What is a Google Phone?!? Reviewing Every Pixel/Nexus Ever!

simple. Huge in hand not to get too far ahead, but the Nexus 6 is actually bigger and wider than the Pixel 6. So huge screen. Huge 3200 milliamp hour battery with Motorola turbo charging. Huge new 13-mega

pixel

camera with a huge new ring flash around it. new flagship specs snapdragon 805 three gigs of ram and up to 64 gigs of storage and Android 5.0 lollipop, but along with all these crazy specs it was an incredible price for the time, so Nexus 6 cost 649 for the base 32 gig version and a whopping 700 dollars. for the 64. so not only was it big, but it had the highest price of any Google

phone

, especially coming off the back of the more competitive Nexus 4 and 5.

Fun fact: the internal codename of this

phone

when they were developing it. Shamu, the orca, the whale. Look,

ever

yone knew it was big, but perhaps the most important and cl

ever

feature of the Nexus 6 was the camera, so this was the first Google phone to launch with HDR Plus and it didn't seem like a big deal at the time. Maybe it was just another feature of the camera, but it combined multiple frames all together in one quick shot for greater dynamic range, and it notoriously consumed a lot of processing power, so hdr plus was just an option you had to activate.

Get that extra latitude, but that was a game-changer for smartphone cameras in general. I mean, nowadays, if you don't have HDR, you're not really doing it right, it's just the fact that we now take a single shutter press for granted. Information from several different frames is intelligently processed and combined. It was a great time, so Nexus 9, you were a big player Nexus, it's definitely not great, but then in 2015 we got two new Nexus phones at once, we got the 5x made by LG and the Nexus 6p. Made by Huawei, okay, so the Nexus 5x, as the name suggests, was a slight improvement over the Nexus 5.

It added a fingerprint reader on the back. Updated specifications. Bigger battery. Switched to USB Type C. All the classics. It also had boot loop issues which fortunately never affected mine, but that phone was 379 and at the same time we get all this metal stuff.

nexus

6p p jacket for premium probably, but this was an all metal build with a camera visor on top, it had the flat sides that we still know today as premium, the knurled power button, the front speakers and the range chip higher and hdr. Even better, this one had a stellar 6p camera and was universally praised as literally one of the best, if not the best, Android phones on the planet.

This one sold for 4.99, so Google just created two different Nexus at the same time. Nexus Nexi, created two. of them at the same time correct one of them cheaper one of them more expensive one of them economical one of them candidate for phone of the year very premium and this is generally

what

you see in companies that try to offer two different options for two different customers is

what

you get while trying to appeal to a wider variety of masses, which is an interesting move and then that's the last we saw of Nexus, so enter Google Pixel.

I just want to say that as a video enthusiast, I love it. word

pixel

as a name for a phone, but that is a new name, so we have had

nexus

and nexus up to this point we could consider it as the Google software phone, right, we had all the Samsungs, HTCs, Motorolas and Huaweis in the world . making all their own phones, but the Google version with the Nexus name would be Android with fast updates directly from Google. There was also a brief stint of Google Play edition phones in 2013 and 2014 that combined the hardware of the world's best phones with that of Google. stock software, does anyone else remember these?

I love these phones. There was a Google Play edition. Samsung Galaxy s4. It was incredible. There was a Sony Xperia Z Ultra. There was a Google Play edition. HTC One M8. Honestly some of the best phones ever, but this is a completely new Something, this is Pixel, it's not Nexus, so why change the brand? Why the new name? Well, I think there are a lot of different correct answers to this, but basically this is the first phone designed and built by Google, so down there is the Google logo. the first version of this new two-tone design, I mean, internally they still had some help, but this would be considered Google's first real phone, but also a big part of what makes the Pixel reach the next level is how it actually They started leaning towards it as a particularly smart smartphone, so it already had the Google launcher and the clean look, but we're moving further and further away from Aosp.

This is not the exact version of Android that you would get directly from Google. Now it's like the Google skin on top of Android so it's the first Android phone with Google Assistant built in and it has the camera again taking big steps forward thanks to HDR Plus which continues to get better and I remember seeing this ad and feeling really optimistic about the future of the competition because surely if we have the iphones of the world where Apple controls the hardware, the software, the chip,

every

thing was made by Apple to work perfectly together, then surely this is the beginning of Google doing its best version of the same thing, you know, so I think it was Google Pixel 2.

Pixel peak and that's at least two ways, with that camera and with that two-tone design. I already love a good Panda or Stormtrooper phone whatever you want to call it. We saw hints of this with the Nexus 6p, but Google is now full. -about embracing the two different finishes on the back by contrasting them with black and white and then the colored power button. Wow, what a great idea for just a little pop of color, a little accent on the side, but there were a few other notable things here. they got rid of the headphone jack, had some controversy over the blue color shift display on the xl version which used the new LG P LED and I even made a video a few months after launch about why I no longer use the pixel due to the deceleration.

