Google announced its Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL during its glitzy Made By Google hardware showcase yesterday.
The new smartphones have a dual-camera set-up – the first rear-facing multi-camera system to ever ship on a Pixel, as well as new face unlock technology, and gesture controls – so you can dismissively wave your hand above the screen to swat away a notification, or pause a track.
The Pixel 4 is also able to sense your presence using the radar technology that enables gestures, so it will switch-off the always-on display whenever it knows you’re not around (a nifty battery saving boost), and will lower the volume of your ringtone and alarms when it detects that you’ve heard and are reaching for the handset to kill the sound. It’s all very clever stuff.
Google has also thrown-in some faster internals and a 90Hz high refresh rate OLED display.
But while there’s plenty of new stuff to like about the Pixel 4, Google has taken away one of the headline features that used to characterise its own-brand smartphone range – unlimited full-resolution photograph and video storage in the cloud via Google Photos.
Google Photos will compress the images and videos using its own algorithms to try to preserve the quality – without having to upload humongous file sizes to its servers in California. One of the advantages of earlier Google Pixel smartphones was the ability to back-up your entire photo library without any compression at all to Google Photos.
So, if the worst happens and your external hard drive at home kicks the bucket, you’ll be able to download everything in the original quality it was shot in from Google’s servers and it will be like nothing ever happened.
Google removed the ability to upload high-resolution images with its more affordable Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL earlier this year. At the time, we assumed this was a cost-cutting measure for the Pixel 3a line. However, it now seems like a new policy across Google’s range.
Pixel 4 was announced alongside a number of other new devices, including the Airpods-rivalling Google Pixel Buds, a new ChromeBook, and an updated Google Nest Mini, and redesigned Google Wi-Fi with an in-built Google Assistant.