Unboxing, Comparison, Setup and First Look - Pixel 4 XL

Hi everyone, 

The other day Google had their event where they showed off the new pixel devices the 4 and the 4 XL and they were nice enough to send the 4 XL along so in this video were going to unbox the 4 XL well also set it up take a look at some of the specs and take a look at some of the new features and then if you want to jump to any specific point in this video.

So you don’t have to watch the whole thing maybe you’re interested in specific things I'll link the time codes in the description as I normally do so let’s go ahead and unbox this so this is the box that Google actually sent over and it’s sort of integrated the pixel itself is integrated into the box so it’s kind of nice they were talking about more sustainability and I suppose this goes along with that and this is just some cards welcoming me to the pixel 4 and lets open this up and see what we’ve got.

So it says making help magical and I think that’s everything in here now this is the box they sent it in and it says making help magical made by Google lets go ahead and open it up and here’s the pixel itself I haven’t opened it you can see the seals are still intact and then maybe this is a case a little piece of paper there it says pixel 4 XL case so let’s set this aside and here’s the pixel 4 now I have no idea what color this is or anything like that but let’s talk about the price and this comes in at 899 to $9.99 for the larger XL size.

So it’s going to be a fairly expensive premium phone it comes in clearly white just black or oh so orange so let’s go ahead and open it up and see which color I have the orange is a new color but they all look pretty good to me so we have just orange so I figured they’d send the newest color so that’s pretty nice-looking I prefer ibly like I personally like the orange and the white so well set that down let’s take a look at what else is in the box so we’ve got some paperwork here SIM card removal tool a user guide and some warranty information then we have our USB C 2 USB C charge cable and then we also have a little adapter they include this every year and this I won’t take this out but its USB a to USB C to help you transfer directly from one device to another and then we should have an 18 watt fast charger so it’s the typical pixel charger and it should charge fairly quickly I’m not sure how fast just yet but let’s set all of this aside now as far as the phone is concerned.

Let’s take the cover off it the phone actually feels fairly substantial in fact it feels heavier than I thought and Ill compare it with the pixel 3 XL in just a moment but the outside is made of aluminum so its glass front and back this is a matte texture which I really like you’ve got the new dual camera module here and the camera bump is really pretty minimal there’s not much to it really you’ve got a nice kind of creamsicle orange power button you’ve got your volume up and down and this is on the right side of the phone on the bottom you’ve got a speaker and microphone with your USB see Jack in the middle on the other side you’ve got a SIM card tray and it’s not expandable and then on the top it looks like we’ve got another microphone now as far as the glass is concerned its Gorilla Glass 5 front and back and then this has a single SIM card tray with an SIM so there’s no dual SIM card now as far as the internal specs this has a Snapdragon 855 with an adrenal 640 GPU it also has 6 gigabytes of RAM and comes in 64 or 128 gigabytes I’m not sure which size.

This is yet I’m not sure it says on the box but Ill check it once I boot it up and then it also has a couple extra chips and it has a Titan M security module as well as the pixel neuro core now as for the display lets go ahead and turn it on the display is a six point three inch OLED display it’s a 3040 by 1440 with 537 pixels per inch it’s supposed to be HDR certified and hopefully it will look really nice now the forward facing camera is kind of interesting there’s just one but there’s a bunch of different sensor arrays in the top here that’s why you’ve got the larger top in the smaller chin I guess so the top the top itself as a bunch of sensors in it you’ve got a forward-facing camera that’s 8 megapixels with an F 2.0 aperture you also have face unlock ir you’ve got an ambient light sensor a solid radar a dot projector a face IR camera and a face unlock flood illuminator now before I set this up let’s talk about the cameras on the back and you’ve got two this year.

