Over 6 Months Later - Pixel 4XL

Hi everyone,

The Pixel 4XL has been out for over six months and this is a phone I carry with me every single day now I know a lot of you know me for my iPhone videos and things like that but I actually carry the pixel 4 XL with me everywhere I go since it’s been released and so Google actually sent me this a little bit before it came out and I’ve been using it regularly ever since in fact it’s my normal alarm clock I like it a little bit better than what you get with iPhone. 

For example I like the built-in alarm clock where it sort of just fades in the sound and then now you have the new bedtime options and things like that I don’t really care for bedtime and I just downgraded this back to Android 10 since it had the beta on it so I wanted the public release but it’s got these nice little features that I use all the time and also I used the soli radar with it as well so I know a lot of people thought that was a gimmick.

But for example when the alarms going off if you just swipe your hand it’s really helpful to actually silence the alarm or snooze it or shut it off or any of those things and as you bring your hand close to it actually starts to get quieter so all of these little things I find to be very helpful over the past 6 months so I do use it every single day now I also use this a lot for the phone the reception and the overall network connectivity is really good compared to that of an iPhone for example and that’s because this has a Snapdragon processor in it with their QUALCOMM chipset that allows for fantastic communication so because Apples using Intel for example this I find to be much better and much more consistent.

So just the overall connectivity is better in general and so when I place many phone calls its usually on this I don’t really make a whole lot of phone calls but I usually grab the pixel instead of my iPhone to make a phone call I use Google Phi on this and I’ve been using it for a long time and just recently when I set this up I thought it was really interesting that it asked me in Google Phi do I want to use both SIM card and the e sim at the same time so I have a Google five SIM card in here but it asked me if I wanted to use both SIM card slots to help with it switching between networks more quick.

So I turned that on it rebooted the phone and I hadn’t seen that before now as far as the overall design its really grown on me in fact I like it a lot with the exception of maybe this camera in the back that looks a little goofy but this generation all sort of looks goofy with the camera bump it’s a very minimal camera bump and I don’t use this with a case and its held up incredibly well it’s held up better than my iPhone as far as scratches or anything like that in fact there’s no scratches on it whatsoever and I just put it in my backpack or in my pocket or in my car when I’m driving like I said I use this very regularly for a lot of different tasks and I just like the design. 

I do use the squeeze for Google assistant so squeeze what’s the weather today and I find it to be well its terrible weather today for this time of year but I find this to be really nice to use just in general day-to-day it’s a great design I love the textures on it its held up really well I don’t have any Nicks or scratches anywhere around it and I just think it’s really durable and very underrated in general now the display is nice it’s got that 90 Hertz display that ramps up and back down so most of the time its super smooth so if were going into something say chrome here and we go to the Google Play Store on Chrome you can see we could just scroll through super-fast maybe well go back look at.

What’s you know today feed here and it’s just really nice to use that faster display at 90 Hertz so I have that turned on I like it a lot and the colors of this display are very accurate as well which is something I value I usually tend to put it on neutral I’m not sure if I did that this time let’s see here or natural rather I don’t really like boosted or adaptive boost it is really saturated I like a natural look that’s color accurate so this display is great it has great viewing angles it does go bright not as bright as some of the others so it’s okay I would like to see it maybe go a little bit brighter but other than that I really have no complaints the speakers are nice and loud so here’s my Android 11 beta 1 video so let me turn it up here.

So it’s nice and loud I think it sounds good it’s got a great stereo sound and I pick this one up quite a lot instead of my iPhone to use for watching videos I just think it’s a great experience overall now one thing I really like about the pixel lineup as opposed to say the s20 or any of the other phones out there is the regular monthly updates now I cover these videos regularly if you didn’t see that in my feed here I’ll let it reload but you’ll see if I go through every time there’s an update we have a pixel June 20th update or June 2020 update in the pixel feature drop and you continually get updates with this phone so you get three years of updates minimum with monthly security updates and then feature drops throughout the year and that’s something you don’t necessarily get on other phones and while the pixel may be bringing other features like a bedtime that was a newer one in the latest one bedtime was one of the newest features while you may get this on other phones it’s not implemented the same way right into the OS so it just feels more polished on this particular device in my personal.

Opinion so I love that you get regular updates it’s nice and secure and then of course with that you get stability so this phone has been very stable its very rare that I need to restart it or anything like that I don’t have many app crashes everything just seems to be nice and fast all of the time so I really enjoy using this phone and then battery life well I know some people had some issues earlier on but they keep increasing the quality of the battery so you’ll see it said it should last until about 11:00 a.m. that means 24 hours from now based on normal use now battery saver of course you could turn that on a schedule if we go to battery usage you can see that this one while it hasn’t been used very much today like I said. 

I rolled it back to Android 10 just so I could use it on the public release but in general batteries pretty good it gets me through a day without a problem I have no issues with it six hours of screen on time something like that no problems whatsoever and then there’s my favorite thing of this phone and that is the camera the camera is by far the best on most smartphones in my opinion regular pictures in fact I can rely on it to take a quality picture when I want to do a thumbnail for a video for example so any of the photos that you see when I’m outside I did a lot more of those last year based on current situations any of those thumbnails were taken with this phone it’s got a nice quality camera it does great as far as.

Its dynamic range and with the computational photography it’s just super clear and clean you’ll see as I zoom into the lenses of the iPhone 11 pro max here you can see the dust nice and clear and most people especially on a thumbnail could never tell the difference between this and a regular camera so it does a great job especially if you have great lighting other than that I think the one thing that held it back is its price not necessarily its design or overall look or anything like that I think the price when it came in new was just a little too high for the specs that it had had Google added maybe four more gigs of RAM I think less people would complain but in general I think if you added a little bit bigger battery more RAM people would be incredibly happy but if this is around $500 whether you get it used or refurbished or even new on a huge discount this is well worth that price so maybe we’ll see something different with the next generation the pixel 5 or the 4a but right now this is a fantastic phone.