REVIEW: Google Pixel 2 in 2020 - Still Worth It? Best Budget Android Smartphone? By OSReviews

Hey Doc your OS reviews you're, watching our revisited review of the Google Pixel 2 here in 2020, this phone was introduced in October 2017, making it now almost two and a half years old. So time really does fly about this time. Last year we did a review on the OG pixel and I mentioned how it was a perfect value for the money, because it still runs on the latest version of Android. It's been updated to Android 10. It also comes with pretty decent performance, in addition to a very good camera, especially at the budget price that you can now find it at still as we creep into 2020 and Beyond. Perhaps it's worth considering a slightly newer model and that's why we're taking a look at the pixel 2 today now in terms of picking up the pixel 2, you can find on Amazon or eBay.

It usually sits at around $100 there's, actually two variants: the regular pixel 2 that we have here today that has a 5-inch display and there's a larger pixel 2xl that has a larger 6-inch screen and a more modern, 2x1 or 18 by 9 aspect ratio. Even when this phone was new, the design was nothing super remarkable. In fact, it was a little on the boring side, alongside contemporary devices released around the same time, such as the essential phone that really introduced, one of the first bezel s experiences or the ultra sleek and stylish Samsung Galaxy S8. It's kind of hard to believe that this is around the same era, where, as competing devices, were ultra shiny and just felt like a million bucks, Google actually went into the opposite direction and made their friend very toy, like in my personal preference. I actually think is a slight step down compared to the OG pixel.

In terms of the feel in the hand, the pixel too, still has very solid construction. In fact, it's made out of aluminum and glass, just like its predecessor, but Google decided to coat the aluminum with a paint or layer of plastic just to make it feel like it's less cold to the touch. But the result is the feeling the hand is a lot closer to kind of plastic device. What I do like, though, is this smaller visor for the glass part that covers the rear. It just looks a bit cleaner and more modern on the pixel too, in terms of hardware specifications, just like the aforementioned s8 and essential phones.

They were top-of-the-line in 2017, here, 20:20 they're, so decent and will outperform many mid-end phones. It comes with a snapdragon 835 chipsets, it's an outscore chipset, which is definitely an improvement over the Snapdragon 820 one found in the OG pixel, which is only quad-core, although in terms of RAM, it's actually the same as the OG coming in at 4 gigabytes, which is still decent here in 2020. But it's definitely not a flagship grade. I would say it still does a good job in terms of optimization, though, thanks to the completely stock version of Android 10.0, that this device is currently running on, and it will receive an update to the next version of Android as well. Otherwise, it has the latest in terms of Bluetooth 5.0, built-in GPS built-in NFC, but it does not have wireless charging, although one improvement compared to the original is, it is now ip67 rated and that's actually an improvement even compared to the newer pixel 3, which for some reason gets rid of the water resistance rating altogether. So this is actually slightly more durable, which is good.

Now the manufacturer of the pixel 2 is still from HTC, although the pixel 2 XL is manufactured by LG, camera remains one of the highlights of the pixel series and the pixel 2 still is outstanding. It's still quite insane how Google is able to achieve so much with just one lens, so Google is doing a lot of that using software and computational photography, which is actually working and then on the base. Here is where we have the USB type-c port, which supports quick charging, although one thing that is lacking here is a regular 3.5, millimeter headphone jack, a pretty controversial move at the time. Now, if we turn the phone around the regular pixel to definitely was aging, even when it was released because of the larger bezels on the top and bottom, but surprisingly, I didn't find it to be too big of a problem. When I picked this phone back up and started to use it.

Yes, it isn't as pretty as the essential phone or the S AIDS, but it definitely still is very much functional. It's an AMOLED panel, which has an ambient mode, as you can see here. That shows you your battery status and notifications, and you can either double tap. We're going to raise the phone to gently wake it up. Overall body to screen ratio is pretty much the same as the original pixel.

Not much has changed, but the original pixel does have quite a bit of wasted space on the bottom portion. That's not the most attractive, at least on here. We now have Wolfe front-facing speakers and then on the very top. There is an 8 megapixel camera for selfies and a proximity light sensor as aforementioned it's still receiving the latest security updates and OS updates from Google and right now, it's running on android 10, just like on the original pixel. Everything really flies in terms of transitions and animations.

