There’s an intangible quality to every phone that can’t quite be expressed by spec sheets and benchmarks. I can TELL you about the phone, and that still won’t properly convey how I FEEL about the phone.
With the Pixel 5 in limbo, it’s important to check back in with a phone that was pretty heavily panned by critics. For all my personal preferences on beastly hardware and mobile content creation, the Pixel 4XL is still the phone I have the hardest time taking my SIM card out of when I need to move on to a new review device.
When factoring in minute differences between glass on glass sandwich gadgets, a fraction of a millimeter of bezel, or an edge of a sidewall taper, manufacturers have largely agreed on what a modern smartphone should resemble.
That aesthetic is incomplete.
We want a daily driver phone, able to survive lifestyle abuse. To make our phone functionally usable in the real world, without having to baby it, you have to “finish” the phone hardware on your own dime.
At some point we need to acknowledge that the Pixel 4 is a good phone. A REALLY good phone. The healthy debate isn’t “winner or loser”. Instead, the tricky question for Pixel fans:
How large is the audience for THIS phone, who won’t be satisfied by a Pixel 3A?
I’m going to get a LOT of criticisms about my “tone” when the public version of this review is published.
I have a hard time with the inconsistency of reviews we’ve seen on the Pixel 4. I haven’t seen a lot of folks review the phone for what it really is. Instead, most seem fine focusing on what the phone is NOT, and calling it a day.
Well, I love a good underdog fight. There’s quite a bit of crankiness in this video, but let’s see if we can judge the Pixel by the same criteria we rate all phone cameras.
1. What are the manufacturer’s claims?
2. Has it improved over previous generations of Pixel?
If we want phones to start replacing laptops, they have to handle heavier workloads. I’ve gotten criticisms that my video rendering test is too short, so let’s REALLY drive some phones hard. What if we rendered a WHOLE MOVIE on a phone? Can our mobile gadgets hand with laptops? Will phones run too hot?
Motion control showdown! We’ve been dancing around Jedi controls for years. Alternative actions are NOT easier. Google is taking a simpler approach to air gestures. Here’s how it stacks up against the other methods used by LG and Samsung!
I’ve already gone on record proclaiming the V50 as my favorite phone of 2019. As a reviewer and editorialist, I don’t believe there can be “true objectivity” in a review. If you know more about me, how I use my gadgets, and the work I put them through, you will have a better understanding of my analysis. You can apply my experiences which overlap with your needs, and you can disregard the parts of my analysis which don’t apply to you. I made a video on this idea, which you can watch below.
I try to be as fair as I can. I try to examine a gadget based on the claims made by the manufacturer, not my preconceived idea of what the gadget SHOULD be. I try to figure out who the audience might be for EVERY gadget I review.
Every phone I’ve reviewed this year has gotten SOME kind of purchasing recommendation, but obviously some phones have been more broadly recommended than others.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at one of the most brutal comparisons in the premium tier of the Android ecosystem. This is a battle of polar opposites. Two substantially different takes on the idea of an expensive phone. And when the dust settles from this showdown, the songs we will sing of these mighty titans will echo through the halls of history.
Benchmarking a phone is tricky. Synthetic scores only tell PART of the story. If you’re shopping a premium phone, we should be looking at MUCH more aggressive use than just “covering the basics”. Let’s run the Pixel 4 through some tests that can make decent laptops struggle!