The software issues lessened over time, but what made the Pixel 2 really famous was its single camera, so it had a new 12.2-megapixel sensor and featured the latest and greatest in the Pixel 2 camera app. Google, its HDR Plus and its multifamous processing. this phone just took amazing photos, it surpassed everything else, it had excellent detail, sharpness, dynamic range, shutter speed, it focused everything and the videos it took weren't even that good, but the photos were so good that it was basically universally praised when It came out as the best smartphone camera of all time, but also at this point I think it's worth talking about sales, so here it goes: Google sells three to five million pixels per year, which is good, but at the same time, you know, Apple sells 200 million phones a year Samsung sells 300 million phones a year, so even with this amazing world-class camera, great reviews, enthusiasts love their great software, no There are a lot of people who buy it, so the Pixel 3 comes out in 2018 and every part feels like a refinement on the Pixel 2 which is great for people who love the Pixel 2, but the minor improvement alone probably won't increase the sales as you can imagine and there is also a normal version and an the deepest notch we've ever seen on a phone.

It had a regular and ultra-wide selfie camera on the front. on either side of the front earpiece speaker, so honestly, I loved that extra-wide selfie camera on the XL, but no one really loved the notch. There was an old tweet from Google that basically tried to justify it by saying, "Oh, don't worry, the notch for display ratio is actually smaller than many of our main competitors, it's like, that's probably true, but it's also true." would be this notch, but that doesn't make it good by any means, apart from those small tweaks, the overall refinement of the build materials, the ip68 water resistance is finally increased from the ip67 wireless charging is added here the night view is added. to the camera app, but it's basically the same revolutionary camera as last year and overall a pretty solid update doesn't really move the needle.

You know, it did move the needle even though the pixel 3 on this phone changed things for. Google so mid 2019 on Google i or they announced a budget version of the pixel it's a 3a and a 3a xl starting at 399 which is half the price that the pixel 3 started at so it has the same software , intelligence, all things. That made Pixel enthusiasts love the phones, but it made a budget version with a lower-powered polycarbonate interior instead of metal and glass, it still has great battery life in the same world-class camera it put the pixel on the map for so many people and it was a The success basically from the moment this phone was released was the majority of pixel sales, so there are some pros and cons to this level of visibility.

The advantage obviously is that there are now more people seeing and using these phones and the Google Assistant and all this cool stuff. and the camera, but now the most successful version of this product is the cheap one, which means that when people think about what a Google phone is, what a pixel is, they think of it as the cheap phone that takes good pictures on which They are not thinking. The fast or high-end one is the cheap phone with good images. Pixel 4 came out after that and honestly it felt like a bit of a misstep.

It was re-released starting at $800. They are trying the flagship model again, but there were too many. of strange and wacky features that didn't really make sense or didn't work the way Google probably expected it now again has the same plus camera as the Pixel 2, but it's been two years so the rest of the world is starting to catch up and it is no longer so unanimous and the battery life was a bit short and with the addition of a second rear camera for the first time they chose a telephoto lens instead of a much more popular and useful ultra wide even though they talked a lot about the zoom super resolution software and doesn't need a telephoto lens anyway, it was the only radar array in the front which was an interesting idea with a lot of interesting demos and other products, but it really turned out to be very power hungry and ultimately didn't have the functionality in a phone that people were looking for and would be mixed within a year, so the Pixel 4 went from being one of the best phones of the period to actually being quite difficult to recommend.

I mean, not many people bought this phone. Sales figures say there were around 2 million Pixel 4 sales in the first six months. Interestingly, my review of the Pixel 4 got 4.8 million views in the first six months, so there was a lot of attention, but not many people bought the phone and that was until the Pixel 4a came out so naturally that Google followed the successful budget king of the pixel 3a with a pixel 4a and they followed the same formula with many of the same things that people liked about the 3a, the same camera again, two tone polycarbonate design, but this year the materials They were even better, a little more textured polycarbonate, the screen was fantastic, especially for the price, they crushed it and even lowered the price to start at 349, so to no one's surprise, following the same formula made many people will love the pixel 4a.

So okay, at this point, it feels like Google has settled on something with the right pixel: pixel 3 pixel 3a pixel 4 pixel 4a disappointing blockbuster budget flagship phone disappointing blockbuster flagship phone, so that if you continue down this path, continue to cement the pixel as a budget phone, maybe the rest will fade into obscurity and it even felt like the design was slowly becoming more generic and simpler, the two-tone disappeared, even the color power button is a little more muted, it has succumbed to industry pressures, the rear fingerprint reader is gone, the headphone jack is gone, so this Google phone, this pixel has basically become, not so impressive in terms of hardware, but really incredible as a silo for Google to demonstrate all its machines. learning, its software and artificial intelligence, and that is not something that is going to sell a whole ton.