It's super snappy and responsive aside from the screen size, though both the 2 & 2 XL, are basically the same phones in terms of overall performance is just a matter of what you prefer in terms of. If you have smaller hands and the pixel 2 is going to seem more petite and comfortable to reach everything one-handed versus the 2 XL, which definitely has a more modern trend, a little more reminiscent of say the S 8 with a taller screen personally I would say that for most consumers, I would tend to recommend you in the direction of the 2 XL. Just because of that modern screen, 2x1 aspect ratios does seem to be the future and there's a lot of content that has now been optimized to fit very well for that new screen ratio, but otherwise this is still very comfortable phone. Do you 2,700 William hour capacity battery on the pixel 2 also is decent? It's not really an endurance champion, but on a slightly smaller screen, it will still get you through an entire day, sometimes a day and a half before you need to really recharge it. Alright, so jump you to the camera.

As aforementioned, it's a Forte on the pixel series and the pixel 2 is absolutely still a beast when it comes to photography quality compared to the original pixel. It also has slightly faster a processing time of those HDR images just extremely consistent without requiring you to be a pro at fiddling around with advanced controls, but the faster processing compared to the original pixel is because of an additional pixel processing core that was implemented on the pixel 2 and up it's basically a dedicated chipset, that's exclusive for processing the images that you take if you've used. The original pixel you'll know that, after taking an image, it actually takes a split second for it to further process before it kind of clicks into place with the visual core. It definitely speeds up this process versus the original, which tended to get a little warm whenever you took images just because it had to do so much computation. Otherwise, the camera interface is exactly the same as on the original pixel.

It's very simple, but super easy to. In fact, there isn't even a pro photography mode that you can access, but you can actually take portrait images which is actually one of the best in its class from 2017-2018, despite only having one lens there's a separate mode here for nitrite, though this mode can also be found on the original pixel. It still remains one of the best kind of night mode effects, there's also additional features like panorama, shots photosphere, which is kind of an AR interactive mode. You can capture slow-motion and videos up to 4k time-lapse, and you can also use the Google Lens to recognize barcodes and other objects. Now.

One thing I will say, though, is the original pixel does have unlimited lifetime free photo and video backups to Google Images. So, whereas the majority of smartphones, you only get a high-quality upload, which is around a kind of compressed version of your shot on pixel devices, it used to be kind of the full 12 megapixel image would be uploaded for free, that's increasingly no longer the case. Unfortunately, it seems that Google is cutting down costs in that area, but the original pixel still has unlimited lifetime free uploads and the pixel 2 has unlimited quality uploads until this time, next year or 2021. Taking a closer look at some of these sample shots again, the general sentiment is that the quality is phenomenal. It really is super impressive in terms of the level of detail, the color accuracy, everything is on point basically still is one of the top smartphone cameras period that you can find in fact, really the only feature that you're lacking from the camera compared to the newer generation, pixel 3 is macrophotography.

The HDR works wonders when it comes to not leaving out any details. The clouds are so captured really nicely in the background, in addition to the texture of flowers, which are close by just extremely crispy and satisfying looking images in terms of color as well as the detail, you really don't have to wait. You don't have to mess around with anything, and all of your memories are kind of perfectly preserved, which is as it should be, especially for the average consumer. Taking this phone on vacation and traveling is just kind of a dream because of how well it does, and then you're able to relive those memories when looking back without any real loss in terms of feeling too artificial or blown out. So just incredible now, the pixel 2 also has a few special features compared to ordinary Android phones.

That's mostly software base where Google added additional sprinkles of their magic. One of them is automatic song recognition, even when the phone is in ambient mode. So previously we were playing a snippet of the scientist by Coldplay, so it's recognize that and whenever you unlock the phone you can find out more details about the song. Another clever software trick is live captions. The phone is able to recognize what is being said, even if there are no captions added to that particular video.

So this can be YouTube videos. It can be videos that you record yourself anything in the Android system. It will be able to actually kind of keep up with things, as they're being said out loud and tried to tell you what a typed out version of that to text this like, even if we kind of minimize that font there. Another interesting feature is found in the voice recorder, which is a very simple app, but it's able to automatically recognize and transcribe your words into typed text without even connecting to the Internet. Let's do a quick test, hello.

This is a voice recording you can see it's recognizing that this is a speech. Let's stop it, and I can also take a look at this in terms of playing it back and tapping on transcript to see the words being spoken out, and it's actually very accurate. It goes word by word as you're playing it back, which times and aligns itself with the recording. The last interesting software feature on the pixel 2 is the addition of that squeeze or edge assistant. That was a function that HTC pioneered with their.

