Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Pixel 6 Review: Hey Google, Awesome Phone”.
This video is sponsored by rhino shield. You know it’s funny. You stick around long enough in tech and certain motifs tend to repeat themselves the pronounced bezels and aggressively square corners of htc’s 8x, the daft punk camera visor of huawei’s nexus 6p, and the notion that the company, whose software powers three-quarters of the world’s smartphones, should offer A flagship device worthy of that lofty status: this is the google pixel 6. on top of confident design. It brings custom silicon, the biggest camera upgrade in five years and the most assertive android overhaul in 10.. The only thing left for google to do was to make sure the price didn’t get out of control and guess what it did that too 5.99. If the prime directive of a review is to help you make a buying decision well, that price tag is a cheat code, a warp zone to the final boss at 600 bucks, the pixel 6 undercuts the iphone 13 and samsung’s galaxy s21 by a full benjamin. It may not pack the polish or the photographic prowess of its professional grade sibling, but take away that juxtaposition and there’s very little here beyond the bolder than usual bezels, to suggest that this is anything but a top shelf. Smartphone i mean take a look: gorilla glass victus on the front, gen 6 on the back ip68 dust and water resistance, dual direction: wireless charging even 5g. If you’re into that kind of thing, it’s all here and it all works very well, but as usual, what matters is the context within which you experience those specs and with pixel 6. The word that keeps leaping to mind is cohesiveness. This is a google phone in a way that not many of its predecessors have been. I was worried.
The fun had gone out of android when it stopped naming its version releases after desserts and for the past year or so there truthfully wasn’t much to get excited about from a design standpoint, but with the interface overhaul, google calls material. U android. 12 is another thing entirely to begin with.
It codifies a feature. Many manufacturers have experimented with over the years by analyzing the wallpaper you choose for dominant colors and then applying those colors system-wide. I know it sounds trivial, but when you’re typing out a reply to a message, the quick actions peaking out up top the enabled toggles matching the modifier keys and your keyboard, all of it perfectly color coordinated with your home screen. It feels modern and intentional and sleek in a way that, for example, the iphone really doesn’t to me even a week after i first picked it up. I i keep finding new things to like in this balance of playfulness and restraint.
The new bubble-shaped pop-ups on the keyboard, the extreme minimalism of the always-on, display clock and matching the default color scheme with the hardware. Color is always a nice touch. Now the phone does put form ahead of function to its detriment in places. I love the look of the oversized quick action buttons, but the wi-fi toggle i use dozens of times a day now demands two taps.
Instead of one i’m also not wild about the google pay button showing the last four digits of my credit card at all times. The glass back is glossy, which means it’s slippery and even if you put a case on it, you’ll notice. It’S missing the old capacitive fingerprint sensor, a win in the looks department to be sure, but the optical alternative that now lives under the screen is slower and less accurate.
Also, while this is the smaller of the pixels, it’s still a tall boy. So i wish google had swapped the volume, rocker and power button, or at least varied the texture, to help you tell them apart by feel they’re still much more good than bad in the day-to-day which i’m going to come back to in a sec. But first i want to talk about the thing.
That’S been synonymous with pixel from the very beginning kind of like how no mufflers is synonymous with green points for four generations. The pixel had pretty much the same 12 megapixel primary camera, mostly enhanced year-over-year through software alone. Well, for pixel 6 google decided it was finally time to evolve. His knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve in place of that old hardware sits a new 50-megapixel primary camera binned down to 12.5, alongside a 12 megapixel ultra wide shooter. Now i will point out here that if you care a lot about cameras, you’ll likely want the pixel 6 pro which bundles not just a dedicated telephoto, but also a wider angle, selfie camera. On the front side, i wish google hadn’t followed an apple and samsung’s footsteps by making the best camera contingent on getting the biggest phone, but it did and i’ll be covering that pro in a future review, hopefully with a road trip in the mix.
I stayed closer to home to test the pixel 6 camera, which helped me document a visit to the 10th anniversary celebration of the verge, featuring vintage phones from friend of the channel sasha segan of pc mag and midnight noms from a new friend of the channel five Boroughs pizza, the next day i hopped over to the google store in manhattan to film people checking out the pixel 6 on the pixel 6, and then i hit up the wind-up watch fair across the street at chelsea market. The pixel’s reputation for photographic excellence is secure. I expected to be delighted by the output from these cameras and by and large i am i’m specially taken with the toys google built in this year.
You might think of the long exposure mode as a gimmick, but it’s exactly the kind of thing i’ve been trying to do with manual mode on phones for years, and it’s just so much easier. Now that machine learning lets you do it handheld, instead of needing a tripod in the same category, is the action pan function, which is less reliable, more finicky but still fun to play with magic. Eraser is probably the most useful of all three of the new major features.
It comes in real handy when you’re, surrounded by eight million photobombers, like i often am, but above all, the key benefit to shooting with a pixel, is still there the fire and forget confidence. You get from knowing you can point and shoot and you’ll love its photos more than any other. Almost every time did you catch that almost weasel word in the voiceover.