I mean, enthusiasts will love it, but it doesn't even allow them to reach their full potential with that, or they're a little limited by the latest stuff. The chipQualcomm available on the market is capable of doing or designed to do, so this spoiler alert came when they started making serious progress on something new in the background, which is why the pixels 5 and 5a felt like phones placeholder. The pixel 5 here is a 700 flagship, relatively normal price, but there is no XL version, only one size, no higher capacity storage versions, only a non-expandable 128 gig spec, snapdragon 765g, just one chip upper midrange available in the market, that's all, it's just here. it's a phone it's like the 2020 blank canvas of phones like oh you have a corner cut out for the selfie camera, just like everyone else, it has wireless charging, it doesn't have a headphone jack, it's like we've seen this shell before Well , maybe not with the soft touch on top of the metal, but inside is where all the software magic still happens and all the enthusiasts who love the pixel still care deeply about everything that's there, here's how Most reviews, including mine, looked at the Pixel 5.

Decent if disappointing hardware, but Android 11 is better than ever. Google assistant is improving these incredibly useful pixel-exclusive features on top of aosp, like the assistant detecting spam calls, and again, it's basically the same camera stack as the pixel 2, but computational photography. still brings out the best in this hardware and is still one of the best photographers in the industry, then the pixel 5a drops again almost a year later with a spec and a size and it is very, very, very, very similar to the pixel 4a 5g . from the previous year, but as expected, people like a big screen, a big battery and a big camera for a low price, so this was again the winner, but all this time partly in the background because There are always rumors of things in the tech industry, but part of that, because it was really new, were rumors that Google was working on a phone that looks even more like a Google phone than before and that Google is pretty bad. to contain leaks, so a lot of those things came to light and just confirmed it.

So, after many teasers, previously published information and leaks, the 2021 Pixel 6 has finally arrived. This is now the peak of being the most Google phone of all time. Finally, I remember being in a few meetings and briefings with some Google employees before this phone arrived. They're showing it to me and they all have kind of a smile on their face like, we finally did it, this time we actually made a Google phone because now this one has Google software designed by Google and a chip designed by Google called tensor. And it's kind of like how the name changed from Nexus to Pixel when they finally started doing the design themselves.

They definitely changed the design here with this camera bar at the beginning of designing their own silicon and the benefits of the new silicon. with the dedicated machine learning accelerators it has been very real, both with photo and video processing and speech to text, things like that, the rest of the phone is now also pretty high-end across the board, mostly not It is completely innovative, but the biggest one is added. The high resolution refresh rate shows faster charging, more RAM, and a set of new, much larger camera sensors with a massive main sensor, so it's starting to feel like a pretty big upgrade.

The most impressive thing about this phone though might be how much effort. Google is now going out of its way to make sure the world knows that this is a flagship product. I mean all the advertising puts all the effort into getting this in front of people's eyes, this is a flagship and it's a Google flagship and it's good, that's what they want us all to think now from some conversations I've had with people at Google, they were working on tensor for a long time and they actually wanted to have This was explained before, they are actually planning for the Pixel 5 to be the first phone with tensor, but then with Covid issues and the supply chain and a lot of things that get in the way at the last second, they had to abandon that, but they still wanted to. to launch a new phone, so they just slapped a Snapdragon 765g on it, shipped it, called it a day, and kept hanging their head for the pixel 6.

So it's out now, and while they're definitely trying to be the flagship, the flagship, the flagship. We're definitely not going to shy away from the tried and tested formula of making a 6a pixel either. I would expect to see it soon, it will probably look a lot like this, but there will be cheaper materials coming out and it will probably work very well too. but I think now if you look at the question one last time about what is a Google phone, we will see that Google is trying to give us an answer: it is a flagship phone, it is a genuine option and it has a lot of good things and that is where we are.

Today, 13 years of Google trying to create a smartphone and going from the g1 to the Nexus to the Pixel and the merger of defining a Google phone as the phone made by another manufacturer with Google software along with another version that has some skin to be Google Play editions and to be the nexus designed by Google down to the pixel, where from top to bottom you have practically Google stuff, so the Tensor Phone is the beginning of the new definition that we expect. to find out what a Google phone is and we'll continue to see how it evolves over time from here, anyway that's it definitely let me know what other phone lines I should look at there are plenty of other options there's the Galaxy line . the oneplus line and many others leave it in the comments section below under the like button thanks for watching thanks for subscribing see you in the next peace