hi everyone it's Dom here and I have goodies from Google I have the pixel 4
and the pixel 4 xl aka the two most leaked phones ever we're going to do a
quick unboxing and show you what the phones are like and what the differences
between the two are though hint there aren't very many as you can see we have
the four and the four XL of in black sadly Google sent us both phones in the
standard black model or I think it's just black they also come in white or
clearly white and oh so orange though that's a limited edition so if you want
the orange one you probably want to act fast and grab one early on because I
suspect that will not be around for the whole of the next 12 months okay I will
look at the smaller pixel 4 first so peel these bits off get to the phone
okay here we have it back first we can
already see the square camera layout and the G logo otherwise looks like a pretty
black slab I'll set that aside just for the moment and look what else we're
gonna get in with it in here we just have the sim tool a user
guide and safety and warranty stuff so nothing super exciting
down here we have our USB C to USB C charging cable and then a if it wants to
come out oh no it's all going wrong USB a to USBC adapter and then this I'm
guessing is the charging brick yeah so then here we go the charging brick UK plug
obviously that's why it looks odd and bulky if you're not from the UK as you
can see that's a USBC socket USB C to USBC cable makes sense one note on
what's not here there are no headphones so as with the previous pixel
phones there's no headphone jack on the pixel 4s so you are limited to USB C
or wireless headphones but they've chosen not to include
headphones in this box in some markets I think France and Australia but maybe
others as well you will actually get USB-C pixel bud headphones in the box but
not in the UK pretty sure not in the US so it depends where you are you might
get headphones with it for us we don't and most places are not getting
headphones okay I'll move all that aside and get to the actual phone which is
what we're here for so peel that surprisingly sticky off
okay and then oh yeah drop the phone it's all good okay there we go so this
is the smaller pixel four as you can see it's kind of a nice compact size you can
already see even with the screen off there's a fair bezel at the top though
not so much at the bottom and it's a full bezel not a notch we also get a
better look we turn it on as for the rest of it glossy black back this is the
black model again the other thing you'll note there's a big change is it's a
single sort of block of glossy material of color there's none of the two pane
design that they've had where it's sort of say slightly more matte up to here
and then glossy at the top it's all the same finish all the way down little
Google G logo there and then just the square camera layout which we'll talk
about in a little bit more detail in a sec one thing you will notice is not
here is a fingerprint sensor but before you get your hopes up that does
not mean in display fingerprint reading it means no fingerprint reading there is
no fingerprint scanner at all on either pixel four phone it just face unlock or
nothing and then yeah final little sort of design notes as you see it's a black
border all the way around which sort of slightly rubberized grip feeling which
is nice like it feels quite secure the power button is a little pop of light on
this and on the white and orange models it's a pop of a slightly different color
so again that kind of accent power button is back USB C port for charging
again no headphone jack and there are down firing stereo speakers and that
is about it for the design oh and the sim tray it is a single sim phone at
least for the UK then maybe dual sim models in other markets I'm not sure but
for UK at least definitely just single so let's get the four XL out compare
them and then I'll get one of them turned on and start running through the
setup so we can show you some of the actual software features and some of the
camera stuff has changed so everything else in the box is going to be the exact
same so I'm just gonna move that out the way here is the actual phone try not to
drop it this time there we go okay again plain black finish so we see from size
it's a pretty you know noticeable size difference it's yeah it's a big it's a
similar sort of size difference of what we've seen from the previous pixel
generations but you will definitely notice the difference that is sort of
sometimes some some phones the jump between the regular and the pro or the
regular and xl is kind of small enough that you almost feel like it doesn't
matter this definitely is the difference between a comfortable one-handed phone
and one that's just about one-handed but is probably more of a two-handed device
otherwise exactly the same the same camera setup same black finish same
power button accents everything is the same so there are two important hardware
differences between the four and the four xl and they're the only two
differences between the phones that you need to worry about other than the size
one is battery you're getting a 2800 milliamp hour battery in the regular
four and of 3700 in the 4 XL so obviously it's got to power a bigger
screen so that battery life you know it's a bit hard to come calculate how
much better the battery life will be but you should still see a better battery
life from the xl model than from the regular one and the other difference is
the displays so obviously they're different display sizes but more
importantly perhaps they are also different display resolutions
so it's full HD plus on the four and it's quad HD plus on the four xl so
you're actually getting a lot more pixels it actually then works out to a
