After leaking pretty much every detail of its existence in the past few months, Google have finally officially unveiled the Pixel 4 and 4 XL smartphones.
Announced at their Made By Google event in New York City yesterday (October 15), the phones feature a brand new design, along with some interesting new features that leverage on the company’s AI expertise.
We’ll definitely be taking a more in-depth look at the phone in the coming weeks, but in the meantime here’s everything you need to know about the Pixel 4.
Displaying Potential
While other 2019 flagship phones like the iPhone 11 and Mate 30 Pro more or less retain the design of their predecessors, the Pixel 4 is quite the departure from the Pixel 3.
On the front the Pixel 4 ditches the notch in favour of a more traditional bezel, which — in a time where phones are competing for bezel-less superiority — might seem like a step in the wrong direction.
The trade off, however, is Google squeezing a ton of new technology into that little space, which is used to power the Pixel 4’s new Face Unlock feature. Much like the iPhone’s Face ID, this allows you to…um, unlock the phone with your face.
While this was certainly a gamble (the phone even ditches the fingerprint sensor in the process), it seems to have paid of. The Pixel 4’s Face Unlock could very possibly be the fastest we’ve seen in a phone, and even reaches the home screen before you pick it up.
Another big new feature of the Pixel 4 is its 90hz display, which makes navigation smoother than most — if not all — phones. Everything from scrolling through Instagram to gaming will benefit from this, and it’s hard to go back to using anything else once you get used to it.
One last trick that the Pixel 4’s screen has up its sleeve is something called Motion Sense. This allows you to control the phone with simple gestures, so you can skip songs, snooze alarms and silence your ringer without even touching it.
When it comes to internals the Pixel 4 is rather par for course, equipped with a SnapDragon 855 processor and 6GB of RAM. Strangely enough, the Pixel 4 has a smaller battery capacity than the Pixel 3 (2,800 mAh compared to 2,915 mAh), though the 4 XL boasts a 3,700 mAh the 3 XL’s 3,430 mAh.
Two Is Better Than One
One of the biggest selling points of Pixel phones is its camera, and the Pixel 4 continues to build on the strong foundation laid by its predecessors.
While the Pixel’s single camera setup has always been impressive Google have now thrown a telephoto camera into the mix, which allow you to take great-looking photos from a further distance.
Night Sight is also as impressive as ever, and is now even capable of astrophotography (aka the ability to take photos of the stars). We’re going to have to to play around with it a little more to see if it’s as good as it sounds, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Google.
There’s not much to complain about in this department, but if we had to name one gripe it would be the lack of a wide-angle camera. Pretty much every other 2019 flagship phone has it, and its rather disappointing that a camera of this quality lacks what has pretty much become a basic feature
Pricing And Availability
Price wise, the Pixel 4 and 4 XL start at $1,119 and $1,319 respectively for the 64GB version ($1,269 $1,469 for the 128GB models), and will be available at the Google Store, COURTS, Challenger and StarHub from the 24th of October onwards.
If you want to secure a set for some peace of mind, however, you can actually pre-order the phones on the Google Store starting today. The phone comes in three colours — Just Black, Clearly White, and a limited edition Oh So Orange (no prizes for guessing what those colours are).
We’re going to have to spend a little more time with the phone to make a conclusive statement, but as far as first impressions go the Pixel 4 seems like a worthy successor to last year’s Pixel 3.
Feature Image Credit: Vulcan Post