Pixel 5 Detailed Review - What They Aren't Telling You.. By Max Tech

I think that most tech reviewers are being way too nice to this phone. Saying things like it works pretty well, or you can't go wrong with this phone and I think that's false now before you pixel lovers download this video, please hear me out. I think a few of these reasons are going to be astounding to you, and I think that some of you guys should just wait another year or buy a pixel 4 8. Instead. Now I partially understand why tech viewers are being nice to this phone. The pixel 5 is the hardest phone.

I've ever had to review. There's a part of me that really likes it, but there's also a few glaring hardware issues that will be a disappointment to both previous pixel owners and those coming from Samsung OnePlus and iPhone. I absolutely have to be honest and cover these downsides so that you can make an informed decision, and I think, unless you want a couple specific features: you're going to be better off with the Pixel 4a or 485g, while saving money at the same time, or possibly a s20 Fe or just keeping your current phone for another year. Let's start with the best things about it as usual, the software is fantastic. It is by far my favorite version from any android, as it should be.

It's the base one, and I've rarely had any animation glitches or any issues like I sometimes have with skinned versions. I do miss the face unlock from the pixel 4, but it's a worthy trade-off to get rid of the top bezel and the rear. Fingerprint sensor works fantastic, and these things are really great to have in 2020. Still, I do wish that they allowed us to have faced unlock using the front-facing camera. Next, the battery life is awesome, which is such a relief after the Pixel 4 XL you're going to get about eight hours of screen on time, which is great.

This is due to three things: a battery, that's ten percent larger, despite the phone and display being smaller, the screen resolution being lower two and a half million pixels compared to 4.3, which is a big difference. But no, I didn't miss the extra resolution on the six-inch screen and, lastly, a much slower processor, which needs a lot less power. This part is very important, but I'll cover this in just a bit. Let's start with the exterior changes. When I first got this thing in my hand, it felt like the back was made out of pressed card stock.

It's definitely unique, but I still can't decide if I like it or not. We have aluminum underneath with cutouts for wireless charging, so it's strong, but one thing is for sure the resin covered side and back doesn't feel anywhere near as premium as the previous pixels and barely feels nicer than the 350 dollar Pixel 4a. The camera bump also looks cheapest, but as a plus, it barely sticks out. The adaptive 90hz 1080p display looks great, and unlike last year, I never noticed when it dipped to 60 hertz. The front cutout is larger than I'm used to, which is weird, because google said they made the front lens narrower to keep the cut-out small, but it's still bigger than Samsung's, while the camera isn't as wide angle, the display itself is brighter than older pixels, but it's still not great compared to the competition it maxes out at 670 nits, and only if you use auto brightness the iPhone 12, s20, Fe and OnePlus 8t are all closer to 1200, nits, and they're, also brighter in your normal modes as well.

This means that the pixel 5 won't be as easy to see in bright, sun and HDR. Video won't look as good. This is also where my biggest issue and disappointment with the pixel 5 comes in, and it's something that older, pixel owners won't be expecting. The pixel 5 has the worst speakers. I've heard in years.

When I turned on my first YouTube video. I thought I had a defective phone. It is that bad, and I'm not joking or exaggerating, take a listen for yourself. The pixel 5 sounds worse than the 350 Pixel 4a and the 400 iPhone SE, which is still using the same speakers from 2017. This is shameful because in 2017, Google's pixel 2's front-facing speakers sounded incredible and absolutely killed, iPhones and Samsung's, and now they sound like junk.

This is because there is no actual earpiece speaker, but the phone's display is being vibrated to make sound now phone call quality is okay, not as good as older pixels, but not bad, but when listening to music and watching videos, the sound is very unbalanced and the sound coming from the front has no bass at all. Let me know if this matters to you down in the comment section below. For me this is huge and if you have a pixel, 3 or older, this will be a massive downgrade. I'm guessing that google did this to make the bezels slightly slimmer than the 4a's, but in a world where the competition has been perfecting stereo sound. I would much rather have the four ace bezels with their better speakers.