You have a normal wide-angle lens and you have a telephoto lens so you have a 12 point two megapixel F 1.7 with the equivalent of about 28 millimeter wide lens and then you also have a 16 megapixel F 2.4 that’s about a 45 millimeter telephoto lens they record 4k 34 as far as video is concerned so they should be pretty interesting Google has always been really great with the cameras and well set this up in a moment but let me just show you a size comparison with the pixel 3 XL so here’s the pixel three XL side-by-side the pixel 4 XL is slightly taller but it looks like it might be a little bit narrower from the top and it is a little bit narrower so slightly taller a little bit narrower probably to accommodate those that that forward-facing array at the top of the phone but you can see here’s the screen side-by-side so it is a little bit different the pixel 4 XL definitely feels a little narrower in the hand as well so let’s go ahead and set the pixel 4 XL up well hit start connect to a mobile network well skip the sim part right now. 

I’ll put my sim card in it a little bit later it’s going to check for updates now that its connected to my Wi-Fi network and its actually installing an update so we have a day 1 app update going in I don’t know if everyone will get this but I can only assume that everyone will have this update as soon as they get their hands on one now it says copy apps and data you can choose to transfer your apps photos contacts Google account and more well hit next use your old phone you need your old Android or iPhone turn it on and keep it unlocked and find your old phones cable so I’m actually going to transfer everything from my pixel 3xl over to the 4 XL so I’ve got my cable here well plug it into the 3 XL and then plug the other side into the 4 XL now you can do this with iPhone or Android but well hit next and I didn’t even have to hit so it did it by itself and you’ll see.

Confirm your screen lock at the antique phone and reputedly my pixel 3 XL features a very low battery so I may need to charge that for a little bit now while I’m waiting for the other phone to charge a little bit let’s talk about the battery and the pixel 4 XL now this has a 3700 milliamp hour battery it supports 18 watt fast charging and also has wireless charging and the pixel stand support so if you have a pixel stand it should work pretty well let’s take a look at the case that they sent along as well they’ll pull these open here and see what we’ve got most of these are cloth and that’s definitely a bright and vibrant case so that’s got an interesting pattern on it just says Google pixel 4 and let’s see what it looks like in here I’ll probably use it without a case but it fits it keeps the camera away from the table if that’s where you’re setting it and that texture is pretty interesting.

You can see that I do like it but you either like these cases or you don’t they’re cloth they feel kind of like a denim material and they’re very durable though I’ve had one on my pixel 3 XL for some time as well you’ll see it is used in the upper right I suppose it’s got a little bit of fuzz going on there but overall its held up well and has not scratched the phone so these cases do work pretty well and I think the cases have some pretty funny names but I don’t see it on this package at all but the case does have a built-in button here with the volume rocker but no protection on the bottom of the phone so just keep that in mind if you’re using it and you do get a little bit of lay on the table protection so there is a little bit of that not a ton but there is some you’ve got some cutouts for the microphones as well I charge the phone to 20%.

 So I could transfer all my data so well go ahead and hit next verify that it’s me copy data to your new phone hit copy now it says continue setup on the pixel for Excel so its saying what do you want to copy Ill copy everything and well wait for it to continue so well hit next so with then we say ok or not to Google services and then you’ve got some legal terms I assume you have to accept this or you can’t get in then screen lock setup for security set your PIN and now we can set up the new face unlock so it says glasses or tightly tinted sunglasses are okay this works very similar to face ID so well hit next.

Its telling us how to set it up so well set it up here and we have to move our head around it says it looks good and well hit done continue set up access your assistant with voice match I agree I use that all the time and Google already recognizes my voice it says good job you can viewer to delete your activity so it’s telling us about the new privacy and security features we can squeeze this phone as well which is one of my favorite ways to access Google assistant I’ll just leave it as is well hit next and now it’s showing us the new quick gesture so well turn them on it says make your lock screen smarter so as you approach it with your hand it will turn the screen on I’m all for that this is anything else well hit no thanks and its giving us some tips and tricks so well hit.