It’S important. I was shooting alongside the iphone 13 pro for the past week and nearly every time i put the pics up against each other. I preferred the iphone’s photos, yes you’re right to say i should have been testing with the non-pro build of the iphone 13 to make it a fair fight. Here’S some side by side samples from the thirteen mini as a meia culpa. But one thing i noticed, no matter which iphone i used was that the pixel always shot hotter. Its auto settings and hdr processing just tend to produce brighter shots, with the result being more detail and shadows yeah, but at the expense of the kind of dramatic contrast.
Some folks, like me, prefer an important exception, though, is in photos of people. Google’S real shot does a much better job of preserving authentic skin tones on people with darker skin, which is a long overdue fix for phone photography. There’S a lot more to play with on the camera front but, like i say, if you’re buying a pixel for its photos. You’Re gon na want the pro so for now i’ll stuff, the shutterbug stuff and come back to the band in which those cameras are accommodated which resembles nothing so strongly as jordy’s visor from star trek the next generation. It’S a bold bifurcation between saturated and pastel colors that you’re either here for or you’re not and if you’re in the latter camp.
Well, today’s sponsor is worth a look. This video is brought to you by rhino shield maker of the solid suit family of cases for the pixel, 6 and well pretty much. Every other phone you can think of the solid suit is a full coverage case with military standard protection that can survive drops of up to 11 feet and if you don’t want to go with the subdued classic black or carbon fiber, a whole range of styles is Available from lakers b-ball to the nasa meatball rhino shield doesn’t just protect your phone, it lets you be you whatever. That means for your own personal aesthetic and with the modular mod nx case for the iphone you can mix and match individual components.
You can even make your own design for a case. That’S uniquely you rhino shield. Ships worldwide covers all iphones and most android flagships and backs all its cases with a lifetime replacement. Warranty hit the link below and use code, mr pixel for 20 off in the first week after this video goes up and 10 off after thanks to rhino shield for sponsoring this video now case or no case these days, it can be tough to tell android phones Apart, unless you have a foldable and until we get a foldable directly from google, what will continue to set the pixel apart? Is the details i’m talking about the privacy indicators that let you know when your camera or microphone is being used by an app which i’ve been waiting for google to bake into android? Since i reviewed the iphone 12., i’m talking about the haptics which are snappy and tight from the keyboard feedback to the ringer vibration, i’m talking even the ringtone selection itself, with tunes for every mood, even a whole retro section complete with flip phone.
Oh wait! That’S just terrible: let’s um get away from that. Am i right folks, and then there are the pixel exclusives. It’S not just about blocking spam calls or telling you what song the bar is playing without you having to ask for it. Voice command has gotten even more elaborate this year, letting you dismiss calls just by talking to your phone and when you’re dictating a message now you can dictate emojis. You can undo and send by voice just like the best starfleet computers, dear father, pause and erase, and i will say that feature still needs work because where it tries to guess my punctuation, it almost always fails. But my friend julian over at wired had better luck.
Even dictating much of his review through the device, and now the devil is also in the details, so i have to say the first day or two did have some bumps the phone. Wouldn’T let me fully deploy the notification shade once which required a restart another time. The battery level on the always-on display showed me a figure from several hours before and i had trouble connecting to the t-mobile network once or twice on the first day, but maybe thanks to an update early in the process. Those didn’t recur over the following week.
The phone’s solid as a rock now from calls to browsing binges and even issues i expected to run into due to the new google tensor chipset, never materialized, i mean modern, combat 5 plays like a dream. Without a hiccup. In fact, the phone is so performant. I even had to recheck the spec sheet to make sure it’s only a 90 hertz display and not 120..
It feels that smooth the only consistent low point i can point to as we wind down here is battery life. I mean it’s, it’s a full day phone, but i get closer to empty a lot sooner in the evening than i like, and on top of that, it’s really tough to diagnose what the main drains are because of android 12’s new power consumption report. Another area where form over function was probably taken too far if the pixel 6 were less capable or more expensive. Those shortcomings would give me pause, but to its credit, google patched the bugs i saw before it shipped the phone and it’ll keep supporting it with platform updates for three years. As a result, this is a 600 phone that most of the time behaves like an 800 one and gives you the best of google in the process. I haven’t seen better value on android since the nexus 5 and i haven’t been as happy with the end product since the galaxy nexus.
The pixel 6 isn’t perfect, but it is a google phone to be proud of this. Video was produced following eight days with the pixel 6 review sample provided by google. As always, google was not given copy approval rights, editorial input or an early look at this content, they’re, seeing it for the first time right alongside you subscribe to the mr mobile on youtube. So you don’t miss my 6 pro review coming soon and hit up my friends at android central for a deeper dive on both pixels in the meantime, until next time, thanks for watching and stay mobile, my friends, you .