Google Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL: Price, Specs, Release Date

A few years ago, Google started selling its own smartphones. These handsets, named Pixels, represented a shift in Google’s approach to mobile hardware. Previously, the company had shipped Nexus-branded products that were manufactured by different hardware partners, but Pixel was supposed to be all Googley from the ground up: Designed, developed, and sold by the search company, and running an optimized version of Android, its homespun operating system.

The Pixel 4, formally announced today, is the latest version of that. Until this morning, the Pixel 4 could only be judged by its leaks, and there were plenty of those—photos of the new phone were tweeted out by Google itself, and other information traders leaked key specs. Now the phone is here.

While Google still has a small sliver of global smartphone market share, the Pixel has become the ultimate expression of Android, the company’s answer to the oh-so-vertically-integrated iPhone and its iOS software. As such, Google uses the Pixel to roll out features you can’t get anywhere else, not even on high-end Samsung phones.

The Pixel 4, which will start at $799 for a 64-gigabyte configuration and $899 for the larger XL version of the same model, has everything from a new neural coprocessor to hand-wavy gesture control to a smarter Google Assistant.

Video: Google

The Pixel 4 comes in two sizes: There’s a version with a “regular”-sized, 5.7-inch diagonal display, and an XL model that has a 6.3-inch display. By big phone standards, this is actually small—the iPhone 11 Pro Max measures 6.5 inches, and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 Plus is a whopping 6.8 inches—but the Pixel 4 XL will still suit people looking for a more immersive screen and bigger battery.

The Pixel’s dual-tone build has always been one of its distinguishing physical features, but Google has done away with that for this year’s phone. Now the back of the phone is smooth and unblemished, with the exception of a “G” icon. There’s even a glossy-backed option as well, which puts the Pixel’s aesthetic more in line with other premium (and shiny) smartphones. It comes in three colors: Clearly White, Just Black, and Oh So Orange, with orange sleep/wake buttons adding an accent to all three versions.

One way of looking at the new Pixel phone: It has a lot of the same materials as earlier models—aluminum frame, glass coating—but it’s constructed differently, with small technological boosts that could affect how the phone works in bigger ways.

Pixel devotees will also notice that the back of the phone is missing something: the fingerprint sensor. Google has ditched this in favor of a face-unlock feature, something that every other maker of premium smartphones now offers, though they may use varying technical approaches.

The Pixel 4’s OLED display has the same resolution as the OLED display on the Pixel 3, but the new one is shipping with HDR support and is UHDA certified, meaning it reaches a certain standard of high dynamic range. It also has a 90-megahertz refresh rate, which means scrolling through apps on the touchscreen should feel extra smooth.

A strip across the top of the Pixel 4’s screen contains all the front-facing sensors. This includes a single 8-megapixel wide-angle camera, an IR dot projector, two near-infrared cameras, and an ambient EQ sensor for auto-adjusting color temperature.

The Pixel 4 charges via USB-C, which also serves as the audio port for headphones. The battery in the Pixel 4 has shrunk slightly from last year’s phone, while the Pixel 4 XL has a larger, 3,700mAh battery. But like other smartphone makers (such as Apple), Google is wagering that features like the screen’s adaptive refresh rate, its power management tools, and even Dark Mode, which rolled out with Android 10, will be more critical to extending battery life than the actual battery size.

The Pixel 4 will ship running Android 10, and it’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor. But Google likes to tout its custom-designed coprocessors as well. This year’s model includes Google’s Titan M security chip as well as something called the Pixel Neural Core chip. This is a rebrand of earlier Pixel Visual Core chips, and that’s largely because this dedicated coprocessor now supports certain audio features.

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The Pixel’s camera has typically been one of its signature features, one of the areas where Google’s software-first pedigree stands out. Last year’s Pixel 3, for example, had only a single rear camera lens, but thanks to computational photography it was capable of shooting remarkably good nighttime photos, and was able to select the best shot from a burst of images. Now, thanks to added lenses on the back and this new Pixel Neural Core chip, Google claims the camera is even better.

