The Google Pixel 4 XL Review: Stuck In The Past In 2019

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Amongst the last big smartphone releases of 2019 is Google’s Pixel 4 series. Google’s own flagship devices come late in the generational product cycle whose timing is mostly dictated by the SoC release schedule – it’s always hard to be able to make a case for your product knowing in a few months’ time we’ll be seeing a barrage of new competing products raising the bar again. Google’s forte in this regard is that it promises to augment its products with features beyond what the hardware can provide, yet in a sense, the Pixel 4’s biggest improvements (and weaknesses) this year are actually mostly related to its hardware.

The new Pixel 4 is again a camera centric phone – it’s the topic that Google talked about the most and dedicated the most time to during its launch event in New York. The Pixel 4 adds for the first time a second camera module that acts as a telephoto unit, and also promises to have improved the capture quality on the new main camera. Whilst Google has a reputation for having good cameras, the Pixel 4 this year faces incredible competition as essentially every other vendor this year has launched devices with triple cameras and have stepped up in terms of their computational photography capabilities.

Other big features of the Pixel 4 include a new 90Hz capable display panel that allows for a new ultra-smooth device experience, a feature that’s still quite rare amongst flagship devices this year, but quickly catching up with many vendors. Another big change for the Pixel 4 is the dropping of the fingerprint sensor in favour for a new full-blown face unlock feature. This latter feature is augmented by another novelty of the Pixel 4: A radar sensor that’s able to detect movements and gestures pointed at the phone.

We’ll be putting the new Pixel 4 XL through our test benches and determine if Google has managed to create a compelling product worth your money.

As noted, the internal hardware of the Pixel 4 XL isn’t all particularly exciting at this point in time. The Snapdragon 855 is the same SoC that we’ve seen in devices launched in February and March. Google could have opted to use the slightly faster and better binned Snapdragon 855+ this year, but for whatever reason it didn’t make it. That being said, Google is known to be able to create amongst the best implementations of a given SoC, so we’re expecting a very fast device experience.

One big criticism that the Pixel 3 suffered from last year and that the Pixel 4 series partly addresses is the RAM. Android is quite memory hungry and Google has now updated the line-up from 4GB to 6GB which should help in keeping more applications alive. It’s still a step below what other vendors offer this year as 8 and 12GB variants have become relatively standard in the high-end.

One aspect that isn’t high-end at all is Google’s choice to go with 64GB of storage in the base models. This is a bit painful to see as more and more vendors go with 128GB as the minimum. The up-sell to 128GB costs $100 which is even more than Apple’s $50 premium for the same upgrade, putting the Pixel 4 in an even more awkward situation.

Key to the Pixel 4’s are the new display panels. The Pixel 4 XL goes for a more elongated 6.3” 3040 x 1440 resolution screen, resulting in a 19:9 aspect ratio, whilst the regular Pixel 4 remains at the smaller 2280 x 1080 for the smaller 5.7” form-factor. The big news here is the inclusion of 90Hz refresh rates. High refresh displays in mobile have really made an impact this year, with the OnePlus 7 Pro particularly making a lasting impression. Google’s implementation is slightly more subdued as it’s adaptive refresh rate switching feature between 60 and 90Hz is still a bit quirky – however one can force the devices to be in 90Hz mode all the time, although it comes at a cost in power consumption.

Google promises that this year they’ve paid a lot more attention to the colour calibration of their screens. In the past we’ve seen some major oddities in terms of the target gamma that Google had employed and a few miscalibration issues in regards to the average picture level scaling of the screen. This year the Pixel displays are again dual-sourced between LG and Samsung. The regular Pixel 4 receives an LG panel, whilst the Pixel 4 XL we tested today employs a Samsung unit.
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