This is My Next Smartphone... By Unbox Therapy

Google Pixel stuff finally arrived, Google Pixel, 5 and 4a 5g, and it's a little different this year, because google day, maybe it's a bit of a departure. We have a budget minded device with the snapdragon 700 series and this one. What is it? The 765 g and also 5g sub 6 5g on the pixel 5 model, but with the 4a they put 5g right in the name. It's the Pixel 4a 5g. We have a couple different colors here. What do they call it? Just black, just black, they stick into the just black branding, and then we have sort of sage, which is the exciting model that everybody wants to have a take on, because well it's an unusual green.

It's the year of unusual greens because apple put out a green as well, and it was a polarizing green. I think this one actually got some decent feedback. Of course, it doesn't matter to me because I won't be slapping on a pixel 5 official case, but what I will be slapping on is this right here, the later case: crazy, thin Kevlar. As you know, it's going to make sure that I can enjoy the pixel 5 the way it was intended, almost as slim as having no case at all. You can order these right now, so I'm going to go for the black pixel five.

So then I have the seamless look once the later case goes on. You can check this out in the description. Okay. So, let's start with that model, and we have two little pull tabs over here now. It is important to note this is not a millimeter wave model, so no Verizon love for the superfast 5g, at least not here.

Oh that's, an interesting texture, a little drippy, almost one plus sandstone, but not quite to the same degree where you feel as though it is sandpaper for your fingers. This, on the other hand, is a satisfying kind of grittiness. You hear that it's the best way for you to imagine the texture. Again, it doesn't matter for me. I slapped the later case on, but it's its worthwhile to mention, because it is a bit of a bit of a departure.

You don't see this all that frequently uh. Let me remove the plastic. It looks like an easy to remove situation. Ah yes, so this is a compact phone for this year, everybody's interested in a smaller phone. We got, I mean they scaled up so big, I guess uh, it's not just google uh apple, they put out the 12 mini yesterday, and they claimed that's the smallest 5g phone in the world.

This is close comparatively. What I'm interested in is on the back. Here I have been a fan. I mean I've, told you before I've been a fan of the computational stuff that Google does in the camera department. I feel like with previous pixels.

Furthermore, I couldn't take a bad photo. Furthermore, I just point at something boom. Why does that look so wonderful, the other interesting characteristic, the fingerprint scanner? It's on the back. I never minded this on previous phones and for me, it's actually a little faster than the in display little touch here on the side you have the metallic power switch, which is above the volume rocker bottom of the device, type c connector. I believe it's an 18 watt charger in the box and I can already tell we have a single hole punch up in the top corner.

You remember previous pixels they've been all over the map with various notches and things. This is a nice little simple implementation, not too distracting you get the screen to body ratio all right. So let me get that started. Booting up, google logo jumps out. Also in the box.

We have our paperwork, our sim tool. We have the power brick that I mentioned, and 18 watt USB type-c all right, cool plastic removal. Furthermore, we have our USB type c to c cable, and they've, even included a c to an adapter for all your migration needs. So that's a nice little touch as well. Now that one is still booting up, so I'm going to jump over to the sage model, so we can catch a glimpse at this color right here same procedure.

Oh, you know what. As far as greens, go I'll, tell you what it's not a terrible green, it's quite pleasing! Inspired by nature, possibly it's a bluish green all right, let's get to it! Boom kind of creates a nice contrast here on the side of the device where it meets the glass, but again I'm going to be boring and just go for the black model, of course also the button on this one, it's metallic, but it has a sage kind of tone to it and now let's go ahead and check out just how much larger the 4a 5g is. So it's a six-inch display on the regular pixel, 5 and 6.2 inches on the Pixel 4a 5g. So it's not a tremendous difference in scale. Of course, there is a difference in price this one- I guess that's plastic sure feels like it, not as pleasing as the texture over here on the standard, pixel 5 much bigger body over there.

You know what's weird about this device, though I don't believe it got a huge battery. The battery spec on the regular pixel 5 is 4080 William hours 38.85. So that's kind of a strange departure here from the norm. You would assume you have a bigger phone. You get a bigger battery.

I guess it's not always the case, but you do save some cash. I like the dark mode option during the setup, so I can go straight into dark mode, see it allows you to save battery with a dark theme, or you can switch to the light theme right out of the gate, I'll leave it dark for now. So here we have our smooth display setting automatically raise the refresh from 60 to 90 hertz for content increases battery usage. This is something google introduced a little while ago. For me, it makes a big difference.