significant pixel density difference this is 444 pixels per inch
and this is 537 pixels per inch you're getting a much denser pixel
count in the display much higher resolution the display on this one
should look noticeably better as we go through we'll see how sort of obvious
that is I'll just rush through set up on them both okay so here we go one other
thing that's worth noting from a display perspective which is the same between
them both is they're both OLEDs they've both got HDR support but
also they both have ninety Hertz refresh rates which is really nice so you may
notice that is a very fast very smooth animation even as I sort of move it
quickly is totally fluid there's no jaggedness to the movement this is
obviously this isn't the first phone to have 90 hz display the one plus seven
pro and now the one plus 7T pro and the one plus 7T you have it quite a
few of the gaming phones about ninety Hertz 120 Hertz refresh rates but it is
a bit of a surprise to see a popping up in the pixel and a really really
welcome one 90Hz display tech is one of my favorite display innovations one thing I
actually want to play around with and see that maybe we can get to the
settings and find out is whether you get manual control of it yeah okay this was
what I feared so the one downside is it's just sort of adaptive smooth
display tech so the option you get is that it will automatically raise the
refresh rate to 90 Hertz for suitable content what you can't do as you can on
say the oneplus phones is just set it to always been ninety hz you don't get
that option here obviously there will be a battery great battery life hit from
that and maybe Google is worried because the battery capacities aren't that
great on either phone and so they don't want to tank it with ninety hz but
yeah you can't have it always be 90 Hertz it will just turn on and off when
the phone detects it will be of benefit to give you 90 hz the other thing we
notice in here is ambient EQ that's tech that Google added in the Google home hub
now nest hub it's kind of similar to Apple's true
it basically detects the environment and adjust the color temperature of the
display to match the kind of light levels in the surrounding area which
should mean it just looks a bit more natural and colors look a bit more
realistic all the time right so in terms of what's actually new in the phone
beyond the hardware changes there are basically three things that I'm gonna
focus on and I'm just going to quickly go through some of the most exciting
bits of each so first up is the camera which is always the big draw of any
pixel phone so if we get in the big change obviously is on the back where
we've gone from a classic single lens on any previous pixel phone to for the
first time a dual lens rear camera that might not sound like much when other
phones are doing triple and quadruple lens cameras all the time
but still going to two lenses is a big step for Google the main lens is still
pretty much the same as it was before I think there have been some slight
revisions but it's still a 12 megapixels sensor well 12.2 technically and it's f
1.7 aperture wise but the second is slightly different it's a 16 megapixel
telephoto that's F 2.4 so won't let in quite as much light one thing you'll
see when we go into the camera app is that you don't actually get a sort of
chance to hit specific zoom spot it's more just that as you zoom you get
a zoom slider on the bottom and there's a point about there where we switched
lenses it's kind of hard to tell but I think you can just see the color changes
slightly just at that point around two times and that's where you hit the
telephoto so it's effectively a two x telephoto I think though Google hasn't
sort of specified in those terms it's mostly talked about the kind of focal
lengths you're hit which range from 24 millimeter of 85 millimeter effective
focal lengths but yeah it's it's it's a telephoto it's the chance to zoom in and
have zoomed in photos look better than they ever used to that's not a massive
game changer especially in through the days where now you can get to 10 times
hybrid zoom from Huawei and makes like that it's the fact that this goes up to
eight times is good but it's not the best
around but still that kind of zoomed in shot together with the computational
photography stuff that Google's best known for is kind of exciting there are
other changes beyond that second lens though so if I tap here we'll see there
are now two brightness sliders so up here is an overall brightness slider
lost it so we've got an overall brightness slider basically the same as
it would have been before but we also have a shadows brightness slider which
only affects the brightness of the darker parts of an image while leaving
the brightest parts as they're on their own so Google's calling this dual
exposure but it basically means that if you're taking photos with a really
bright background and maybe a darker foreground like say a portrait shot of
someone against sunrise or a sunset or something like that you'll be able to
make sure you get enough light of their face without messing up the colors of
the background and any other circumstances where you
have really different light levels in different parts the shot you'll be able
to play around with them to basically sort of manually get a better HDR effect
which is pretty neat speaking of HDR actually one of the
other changes is that the viewfinder has been improved so that there's a live HDR
in the viewfinder one of the downsides of pixel cameras before is that because
so much of the best parts of the shot was done after you took the photo you
didn't always get it you didn't always get a good sense of what it was gonna
