Pixel 2 XL in 2021 - Is It Worth It? By Ians Tech

Hey there guys and welcome back to another video in today's video. I want to take a look at the pixel 2 XL and see if it's worth it in 2021 all right. So just before we go on here, I just want to let you know I did buy this pixel 2 XL for just 36 last year and there's a reason why it is very badly cracked. So, as you can see, we have a lot of cracks going through the display right here, as well as our impact point right here where a chunk of glass is missing. We do have a lot of missing paint along the sides and around the edges here. One good thing is the back looks okay, so, as you can see, everything looks pretty good on the back.

Here. Do have some pitting and stuff on the glass right here on this top lens right here, but that is the reason I got it for so cheap, but also don't judge the pixel 2 XL, based on my example. But just let me just give you some specs on the pixel 2 XL here it was released alongside the pixel 2 back in 2017. Both of those phones came with android 8 upon release, and the final version that is supported on here is android 11. So this one features a six-inch display.

It is HD plus at a resolution of 2880 by 1440. It is a 1440p display. Furthermore, it is poled at 538 PPI. So a very high resolution there, 18 by 9 aspect ratio, does feature an always on display: 100 DCI, p3 color gamut, 1, 100, 000, to 1 contrast ratio for our cameras. Here around back, we have a 12.2 megapixel camera with an f 1.8 aperture that can do a max of 4k at 30 frames per second for video and also features optical and electronic image. Stabilization around front.

We have an 8 megapixel camera and that has an f 2.4 aperture and that can do a max of 1080p at 30 frames per second for a processor on this it does have a snapdragon, 835 and arena 540 for graphics, as well as four gigs of LP ddr4x ram came with two storage capacities, 64 and 128 gigs and came in two colors, just black or black and white. This does feature stereo front firing. Speakers, Bluetooth, 5.0, plus low energy, does also have wireless HD audio with DAC Qualcomm apex and apex HD audio codecs that are supported, and it does have three microphones with noise suppression offers a 3520 William hour battery does have Wi-Fi uh, 2.4 and 5 gigahertz at 802.11, a b g n ac with 2x2 memory use USB for charging. It has 3.1 gen1. It is also ip67 water and dust resistant as well all right and taking a look at the design of the pixel 2 XL.

Here you can see we have uh quite large bezels on the top and bottom here. One thing that kind of annoys me is that the bezel is much larger on the top than it is on the bottom. However, the newer pixel phones are all screen and just have a punch hole camera, unlike this model here uh now. This does have a mostly flat screen with curved edges here, so they kind of curve off, but they're curved at the bezel. So when you're typing on this, it's actually still a good experience.

Now going along the top here, you can see we do have our camera. We do have our earpiece, which is a pretty long earpiece and then at the bottom. We have another speaker, so there's no speaker on the bottom. It's actually right here in the bottom of the display. So when you are actually listening music or anything on this, it does actually sound pretty good, because it's facing you instead of having one out here and then one coming from down there, taking a look at the side of the phone, you can see that we have just a sim card slot on this one side and the rest is blank on the top of the phone right here.

The only thing we have is just a microphone right there on the opposite side. Here you can see we have our power key, which is kind of small, and then we have our volume keys right below it right there, and it's just a one button affair, so you just click the top for volume up and the bottom for volume down, and then that's it for that size. On the bottom, you can see. We just have our USB port for charging and then around back you can see uh. We have a kind of glass piece right here and then the aluminum at the bottom.

So you can see we have our camera housed in the glass with the LED flash. We do have a fingerprint sensor, and then we have the Google logo right there, so the pixel 2 XL came out originally with android 8 Oreo, and it's on its final version. Android 11. Now its final security update is October 5th 2020. So it got a little over three years worth of updates, which is pretty good.

Considering and pixel phones are going to be the only way to get the most updates out of your phone, so uh, like Samsung you're gonna, get about two updates. If you buy a flagship, if you get a budget phone, you may be lucky to get one update from android, so it's still perfect to get a pixel phone. If you want to have those updates. Another reason you probably want to get a pixel phone is, if you want a clean stock android experience, because you will not find anything like this on other phones, the only other phone manufacturer I know of that does a mostly clean stock UI with android is Motorola, and the only thing Motorola does is add a couple. Motorola's apps.

If you want the clean stock experience- and you want those updates on time every time, pixel is the way to go. So one of the other great things about that is that this phone of course came out back in 2017. It only has four gigs of ram, and it has an 835 snapdragon processor. So you would think that by today's standards, that'd be pretty slow, but the thing is this: has no bloatware, no extra UI, no garbage running in the background it has clean stock android, so it runs really, really well, and that is something that I definitely appreciate. So if you wanted to buy an older phone that has you know, flagship specs, this one is still going to run really, really well.

So the pixel 2 XL, of course, had some cool little features that were added and one of the things I really liked were these live wallpapers which they called living universe. So you could go into them here and, while you're on your home screen, you'll see little cars going by on the road right here on this one, or maybe the clouds moving or this one, where you're getting crashes on the beach from the tire, or you're, just getting a little zoom in right here, just little things like that, and it just uh see birds going by over here. So little things like that on your home screen, just a really nice touch, and it was just really cool. So all the while you're on your home screen, you could have waves just crashing right there. It just adds a little nice ambiance while you're, you know going around your phone scrolling, and it doesn't cause any performance lag.

