in several retail locations. Right now that one does get you triple cameras, it gets you a 6.5 inch display for those who did want a bigger display, for example, and the more class leading snapdragon 865 processors on board as well. So that is stiff competition. I mean it's good for Google if you buy android of any kind.

Obviously, but this is going to hurt the pixel some. I know some of you prefer the pixel experience and more power to you versus Samsung, but for those who are open to both experiences, that Fe is a lot of phone for the money, and then they're the one plus eight line, though they've been getting more and more premium. The OnePlus word is coming to this country too. So that's another one to consider. So that's the Google Pixel 5, obviously in sorta sage, they do have the just black for those of you who want the brown paper bag version of a smartphone very unassuming looking, and I it for those who, like the durability of aluminum and for those of you who want something that really fits in the hand.

Well, you like the capacitive fingerprint scanner, and it's hard to default. Google for the camera quality for still photos, particularly it's a nice phone there's just a lot of competition out there, which is a good thing for you. I'm Lisa from mobile tech review be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more cool tech videos and hit the notification bell. So you know about them.

Source : MobileTechReview