Now, let's get to the processors, where I have good news and bad news, and now the bad news isn't that the processor is slower than the pixel 3's, which it is the real bad news that I wasn't expecting was how slow 5g was in my real world testing compared to Samsung and the iPhone the pixel 5 really disappointed. Now your mileage may vary based on your carrier and your city, but I'll give you my experience, I'm using T-Mobile, and we only have subbed 6 in my city, so the pixel shouldn't have any issues, and it does connect to 5g right away, but the speeds are barely any better than my iPhone, which doesn't have 5g and the LTE is already pretty slow. I tested data speeds in the morning and evening in three spots around town. In my first test, the pixel 5 got 47 MB per second download and 23 uploads connected to sub 65g. I then tested my iPhone, and it was barely slower for download and almost twice as fast for upload connected to 4g, which was weird.

My next test was deep in the valley during peak times, where my signal is worse and where I'm routinely disappointed in my iPhone's LTE, and it got 15 megabits per second download and 20 uploads. The pixel 5's 5g connection was just slightly better at 21, download and 27 uploads. I immediately popped my sim into the note 20, and it got a download speed of 73 megabits per second and 25 uploads. I don't know. What's going on, I have the unlocked us pixel 5, sent to me by google, so there shouldn't be any issues, but my speeds are nowhere near the 5g Samsung.

Maybe they have better modems with their high-end snapdragons, or maybe it's because the antennas are hidden behind the aluminum and resin back or who knows. This made me very curious how the pixel 5's 5g compared to the non 5g version of the 4a testing them at the same time and place the 5g was slightly faster in download speeds, but slightly slower in upload. If you're wanting to upgrade specifically four 5g connections, either with the pixel 5 or the 4a 5g, which have the same chipset, I would make sure to do some side-by-side tests to make sure that you're getting what you're paying for speaking of processors. Yes, this one is weak performance is much worse than the pixel 4s and actually matches up fairly closely to the pixel 3 in terms of CPU, but the pixel 5 actually gets smoked by the pixel 3 in terms of graphics. Let me put this simply if you're a gamer, this isn't the phone for you.

I don't remember the last time we tested a brand-new phone in this price range that actually had noticeable drop frames while gaming and keep in mind most people keep their phones for three years now, which is what google is promising for software updates in terms of UI smoothness. I didn't notice any issues, but it also didn't have any issues with the 4a I tested, both in geek bench and surprisingly, the 4a pretty much matched up the iPhone SC, absolutely smokes it with its a13 and, of course, the iPhone 12 will be even faster and that will last a solid five years. What I did notice in terms of performance is longer load times for larger apps and games and longer photo processing times than the pixel 4, which makes sense because we have a slower, CPU and no more dedicated neural core. This doesn't mean that the photos are any worse. In fact, they are basically identical to the pixel 4 other than a few new software editions.

Panoramas still look bad because of crazy compression, but HDR performance is still very good. Now, let's get into photo and video quality, and I'm going to go deep here and give you some info and perspective that most reviewers aren't. Google is using the same exact sensor as in the pixel 3, which is a four-year-old sensor now, and they say it's because their algorithms work best with it, which is true. The s20 ultra had lots of issues when it came out with that 108 megapixel sensor. But after six months of algorithm optimizations, the note 20 images are amazing.

There's a reason. Samsung and apple keep upgrading their sensors every year. Despite needing software tweaks. That's because there are so many improvements every year sure in optimal conditions. The pixel has great HDR and night shots, but the competition has caught up there and because of the newer sensors, readout speed and noise performance is so much better, and I can prove it using google's own pixel 5.

Here's a sunset photo taken with the main camera, and it looks good, but then I zoomed out to 0.9, so the pixel changed to the ultra-wide. Yes, it's not as sharp, because it's cropping in almost two times into the ultrawide but check out the extra dynamic range they're getting from this new sensor, and this is without three years of optimization. So this sensor will keep getting better. The use of this older sensor is most noticeable in faster action, shots and medium lighting, which most tech, reviewers don't show. The noise performance and readout speed is worse than the competition and shots.