As you see, and this whole time I've been holding the phone, you might not even notice that the way the waves were crashing just a really cool little feature. One other interesting feature that is included with the pixel 2 XL. Is this squeeze feature which is just kind of strange, but basically you squeeze the bottom of the phone. It gives you haptic feedback, and then it invokes google. So you can actually ask google a question so, like some phones actually have a dedicated Google button right where you know you could press a button, real, quick and then say something, but this one.

You simply squeeze ask your question, and you're done, and you get some haptic feedback. You can squeeze it lightly. Furthermore, you can squeeze it really hard, and you get haptic feedback depending on you know what you're doing, if you squeeze it really hard you're going to get hard feedback if you squeeze it lightly, you're going to get light feedback. So it's just a kind of interesting feature. That's included there.

I will say this, though it does invoke it quite a bit, because you know you squeeze your phone, not really knowing it. You know you pick it up, you squeeze it and bam. It just invokes google, so that happens. Kind of often another cool feature, of course, is the always on display. Now I know this is not unique to the pixel 2 XL, but it's nice to have here.

So of course you get your time date. The temperature outside- and maybe your notifications or something like that- and you also get your battery life right there, and then you also can double tap to wake it up. So you can wake up your phone and then open unlock it right there. All right here is our geek bench score for the pixel 2 XL, so we get a 344 single core score and a 1409 multi-core score. So again this isn't snapdragon 835, but this is what I'm saying here: don't really trust this performance right here because, like I said it's running stock android, so it feels faster than it really is.

I guess is what you could say, because most android phones have these UIs on top, or they have stuff in the background just running constantly, and it causes performance to lag, but the pixel phones don't have that stuff happening in the background, so they seem to run a lot faster than you think that it would so judging by these specs, you might think this phone would be slow by today's standards, but it actually is still pretty good all right. So now I just want to do a quick social media test just to test out a couple social media apps and just see how the performance is with each of them. So first we'll go with twitter, so, as you can see, it starts pretty quickly. Scrolling is a little laggy at first, but still pretty good, create a new tweet here go to the top. Here we can go to our fleets and, as you can see, performance is still really nice there.

If we go to Instagram real quick that loads up pretty well as well and as you can see scrolling on this is still pretty good. Also, all right! Let's try it again. You can see just a little lag right there, and then you can see this broken camera right here, but for the most part, it's still pretty okay, but you can definitely see some lag going on if we go into TikTok here I do have the volume down, so I don't get any copyright strikes or anything, but you can see everything runs pretty well, so even on tick-tock, even in 2021, everything still runs really, really well. If we go to the notifications right here, go to my page right here, you can see everything runs really, really well here, all right now, just to give you a quick speaker test on the pixel 2 XL, now just to preface this because the screen is broken on here, it does have a little of a tininess to it. So don't really judge this based on this phone itself.

Here you'll always be my master. So one good thing about this, though it is a very loud phone and I do like that they put speakers on the front of the phone instead of facing down, so you actually get a full-featured stereo experience with it, so the pixel 2 XL does have a really nice display on it. However, I noticed on the default setting, which is natural. Colors are just kind of muted and dull, and they just don't look very good. So the great thing is, though they do have different settings here, so you can go in here.

You can boost it, so you can boost some colors, or you can saturate it, and it can become more saturated. Like you know, really, nice displays. However, it's not you know. Super-duper saturated, like I say, like a Samsung display, but still looks pretty see here with the uh with this 4k video sample. We do get really nice colors and contrast ratio, and it does get fairly bright, uh but, like I said it's not like super saturated, even though it's in this saturated mode, it's not as saturated as some other phones, uh get, but still a really, really nice display.

Overall now, just as you'd expect with a pixel phone, it does have fantastic cameras on here. So even though it just has the one on the front and one on the back here. These are both really, really great cameras even today. So one thing it includes here is this thing called motion: photos which are basically like live photos from iOS, so it takes a little video before taking the photo. So you can turn that on or off we do have a portrait mode for front and back we do have night sight which works really, really well and of course, we have 4k video recording at 30 frames per second, so I'll go ahead and show you a couple of samples from the camera right now and here's a quick sample of video from the Google Pixel 2 XL.

It can do video up to 4k at 30 frames per second and here's, a quick sample of the front-facing camera on the Google Pixel 2 XL. However, the screen is cracked on this one, so this video might not look that great, so don't judge it based on this video, the pixel 2 XL, still worth it in 2021, I'd, say yeah for the right price. Of course, it is, it's still a great looking phone. It has a lot of great features. It is a pixel, of course.

I definitely recommend it. It has stock android and, of course it's not going to have any bloatware or garbage on here. This is unlocked, it can run on air any carrier, and the cameras, of course, are really great. Even today, so the pricing I'm seeing one bay here it seems to vary from you know 70-ish dollars to just over a hundred dollars, so it's still definitely a good buy for that price. However, the one thing I will say, though, is that a lot of budget phones coming out offer a lot for the money, so you may get better performance with one of those budget options over the pixel 2 XL, but you know what it's still a worthy contender.

If you're looking for a phone, if you don't need it for anything, really super performance intensive, this is definitely still a good phone for social media for taking pictures all the basics. I definitely think this is still a great phone and, of course the display is absolutely beautiful as well anyway guys there, you have it just a quick look at the pixel 2 XL in 2021. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video if you did like the video hit that like button, if you want to see more like this, consider, subscribing, and I'll see you guys in the next video.

Source : Ians Tech