Google Pixel 4 XL initial review: Look mum, no hands
Google's annual phone refresh isn't as mature as the likes of Apple and Samsung - or even Huawei - who dominate the smartphone market.
But now in its fourth iteration, the Pixel is looking to change the story and explore new ways to enhance that bond between a person and their phone. Launched alongside a smaller Pixel 4, we got a brief introduction to the new phone to bring you our first impressions.
Shifting up design
- Black, white and Oh so Orange
- Big camera square
- 160.4 x 75.2 x 8.2mm
The biggest change in the Pixel 4 XL design comes from the finishes. While the materials are basically the same as the past few phones - metal and glass - the coatings on the phone make it feel a lot more tactile.
The edges, rather than being glossy and slippery are coated for a grippier finish - on the orange and white versions, at least. When you're manipulating a big phone that's a great thing, but there's also an interesting contrast between the black of those edges and the colour of the rear of the phone.
Now the same texture across the entirety of the device - there's no matte and gloss mix like before - Google has opted for black, white and orange as colours. The finish and the feel is good, leaving the impression of a premium handset, although the eye will be drawn to the camera array in the corner.
Rather like the iPhone 11 Pro, Google has opted to expand the cameras and the housing that they sit in. It's a big black square, bigger than you'd probably expect from a phone with just two cameras on the rear - but fingers-crossed the performance justifies its bombastic appearance.
Exactly how the textures of this phone will stand the test of time remains to be seen, but around the front there are some interesting details too - and yes, you might have noticed that there's no fingerprint scanner.
Radar magic and face unlocking
- Soli radar chip
- IR-based face unlock system
The first thing you'll notice about the front of the Pixel 4 XL is that forehead - the bezel across the top of the display. Yes, it looks like a throwback to the Pixel 2 XL and while it's great to wave goodbye to the Pixel 3 XL's comedy notch, there's a sense that Google really hasn't gone to town trying to get a full-screen display.
There's a reason for that however. Firstly you have a speaker and front camera - just one this time - but there's also Google's Soli chip sitting in that top bezel. Powering a system called Motion Sense, it uses radar to detect you, allowing a range of gestures to interact with your phone.
That means you'll be able to wave away alarms, you'll be able to skip tracks with a swipe of your hand and in our demo we saw interaction with wallpapers - waving at Pikachu, which is a bit of fun. The full scope of Motion Sense is yet to be realised - and Google says that this is a system that's just getting started - but we've seen some of this before.
LG introduced gesture control on the LG G8 ThinQ and we have to say that we didn't find much use for it: we're either holding our phone or not using it and these features seem to be for that inbetween space when your phone is close but you're not holding it. That might work for drivers - and integrating with Google Maps Navigation or Waze would be interesting - but outside of that, we wonder how useful it will be.
There's another reason the forehead on the Pixel 4 XL is so big though. It also houses the infrared sensors for the new face unlock system. It appears that it's going to be using the same technology as Apple's Face ID and Google has told us that it's secure enough to be used as biometric unlocking for banking apps and the like - although there's going to be some developer time needed for that to happen.
But unlike the iPhone, the Soli chip will be able to detect the you reach for the phone and power up those face unlock circuits to make unlocking even faster - with no problems relating to orientation or angles. We're yet to fully test it ourselves, but it sounds great.
Display and hardware specs
- 6.3-inch Quad HD+ OLED display
- 90Hz refresh rate
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 855, 6GB RAM, 64/128GB storage
As to the core hardware of the Pixel 4 XL, there's a 6.3-inch Quad HD+ display, larger than the regular 5.7-inch Pixel 4 and the big change here is that this OLED display is going to be offering 90Hz refresh rate. That was something that went down well on the OnePlus 7T and should mean that there are smoother visuals.
We've not spent enough time with the display to really get a feel for its performance, so we'll update once we've had the phone for a longer period of time.
The Google Pixel 4 XL sits on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 platform, with a bump to 6GB RAM and storage options of 64 or 128GB. The bump in RAM will likely be welcomed by those who struggled with the 4GB of the Pixel 3 XL, but in many ways the performance will be governed by software optimisation. Will we be able to wave goodbye to the aggressive background closing of apps? We're hoping so.
There's also an upgraded Pixel Neural Core, designed to give power to the camera and to the new Motion Sense functions.
Naturally we're going to spend a lot of time testing the performance of the Pixel 4 XL, but we'll publish a full review once we have.
Say hello to a new camera
- 12-megapixel f/1.7 main camera
- 16-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto camera
- Night Sight enhancements
The camera is what people spend most of their time talking about when it comes to the Pixel. Over the past few devices, the Pixel has excelled with a single camera, able to use software, AI and optimisation to achieve results that others can't manage with more lenses.
The new lens adds zoom - a 16-megapixel telephoto lens - designed to increase the quality for those close-up shots. What's interesting about it is the implementation. Google isn't giving you the option to switch lenses, you can't tap a button and be in the telephoto lens - instead you have to use the pinch zoom, and it's seamlessly integrated.
The idea here is a blend between hardware and software, looking to offer between quality zoom but without saying that you either have 1x or 3x like others do. It's not hugely new in that regards - many recent devices will let you slide from wide to normal to telephoto with some great results.
Google is also boosting the skills of Night Sight, adding capabilities for astrophotography. This will detect if the camera is steady - you'll need it supported or on a tripod - and it will then use 15 second exposures knitted together to take pictures of the stars. You can handhold it, but only for 6 second exposures.
Night Sight was something of a breakthrough when introduced on the Pixel 3 last year; we've seen many adopt those skills, with the likes of the Huawei P30 Pro and the Apple iPhone 11 Pro offering rival or better performance - and now's the chance for Google to boost that performance. We'll put it to the test and see how it compares to rival devices.
But there's one new area that's really interesting and something we've not seen on other phones. Google calls it dual exposure, but don't confuse with dual exposure of a manual film camera. This isn't about creating ghost images, it's about making photos look fabulous.
What it does is take the idea of HDR and ramp it up, allowing you to independently set the foreground levels. This is particularly useful when you have something in shadow or silhouetted against a brighter background. It should allow you to bring balance to portraits in amazing settings.
All the software goodness of Android 10
The Pixel 4 XL will run a pure version of Android 10, with some additions to stand it apart from some of the other leading Android smartphones. There will be a lot of goodness in there, from the Pixel Launcher and Camera, through to the system-wide dark mode and better privacy controls that people are already enjoying in Android 10.
There are improvements to Google Assistant, allowing for contextual follow-on questions, meaning you can do things like asked Google to open a particular Instagram account and then a related YouTube channel without having to say the person's name over and over. It's designed to be smart and allow contextual sense - something we've seen growing across Google Assistant over the past years.
There's also going to be a very smart voice recorder app that will live transcribe your notes and turn them into text. That text will also be searchable, meaning this is going to be great for students or journalists. It's exclusive to Pixel and all the processing happens on the device - so it will work without a connection.
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