Google Pixel 6 Review: Hey Google, Awesome Phone//Technology
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 the 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
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 at 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 truly 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 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 feeling 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 a 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 a 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'm especially 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 gonna 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
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 is snappy and tight from the keyboard feedback to the ringer vibration I'm talking about 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 article 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 reading it for the first time right alongside you.
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