You 11 series. It was kind of their response to iPhones forced touch, but on the side of your phone. So you can exert different amounts of pressure to bring up different functions. The official name is called active edge, and you're also able to change the amount of pressure that you want to squeeze to press a button to activate it even when the screen is off so with those unique software flourishes. Out of the way we can begin by taking a closer look at its performance, loading up Chrome is still very quick and responsive, as you can see here.

Let's try it go into a page, such as the verbs and see how it handles it. The screen is still very sensitive and easy to tap on and with great haptics. It feels like you're pressing on a real button and again, even though it's only a 5-inch screen, I never felt like it was too small or squished for all loading times, as you can see here is still very fast, not a surprise, considering even the OG pixel still loads back webpages without any issues. Snapdragon 820 one is still very capable. The 835 is even more so and open up.

Another tap here maybe go into eBay, and the same thing can be said: it is very fast to load, as you can see there almost instantaneous. So a very impressive experience in terms of web browsing super comfortable. The phone also remains quite cool in terms of temperature, no issues at all, so let's jump back into YouTube and do a quick test of the speaker quality. Next, all right. So turning things down there, the takeaway is audio quality is definitely above average, in fact remaining one of the best audio experiences that you'll find from a smartphone speaker just because of that stereo separation- and they are pointed right at you.

So it's actually very satisfying for watching videos with, of course, it doesn't have as much base as a dedicated Bluetooth speaker, but that's to be expected on such a thin device. It still sounds quite full. It doesn't distort at higher volumes. All is very good with the super inky and contrast key colors. The plenty of sharpness that you're getting here just still makes it very enjoyable for watching some YouTube videos and TV shows with even if it's not the largest screen and, of course, there's still plenty of content, especially older ones, which have been recorded in the regular 16 by 9 aspect ratio and because you don't have to pinch in to fill the screen, you aren't cutting off any portions or losing out on any details.

So still is very good. The only slight downside here is asked with any AMOLED screen. There is a little of color shifting that becomes slightly bluer when you look at it from extreme angles, but from ordinary use cases of holding the phone in front of you. It still is perfectly acceptable without any real problems. Microphones are noise-cancelling and pick up your voice, even if you're, in a crowded space when you're making a call outdoors I tried it with T-Mobile and AT&T, and both worked flawlessly without any complaints.

Now, as far as storage is concerned, the phone comes with 64 gigabytes as the base model, and there is an optional 128 gig variant as well. Over I'd say it's sufficient for the average user, especially since those aforementioned unlimited full resolution photo uploads, don't occupy any of the space. It also means, though, that there aren't too many pre-installed applications, as it should be aside from the default Google ones, things like calendar utility tools, documents notes, apps and that's pretty much it. Everything else is for you to customize and load. If we take a quick look at gaming as our last stop, the a35 is still a beast when it comes to overall performance, even on high graphically demanding titles.

Here we have a Riptide game, it's a pretty similar in terms of graphics, to something like pub G or asphalt 9. So it does demand and require a lot, and it is very realistic in terms of the 3d animations, but we can see here how it's really posing no issues when it comes to loading back super quickly. At launch of the various details. In the background, everything is still captured, just very well overall and accelerometer, of course, works without any issues. Everything feels quite responsive, and it's a joy to use for gaming purposes, especially when you're taking a look at games which have a slightly more contrast background that really takes advantage of this AMOLED screen.

I. Think it's doing a great job. Things are less graphically demanding, run even more smoothly without any noticeable lag or delay things like stock puzzle titles, they all work flawlessly and can be downloaded very quickly from the Play Store, as well, really without any problems. So that's more or less it. As far as our hands-on review of the Google Pixel 2 here in 2020 itself, only a steal compared to other new phones which were that same price would be in the budget territory or, if you're also looking at mid-end phones for that same price, you're still talking about devices that which won't have the fluidity and the stable performance of this device, not to mention the really constant and up-to-date software versions.

That'll be packing and, of course, that flawless camera, which still holds its own against I, would even say flagship phones coming out today. It might not be absolutely the best camera anymore, especially as other manufacturers have started, to make strides to catch up to Google after the pixel 2, but it still remains outstanding when it comes to the level of detail and color saturation consistency for the price that you're paying. So as always, the pixel series represents devices which works really well, despite not having perhaps the most shiny or flashiest design out there. You can check out more details in the links down below, but for now that's been our video thanks for watching through our OS reviews. That's been the Google Pixel 2 revisited here in 2020.

Source : OSReviews