The biggest jump or the most noticeable one is, is getting to 90 hertz and then beyond. That is a bonus, but the 60 to 90. You can notice it. So that's the other difference uh that 90 hertz upgrade it's only going to happen on a small model. This is obviously once again a cost thing.

It's its a real interesting position that the pixel is in at the price point. What they're asking for it, because you're not getting a top tier chip- and you can- I mean instead of the pixel 5, you could find something with a snapdragon 865 in it, for a very you know very close in price. However, with the pixel, what you're getting is you're getting android the way that Google intended you're getting the freshest updates you're, getting a completely vanilla experience, you're getting their computational photography stuff in their camera, app which, yes, you can find a way to get it on other devices. But it's a bit of a headache all right, so I'm going to focus my attention on the standard, pixel 5. , all right so funny enough.

You have to dive into the menu here to find battery share and drag it up into your quick toggle settings, at which point you can utilize it. So this is how it works, charge. Other devices with your pixel flip the phone over to give it a try. Okay, no problem: here we have the Pixel Buds. Oh, did you hear that notification and the orange light lights up, so now we're charging the buds from the phone? That's a cool feature for Google.

It has. It has, of course, been elsewhere, but it's convenient to have it on more devices. So I'm happy about that turn it off when it's not in use. Obviously, you don't want any battery drain going that way. The standout thing to me here is just how comfy the single-handed usage is for this device.

I'm gonna actually slap the case on it right now, because that's how I'll use it- and I mean it's just so- take a look at that. It's so slender, the whole package and small. This is coming from a guy who's been using. This is what I've been using. I've been using the z-fold too it's a bit of a tank which is fine because you open it up, and it's a tablet in your pocket, but the weight- and I mean you know you have it on you.

This is the complete opposite. The standard, pixel 5 and it might be a fun time for myself to uh to take a different, have a different experience and go down the small phone road, which seems to be a thing that manufacturers are catering to right now. So maybe it's time for me to have that experience too, at least for a time period. Maybe I should throw the sim in here that would make this the first phone in a very long time that I throw the sim in that does not have a flagship level processor in it. It's a sign of the times right there.

Okay, so we cut there for a moment had about a billion updates to run on the device. Also, you know what I just thought: I'm going to switch to this phone. I don't know what it is all right, I'm just gonna, I'm going to be honest with you: the pixel devices each year, it kind of they kind of get me going a little uh, it's something about the vanilla software experience and the camera app, and I just I feel like I need to dive a little deeper. So you can see. I got this one, it's rigged up.

I changed the wallpaper man which it means we're beginning our process of becoming intimate together. Furthermore, I also brought it home with me to run some updates and play around with it a little more man. Is this a comfy? That's a comfy phone. It's just I've uh! Well, I've been on really heavy phones. Recently I mean I'm talking brick like phones, and so this has just been so satisfying to do the one-handed to have the lightweight to do to unlock real speedy.

Now I wish I had the face unlock as well, but I can manage because the rear unlock fingerprint is so fast, so I'm living my life, and I'm okay with it. Now one of the updates that took place, we have a new camera UI, so I had to show that off to you, it's a little different. Now some editing features are a little different. The way they come up as well as you can see, we have these huge buttons for enhanced black and white portrait and color pop and then, as you move down to the bottom here into these various sub menus for crop and adjust it's uh, it's just a completely different interface, giving you a little more control, it's the most current one that they're working on. But let me tell you, there's something just something about the look, the way the processing takes place here now I realize other manufacturers have caught up.

I have tested so many fantastic smartphone cameras in here, but what's cool this time around is assuming the camera performance on this guy 4a5g is similar. What's cool is to get this level of camera performance in devices at this price point, so I realize the pixel 5 there's a lot of discussion around price for what it is considering. It doesn't have the flagship chip in it, and we're talking about 700 bucks, but this one. On the other hand, if you're really interested in value well now you're talking I'm talking about the 4a 5g or even the regular Pixel 4a for that matter, it's just cool to see their level of computational photography in devices that are that cheap and uh. And so of course, this is no exception.

