While it doesn’t seem like the first phone Google has ever made, the Pixel actually comes across as a bit of a revolutionary idea for the search giant. Google has generally sat behind the lines and quietly watched as the market uses their mobile operating system to perpetuate Google’s ecosystem across the world, only yearly releasing a Nexus phone as a sort of reference design for what people can come to expect from the future of Android devices. This year Google is changing that up and has actually gone back to the drawing board, creating a new phone from scratch in an attempt to make the best phone ever.
The Google Pixel comes in two sizes, the 5-inch Pixel and the 5.5-inch Pixel XL. These phones are both powered by the exact same set of internals including a Snapdragon 821 and Adreno 530 GPU with some custom silicon thrown in for good measure. This custom silicon is here for a number of reasons that include overall speed and processing power of the phone, VR capabilities like we haven’t seen on the mobile side of things, and a new set of hooks for Google Assistant. This new AI, designed to be a replacement of the voice portion of Google Now, brings a more personalized Google to your phone, and ultimately does things we haven’t seen from other AI assistants yet.
4GB of RAM is pretty standard on a 2016 flagship, but most phones don’t fly quite like the Pixel does. If you’ve seen our written review for the Pixel and Pixel XL, you’ll probably know that the Pixel smokes other phones in overall speed, as well as doubling the compute performance of any other mobile device on the market, and even the storage speed is considerably faster too with its UFS 2.0+ speeds. What’s not to like about the Pixel? There really aren’t a lot of negatives, but you’ll just have to find out in the video what we thought of the phone overall. Check that out below and don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for weekly reviews and other content, as we’ve always got something cooking for your entertainment pleasure.