look like before you took the photo now you should it should be closer to what
the final product is going to be though there's still more going on after you
hit that button the other thing is night sight I can't test it right here as
you can see the studio is not super dark night sight has had a few improvements
the partly it's just been improved so that it will handle dark skies better
and get the colors a bit better on on sky shots I have another chance to test
it yet the bigger new mode is called Astro photography I believe it will be
activated by hitting that little shot of a moon no that's just the shutter
button I'm an idiot apparently there's an astro photography mode it's part of
night sight I'm not sure exactly how you activate it I think it maybe actually
can just tell when you're pointing at the night sky that's what I was told in
my pre brief so hopefully that's how it works I'm in London which means there's
light pollution and taking photos of the stars is going to be
incredibly hard but basically this is a ultra long exposure mode that combines
multiple long exposure shots to get some really good photos of stars galaxies the
moon all that kind of stuff that normally a phone could never photograph
in any particularly convincing way the downside is you will need a tripod or
something stable to rest the phone on because the exposures could take as much
as four minutes or longer so you you can't do it holding in your hand it will
not be steady enough to get good results other than that the camera stuff is
pretty much the same as it was nothing else has changed radically which makes
us feel like a small step forward despite the big move with the second
lens actually in terms of like the main shots you're gonna take nothing here is
radically new compared to the pixel 3 where the camera was so good the Google
assistant is baked directly into the OS which means better integration with apps
so it can bring up specific Instagram pages Twitter pages things like that
you've also got a new way to activate it which is a corner swipe like that
I just it can't test it right now because this is a pre-release bit of
hardware and that bit of the software hasn't been baked into it yet I've tried
it at a pre-brief where you can sort of dart around getting Google to bring up
specific Twitter pages then Instagram pages you can use continued conversation
to dive between apps really easily it's very fast it's very fluid and we're
going to be putting together some video content specifically on that very soon I
hope and finally the other stuff is motion controls which have been added in
so there are a few one of the main ones is to do with the always-on display
which you can see there basically it will now detect presence so if there's
no one nearby it will just turn the always-on display off because there's no
one to see it anyway thus saving a bit of battery okay one of the other ones it
detects whether you reach for the phone and what it does is it basically primes
the face unlock sensors which remember are the only way to access his phone
other than a pin or a pattern because there's no fingerprint so it primes the
face unlock sensors if it detects gestures that suggest your want to use
face unlock so in theory if I just reach and pick the phone up and bring it
up is that it's based on what's already it's instant it was before I could even
explain that it was about to do face unlock so it gets the sensors ready to
go so that by the time the phone is actually facing your face
everything is on everything is ready all the software is sort of primed and then
BAM it gets you in straight away that does ease the pain of losing the
fingerprint because it makes this one of the fastest face unlocks around I'm
looking forward to testing and seeing how reliable it is different lighting
additions stuff like that whether it can handle dark rooms etc etc but if it's
reliable enough this could really improve things because it will just make
it that much faster and the final thing is traditional gesture controls like
we've seen in other devices like the LG G 8 all this stuff is based on radar
rather than a camera which Google says makes it more reliable but the actual
functionality baked into this stuff is fairly similar so it's things like
skipping through songs so if I play some music
I can then wave over to go to the next track we'll go back the other way you
can do the same thing with answering phone calls or muting phone calls
dismissing alarms stuff like that just that simple hands-free controlling that
you may want to use I don't know first thing in the morning when your alarm
goes off if you're listening to music while you're cooking and your hands are
messy it's still kind of an issues case it's actually turned off by default
though and you can just leave it off if you never want to use it it's called
motion sense but yeah super optional I will probably turn it off once I'm done
reviewing the phone but we'll see so yeah that is the pixel 4 and pixel 4 XL
in the flesh we will be playing around with these reviewing them we're gonna
have some more video we have a big camera comparison coming up where we're
gonna pit the pixel for up against the iPhone one of the iPhone 11s and also
the Galaxy Note 10 and we're gonna see which of those big three flagships has
the best camera right now and whether that telephoto is going to give the
pixel four an edge that it didn't have before so remember to like subscribe hit
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keep an out for more to come from us and let me know in the comments if you have
any questions about the new pixel phones or any suggestions for what we should be
doing with them thanks