You pair it with the large battery and some features like wireless charging. Reverse wireless charging fast unlock extra camera module. I don't know we just have a package here that, for some reason in my hands is compelling at the moment. So let's go ahead and just snap a few more photos. Inside the new UI, I mean I didn't bring over the Robin Hood: all-purpose flour for no reason, so I'm going to go ahead and do a quick 1x over here boom.

There's a 1x and a 0.6 and a 2x as well, and then also you know what might be cool is to try to get a close focus all right. So that's the two. That's your 2x camera and I don't know about you Kirk, but I mean I'm seeing the texture of the bag over here. All right. The video UI also new, a lot of the fancy stuff happens under this little shake button over here.

You have standard video stabilization for light movement. That's the default setting. You have locked for far away still shots 2x zoom active for heavy movement, so that's the most extreme stabilization and then cinematic pan, which is the thing that they showed off at the event which gives you these smooth, panning shots. Half speed, muted interesting. So I suppose we should do maybe the standard version first.

So this is standard stabilization, and I am going to walk around and mo is going to say hi there you go, and I'm still walking, and the camera is moving relatively rapidly, and you can test out just how smooth that is, and I'm now I will go ahead and switch to active mode. I don't know what's going to happen here. Is it going to crop in more look, we even have a little demo, oh interesting, so stabilized versus standard. Well, obviously, that's quite the difference, a demonstration of locked, my goodness. Ah, I don't think we're going to simulate the uh active scenario.

At the moment. Cinematic pan yeah- I can do that. Let's give that a try, in fact I'll bring up our model for that purpose, and we shall pan let's try this out, so it slows it down. It looks I guess it's filming at 60 and then down to 30, but yeah very cinematic feel to it so uh again, just like all the other camera features, it's its software heavy stuff, and it's amazing what they're capable of uh via software. Obviously it's a real preference thing.

You don't have to agree, you could say I prefer the look of a Samsung photo. You could say I prefer the look of an iPhone photo. They all make great photos, it's cool to have your preference. What I tend to think about the pixel camera program is, it seems to have a focus on sharpness, maybe tweaking sharpness a little and contrast instead of going overboard on saturation and smoothing, at least in my experience and- and that happens to be to my personal preference, okay, something else worth mentioning here. The speaker setup is a bit weird.

It is a more than one speaker and I don't really want to call it stereo, because most of the sound comes out of the bottom and then the top side is. It looks like one of these in screen kind of speaker units for the earpiece, that's okay, but for audio when you're, I don't know watching some YouTube as you would be. Furthermore, it is it's not the optimal experience, so let's go ahead and play a clip from Lou later here. So if I plug up the bottom speaker, you can, it's just not as casual it ain't much coming out of the earpiece section, so don't think it's a stereo speaker experience, lockdown stuff! First started: there was talk of Starbucks, even shutting down some stores, but of course, Starbucks huge. Look at how symmetrical this viewing experience is with the bezels in each direction.

Now, obviously, you have the hole punch for the front-facing camera one day in the future. This can be hidden beneath the display not today, but in the meantime I mean this is just a nice little package right here, and it's its so strange that we are on the cusp of a resurgence of the small phone. I can't say that I saw it coming. I knew there was some chatter some talk. People wondered if it would ever happen, but now we have some big players in the space taking the small phone seriously players like apple and players like google and that may have an impact on the marketplace as a whole in encouraging other manufacturers to also rethink their strategy.

In fact, actually the OnePlus 8t was kind of similar in the sense that it was a bit smaller than the OnePlus 8 pro, so we'll see if this continues. In the meantime, my sim card will now enter this device uh. I want to play around with the video I want to play around with the photo, and I want to play around with the idea of having a tiny phone in my pocket in a more traditional form factor, because I have been using the z-fold too for a long period of time, and I have actually a few more things to say about this guy as well. I think this is kind of underrated. You might think that sounds crazy, because millions of people are obviously interested in this.

This is a lot more like having an entire computer in your pocket. It's like a pocket tablet as much as it's a phone, and there are the drawbacks, of course, with carrying a brick around comparatively to something like this. But when you pop this thing open, you need to get some work done. You need to do some serious typing, there's not much else like it that you can fit in your pocket. So I don't know.

Maybe I have more coming up on my experience with this, but for now the sim card is about to enter the brand-new pixel 5, bigger battery features that I wanted. Like the reverse wireless charge, wireless charge, the display looks nice, and it's just well. It's the latest pixel. So I'm going to give it a shot.

Source : Unbox Therapy