Mobile phone tracking reviews Google Pixel 4

Meeting your goals each day? Based on your activity and goal progress, Google Fit will help you adjust them so you can keep challenging yourself to achieve a healthy heart and mind. Enjoy a different type of workout? Select it from a list of activities like pilates, rowing, or spinning, and Google Fit will track all the Heart Points and Move Minutes you earn. Learn more about Google Fit and see a list of supported apps at: www. Reviews Review Policy. View details. Flag as inappropriate. Visit website. Google Classroom. Google LLC. But that's what Google has done.

And it looks superb, save perhaps for that massive camera lump. It's not just about contrasting visuals either: the Pixel 4 in this colour feels different to most phones out there too. Its frosted look is matched by a soft texture that's much nicer to hold than the usual shiny, glossy and slippery glass phones out there. And it's as much about the finish of the metal edges as it is the glass on the back: these have a soft-touch texture to them, all the way around the phone.

It therefore doesn't feel cold, rather more welcoming and easy to grip. More importantly than all of this: the matte-textured finish appears to have a more scratch-resistant quality to it than its shiny counterparts. A few months into our time with it, and we don't see any obvious scratching or scuffs on the edges, or on the back.

Being the smaller model of the two-strong line-up, it's also easy to grip in one hand - not that the XL is overly large. The Pixel 4 is comfortable and ergonomic, almost friendly in its size, shape and texture. Like it wants to be used. Oh, and it has that awesome orange power button on the side, which is just cool. We're totally on board with it. Around the front and it's quite different to most phones too. Rather than go completely bezel free, or use a minimal notch or hole-punch camera, Google has opted for quite a hefty 'forehead'.

As you'd suspect, it's not there for its looks, it's a functional decision. Within this forehead you'll find an array of sensors and cameras designed for 3D facial recognition and Motion Gestures more on those later. It's certainly an unusual look, but it's still an improvement on the rather ostentatious notch that featured Pixel 3 XL.

Compared to its predecessor - the smaller Pixel 3 - it looks as though the Pixel 4 has maintained the same excessive top bezel, while significantly slimming down the 'chin' at the bottom. With that said, the chin is still noticeably thicker than the side bezels, so you get this weird sort-of unbalanced look to the whole front. We found it best just to use a dark wallpaper, to help minimise the look. Rather than go the route of in-display fingerprint scanners, or any fingerprint scanner at all, Google has opted for the aforementioned 3D facial recognition hardware in the Pixel 4 family.

It's the only reason the phone has that big forehead. It's not just about facial recognition though. There's also a Soli chip which is used for Motion Gestures - which you might hear called air gestures - that you make with your hand. That means being able to skip tracks or decline calls, or even interact with some of the live wallpapers by waving at the phone. In daily practical use, we didn't find it was something we used all that often. And when we did, it wasn't consistent.

Some waves it didn't detect, others it would respond in the opposite way to what we meant, skipping tracks forward rather than back. In its current form, it doesn't really feel like something that's necessary either. Given the unreliable nature of it, it's easier just to just tap the buttons on the screen. The full scope of Motion Sense is yet to be realised - and Google says that this is a system that's just getting started - but as it stands we really can't see that it adds, well, anything.

It's not a feature we've been waiting to appear, it doesn't let you do anything you can't already do with voice or a tap of the phone. Google's move towards advanced facial recognition for security mirrors Apple's move with the latest generations of iPhone. It works well, unlocking the phone really fast. Just pick it up, the phone unlocks, and away you go. You can have it unlock immediately, or require a swipe on the screen to unlock it if you found that too quick and unsettling.

The obvious downside with this 3D face scanning feature is that there aren't many third-party apps to adopt it yet.

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Since launch, the list has grown slightly, but there seems to be a lack of any significant progress and here, and that means there's a good chance a lot of your password and banking apps will require a PIN unlock, which is nowhere near as quick or convenient. It uses an OLED-based panel, which means you get lots of colour, deep blacks and bright whites.

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Thankfully, the Pixel 2's display woes are far behind us in the distant past. Part of it is down to the small size, meaning there are pixels-per-inch, making for a sharp image with nice fine details. Another is that 90Hz refresh rate, which only appears to kick in when the screen is bright. It makes animations seem a tiny bit smoother, although you might not notice in general everyday life, you might if you look closely.

Like many new features on the Pixel 4, the 90Hz display sounds good on paper, but in reality, it comes with myriad gotchas. Not running in 90Hz all the time is justifiable in some cases. If you're running a full-screen video at 24fps, 30fps, or 60fps, a 90Hz refresh rate won't do anything other than burn battery.

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Some games are not compatible with 90Hz, so limiting the display there is appropriate, too. WhatsApp was blacklisted by Google "due to poor performance under 90hz" according to an Android commit. Google Maps and Waze, Google's two mapping apps, don't really have an explanation attached as to why they are limited to 60fps on the Pixel 4. We can only assume it's because Waze and Maps are already battery-heavy apps, and Google is worried about the Pixel 4's battery life.

The second big refresh rate issue is that the 90Hz mode is tied to the phone's Google PR responded to this discovery, saying the behavior was "preserving battery when higher refresh rates are not critical. In here, you'll find an option to "Force 90Hz refresh rate" all the time, which then makes the Pixel 4 work like every other 90Hz phone. With this developer checkbox on, the Pixel 4 matches the buttery smooth performance we've seen from other 90Hz phones: the animations, scrolling, and transitions are all faster and smoother feeling.

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With this checkbox off, eh, it's a crap shoot. The Pixel 4's brightness and ambient light requirements for the 90Hz mode are very high, and this seems to require bright overhead light. Just keeping the display on and wandering around my house in the daytime is enough to have it ping-pong between 60 and 90Hz. The very brightly lit bathroom with the overhead lights? That's good enough for 90Hz. The moderately lit bedroom with the lamp in the corner and light coming through the window? That's going to drop to 60Hz. Even just something like my head casting a shadow over the light sensor from an overhead light is enough to have it drop to 60Hz.

You know how auto brightness is totally crazy and unreliable? Now imagine that technology being used to control the refresh rate of your device. It is just all over the place based on the tiniest light fluctuations. It really is detrimental to the experience. It's great that you can turn all these half-measures off, but the overwhelming message from Google is that its 90Hz phone doesn't have a big enough battery to support 90Hz mode all the time. The display on the Pixel 4 XL looks great in indoor lighting, but it's not very bright, and you might have issues in sunlight.

There's actually a hidden high-brightness mode that was recently discovered by XDA. The display has a sunlight mode, but Google chose not to expose it to users. I would guess this is because it would use a ton of the device's limited battery. This year the Pixel 4 supports "Ambient EQ," a display white balance adjustment that changes based on the surrounding light. It's basically the Google version of Apple's True Tone. Ambient EQ previously appeared on the Google Home Hub , which came with a special hardware color sensor and aggressive automatic brightness and white balance controls.

I was a big fan of the Home Hub implementation, which was so aggressive that it allowed the display to blend into the environment, completely removing the glaring, blasting light that normally comes out of a display panel. The Pixel 4 doesn't have the special color sensor and only lightly tweaks the display based on the surrounding light.