Alex Kidman from finder with our video review
of the Google Pixel 2 XL.
Now the Pixel 2 XL is pretty much
the last premium handset to launch in 2017 but the question is
has Google saved the best to last? Let's look at
the design first and in design terms there's really
not a lot
to the Pixel 2 XL. If you compare it against
something like an Apple iPhone X or a Galaxy Note 8
it almost feels a little bit under designed.
The display screen isn't quite full screen,
it doesn't quite wrap to the edges, now there's very good reasons for that.
Google's incorporated dual-firing speakers at the
top and bottom, and on the sides you have the squeeze feature which
they've adopted from the HTC U11 although,
it's a limited squeeze feature. On the U11 you could say
I want this to launch the camera,
or I want this to launch an app,e
or I want this to launch the Google assistant, on the new
Pixel phones it's the assistant or nothing, and that
plays into one of the key strengths of this phone. This is a phone
all about Google's software. Google's been really
insistent that software is at the heart of what
they think makes a phone special. The design is
rather plain, it'll only take a sim, this is
very classic Google, they've never really supported microSD
because they'd rather you had your data up in the cloud
it also of course won't actually take a standard
headphone jack either. They do supply a USB-C to
3.5m jack adapter in the box but
as with the iPhones and the other phones that have dropped the headphone jack
that's a bit more problematic than it really should be.
I miss the headphone jack and I suspect a lot of people do.
It's water resistant, which is a great feature to have
and the rear-mounted fingerprint sensor is quick,
fast and well located. Samsung, if you're
listening, put your fingerprint sensors down low like Google does.
It works.
Then there's the display screen and here there's
a bit of difference between the Pixel 2 and the Pixel 2 XL
which I've got here. The XL has an OLED display
which Google has fine tuned to the SRGB
standard, and that's a little less vivid
than you're probably used to on your Samsung Galaxy or on
any number of Chinese-made phones where vivid is
usually seen as a good thing, you want those reds and oranges
really bursting out of the phone. They really don't
do that on the screen to the same extent. Google has released an update
which makes it a little bit more vibrant but it's nowhere near
as punchy
That's a kind of problem if you think it's a problem.
It looks a little different, it doesn't actually look bad in that
sense. Slightly more problematic is the
very evident blue shift that you get if you tilt the phone at all.
Now, again, this is a characteristic of display screens,
they all do this to one degree or another
but the Pixel 2 XL does it to a really noticeable degree.
Not a killer
problem, but not exactly what you want out of a premium
priced phone. In terms of
processing power, the Pixel 2 XL has a really
interesting story to tell. Now it's running on the same Snapdragon
835 that you'll find in just about
every premium Android phone today
and in sheer benchmark terms it
runs just about the same as they do. You might think
well it's just the same as all the others. No
it's not. This is a far more responsive phone.
It is of course running pure and clean Android and one of the
big promises with Pixel as with Nexus before it
was that you'd get updates first
and you definitely do with this. But the end result is one of the
snappiest, quickest phones I've used in
years, it's really very good at basic
tasks and even more computationally intensive
tasks because of course the Snapdragon 835 is no
slouch. As for the camera. Google's only opted
for a single lens solution, which might make you think
that it's a lesser camera,
and it really depends on how you want to use it.
As you may well be aware, DxOMark has rated
the Pixel 2's camera as the best in market.
But you've really got to break that figure down to understand what it is
and what it means for your actual usage.
The key factor with Google's camera is that it's AI
drive, it automatically analyses the scene and basically
sets everything automatically for you, and for the most
part it does this really, really well. You can get some very
very good shots even if you're a terribly ordinary photographer
out of the Pixel 2 XL.
However, if you're more of a pro photographer,
if you like your manual settings, they're really hard to get
to, and some of them you can't get to at all. So if you like
fiddling, this may not be the camera for you.
Google's managed to incorporate a portrait mode into this, even though
it's not a dual lens. And computationally that's quite impressive
and the results are generally pretty good.
Throw complex hair at it and it can be a little bit problematic, and
there can be some instances in some lighting where you end up with an almost
photoshopped-looking subject because they just don't
quite look like they're in the scene they're in. There's a little bit too much blur or the
blur looks a little bit artificial behind them, because of course it is, it's
just software derived. Is the camera better or worse?
It comes down to your usage. I would tend to favour
a dual camera approach, not just for a
slightly more realistic portrait but simply for the flexibility
that it gives you. You don't
get a 2x optical zoom, you don't get a monochrome lens,
you don't get a wide lens. You get a single lens, a very good
lens and the software supports it beautifully but you are
stuck within that single frame of reference. For a lot of
folks of course that will well and truly be enough
but if you crave a bit more playfulness in your photography
maybe look at the other dual lens cameras and
hopefully for next year's Pixel phones that's the route
Google will take. So should you but the
Pixel 2 XL? Well that depends. It's
premium price, whether you pick it up outright or on contract
and you've got lots of premium options. If
you love the idea of getting Google updates really
really early and you really like having your data in the
Googleverse, then
yeah this is pretty much the obvious phone to buy because it's so heavily tied
into Google's services. If you want something a little bit more
photographic flexibility I'd suggest you look around
at options like the Note 8 or the OnePlus 5
or competitors even in the single lens space
like Sony's Xperia XZ Premium or even
dare I blaspheme, an iPhone X or an iPhone
8 Plus. The Pixel 2 XL isn't
without its flaws but it is an exceptional
phone. We've published our full review including photo samples, video
samples and everything you could possibly want to know on finder
so I encourage you to go and check that out today. Thanks for watching.