First, the basics: Its front-facing camera is a wide-angle 8-megapixel lens (although its field of view isn’t as wide as last year’s). Its rear camera block includes a 12-megapixel wide-angle lens and a 16-megapixel telephoto lens. There’s also a spectral sensor on the back of the phone, something that was included in the Pixel 3; it’s a way of measuring light flickers, so that when you shoot a video and there’s a screen somewhere in frame, it doesn’t appear to flicker. Like the new iPhones—and as every prior leak about this phone suggested—the Pixel 4 has a square camera module on the back.

Personally, I think the square camera module is the new “notch,” which is to say, some people will hate the look of it and will not be able to unsee it as long as they own the phone. But I believe most people will stop talking about how unsightly it is if the phone manages to perform some sort of new function. And it seems the Pixel 4 camera does have some new tricks up its (square) sleeve.

For one, the phone’s Portrait Mode is supposed to be better, although you’d expect that with the wide-angle and telephoto combo on the back. Super Res Zoom is better too. The new camera app will also have dual exposure controls, so you can balance color and exposure in particularly challenging shots, like when someone is backlit. Night Sight, the name for last year’s nighttime mode, is said to be improved, and now it even has an “Astrophotography” option for all those times you’re stargazing and want to capture the moment (although a tripod is still recommended).

We won’t be able to really assess the Pixel 4’s camera until we can use it for an extended period of time and compare it to other top smartphone cameras, but Google seems like it’s committed to the same camera approach from years prior: At a time when many leading phones have triple-lens cameras, Google is sticking with two lenses but believes it can compensate with software smarts.

Wave Hello

Those software smarts also translate to other futuristic features on the Pixel 4, ones that may prove to be only occasionally useful but highlight what Google believes an Android mobile experience should be. It makes sense that a company that rakes in the overwhelming majority of its revenue from advertising through software would focus more on software features, ones that it can tightly control, even as it’s using hardware parts from other suppliers and manufacturers.

That strip of sensors on the front of the phone, for example, also includes sensors for Motion Sense. This is Google’s name for new, advanced touchless controls on your phone, which started as Project Soli years ago. Now the controls’ use cases vary. Sure, you can simply wave your hand to dismiss incoming phone calls, like a Very Important Person. But you can also hover your hand above your phone when your alarm goes off, and it will quiet the alarm. (Don’t worry: It goes into snooze mode by default.)

You can also use gesture controls for media control: You can fire up Google Play Music or Spotify and launch a song, and when you’re ready for the next track, just wave your hand. This gesture control interaction won’t be available for non-Google app-makers to tinker with just yet, but media controls should work universally across apps. In early tests, this gesture interaction didn’t work all of the time, but, again, we haven’t been able to test it for an extended period yet.

This gesture recognition is also part of a broader scheme to make accessing your phone feel a lot faster. Google says it has trained Motion Sense on hands specifically, so when you begin to reach for your locked phone sitting on a table, it’s already starting to wake up. The face-unlock camera is initiated, so by the time you hold it up to your face—in theory—it’s ready to unlock.

The Pixel 4 will support live captions on prerecorded videos, something that was announced as a part of Android 10 but will come to Pixel phones to start. This means your phone will automatically transcribe spoken audio from any video playing on your phone, whether it’s something a friend sent you or something you’re watching on YouTube. The phone will also have a native audio recording app for the first time, one that transcribes recordings into text and lets you search for keywords almost immediately—journalists rejoice. And as part of a relatively new suite of emergency features, it will have “car crash detection,” ringing emergency contacts if the phone’s sensors interpret that there’s been some sort of serious crash while driving.

For all of this, Google is still offering its top-of-the-line smartphone at a price that undercuts Apple’s and Samsung’s most expensive phones. But with a $799 starting price, the Pixel 4 still isn’t cheap. And Google declined to say whether it plans to launch a less expensive, Pixel “4a” anytime soon—although if it follows last year’s cadence, that might be coming in the spring.

Even if there is a cheaper Pixel to come in less than a year, it may not move the needle much in terms of Google’s share of the world’s smartphone market. But like the Pixel 4, it would likely offer just enough Pixel-only features to set it apart from the Android pack.