My iPhone would have captured result in blurry images with the pixel. The same thing is noticeable for portrait shots in medium lighting, where the processing is focused on blurring look, how much noise and artifacts are in Elon's face and then compare it to the note 20, which is also digitally cropped in to match. Of course, the note 20 is way more expensive, so we'll be doing an unbiased blind camera comparison against the s20 fan edition and the iPhone 12 next week. So make sure you subscribe. If you want to see that it's still a bummer, that Google forces you to use a crop for the portrait mode when everybody else stopped doing this limitation, so you can actually get wide portraits.

We also no longer have the telephoto lens. Last year the pixel 4 zoom shots smoked the iPhone 11 Pro, but this year they look much worse and, of course, you can't even compare them to a high-end Samsung. The result is even worse if you compare 4k video quality against the iPhone 11 Pro, which actually looks decent compared to a waxy compressed mess on the pixel. With that said, since Google only wanted to have two lenses, the ultrawide is more useful and even though the field of view is narrower than all the competition, it looks good in optimal conditions. Like high contrast, it looks perfect matching the iPhone on Samsung, but, interestingly, there's consistently less contrast, which is weird for Google, I'm guessing.

This will be fixed with updates. It also looks great in night mode shots where google's algorithms are fantastic, but just like the main sensor in scenes where google can't do its magic. Like medium lighting, the new ultrawide falls behind because of its smaller sensor. My guess is that google is using these sensors because they're cheaper, especially if you're buying in bulk, and they're the same sensors that are used in the 4a and the 4a5g. So other than the 4a not having the ultrawide, the image quality is the same.

Google software is fantastic, pulling out so much dynamic range from shots and doing a great job at night mode. I just wonder how much better these images could be if they use new sensors. At this point, the competition has caught up or even beaten the pixel and in areas like night mode, where you might see the pixel excel, you don't get the whole truth when looking at camera comparisons in this shot, the pixel captures an image. I couldn't even see with my eyes and when, comparing to the note, 10 and iPhone 11, it looks better, but what you can't see is that the pixel took 10 seconds to capture this image and another five seconds to process it. The note 20 took five seconds and the iPhone took only three seconds, and they showed him right away when I manually set the iPhone to the same 10-second exposure, it captures an image with less noise and with more detail due to its much newer and larger sensor.

Lastly, let's finish off with video, where there have been some major upgrades, we finally have 4k 60 on the main sensor, which is great, but the front facing is still 1080p and even the ultrawide can only do 1080p, even though it has more than enough pixels, I'm guessing, there's not enough processing power to oversimple and cropping would no longer make it an ultrawide. Audio quality has been improved and thanks to killer algorithms and heavy crop. Stabilization is perfect. If you shoot a lot of videos, this would be a good reason to upgrade, because Google is finally taking video more seriously. Overall, the pixel 5 isn't a bad phone other than the speakers.

Those are definitely bad. The software experience is fantastic. The display has been improved in some ways over the older ones and the battery life and ram performance is great, but once again, I think google overpriced their high-end phone. If this thing came in at 599, it would be much more compelling and the older camera sensors and the worse CPU performance and graphics compared to other phones like the Fe, the OnePlus. The iPhone 12 would just make sense at that price, and once this phone drops to that price point, it will be a better buy.

But to be honest, unless you need a 90hz display or the ultrawide pickup a Pixel 4a instead for 350 bucks, you get six gigs of ram the same 128, gigs of storage, the same main and selfie cameras. Almost identical displays both 1080p sleds with similar brightness. The battery life is also great, and you get better speakers and a headphone jack. If you really need or want 5g grab the 4a5g as long as you know that there's an actual difference compared to LTE and your city, and for those of you guys that still want great CPU and graphics performance like the older pixels had you might want to go with the OnePlus or a Samsung Fe for a similar price. Let me know your thoughts down below and if you want to see how the pixel 5's photos and video compare to the Fe and the iPhone 12 make sure to subscribe and enable those notifications.

Thank you guys for watching. This has been max and I will see you in the next video.

Source : Max Tech