Next its almost ready it says you can disconnect the cable so its moved everything over well hit done and it says adding finishing touches now it’s finished and since this runs Android 10 its telling us how to use the gestures so well hit next its telling us how to switch apps how to go back and new accessibility gestures so two finger swipes the maximum amount as get entry to magnification there were things like that so well hit next and it says you’re ready to start using your phone you can turn off gesture navigation and use buttons to go back if you want to do that in settings and we swipe up now the pixel for Excel is fully restored I had to actually install a new update and then re-register my face but all of my apps are here and this is just super smooth when I go through here now this has a new chipset in it that I mentioned before the pixel neural core and this allows for better Google assistant understanding right on the device without sending anything to goggles so let’s turn it into airplane mode and try the demo they actually showed so well turn on Do Not Disturb well turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and well just put it in airplane mode.

That’ll be easier and they have this new voice transcribe app or recorder app that can transfer transcribe my voice in real time so let’s try this it says record respectfully around others so well hit and threes a transcript button down here and it should actually transcribe my voice in real time as I’m speaking so as were talking about the pixel for Excel I can speed up my voice and see if it will keep up and I can slow down and I don’t know how well this works if you have a different accent but the nice thing is after I’m done recording this I should be able to search the text within the recording so well hit pause well hit save and here’s the actual recording now I can search my recording instead of scrubbing so I can say pixel well see if it searches it and it tells me with this little marker here exactly.

Where that part is that I say pixel so well go into that let’s see what it says and it did exactly like we expected in airplane mode so I guess it does work the way they say it works should be interesting to see all of these new features now the camera has been enhanced we do have a telephoto lens and not a wide-angle lens but the rear camera has portrait mode of course you can zoom now and also if you take HDR photos you can adjust different lighting and things like that so if you have HDR capability you can adjust the bright and dark and you’ll see here’s the options we have from motion timer flash ratio full image or 16:9 here you can use either or and then we had even more settings here so this is one of my favorite cameras in fact when I’m taking.

All of my videos when I make a photo outside or something like that I usually use a pixel phone because I can frame it and the pixel the photo comes out exactly how I expect it to I have a hard time with the iPhone with that maybe with the new camera I won’t but so far I have with this we also have an improved nitesite mode so Ill test all of this out for the full review but this should be pretty interesting now that soli radar should help with unlocking so if I put the phone down I approach it should start to unlock as soon as I pick it up and go right to the home screen it’s incredibly fast it’s definitely the fastest face unlock I’ve seen and supposedly its secure and they’ll probably improve it but if you have your eyes closed this works it seems let’s try it and it unlocked and I know.  

You couldn’t see me there but I did have my eyes closed so I took a selfie as well a portrait mode selfie and it did a nice job around the hair it did have a little bit of weird blurring going on there but overall its actually pretty good so far I’ll be testing it over the next week or so and then get back as far as how it is now the overall feel in the hand is quite good I do like this matte finish on the back and it just feels pretty good I like the dimensions of it feels very secure it doesn’t feel slippery or anything like that these sides are coated even though they’re aluminum they’re coated and it just feels pretty good overall now there was supposed to be a little Pokemon app that was installed where you could use the soli radar to kind of contact it or talk to it or wave at it or whatever I actually haven’t seen that on here. 

I’ve only seen it on the demo so I’ve been looking for it I’m not really seeing it on here I’ll see if I can find it no I wasn’t able to find the Pikachu demo that’s actually in the stores but it’s it can be set as a wallpaper so if I go to Styles an wallpapers we go to come alive here scroll down we have a Pokemon sidekick so if we hit download it does warn you that it increases battery usage but let’s try it out and see what we have so it says wave to say hello a wave.

In any direction above you can wave well set it as a wallpaper just to take a look so we can wave and it responds let’s see on the lock screen there probably is just going to unlock there we go we can wave and pokemon is playful and whatever so it’s in the background if you want to pokemon sidekick you can have it on your home screen and it’s just there let me change it to what I’ll use normally now I do like some of these this says compass so you can set it as a compass and it moves with your device depending where you’re going so. I’m not sure exactly it looks like it works kind of slowly but you get the idea so it’s pretty interesting I like all of these new wallpapers.