Amazon.com: Pixel 4 - Clearly White - 64GB - Unlocked : Cell Phones & Accessories

Great phone at a low cost.

Background: As with many other aspects of my life, I am not a typical user so please read this review with that in mind. I am a heavy music listener, spending a lot of time listening to music in a car or at work listening over bluetooth headphones, take lots of pictures and in any other respect mostly use the phone for texting, calling, Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, multi-factor authentication, web browsing and e-book reading. I bought this phone unlocked but I have been a Verizon customer for well over a decade. I went for almost 4 years with the Samsung S8 without any issues. Towards the end, the battery was starting to give out and I was over the quality of the camera in it since I rely on that feature heavily in my work. Unfortunately, I should have done more research than I did (though I see plenty of reviews that still praise its virtues). I think it all comes down to what you're going to use it for (tell me something I don't know, right?).The camera is as solid as others describe. Night Sight is actually pretty cool and produces quality pictures even in low lighting without the obscenity of a flash. Pictures taken in normal settings are true to color and sharp. Love the Google Lens feature that allows it to identify text in pictures so I can track FedEx packages or just copy a MAC address from a pic instead of typing it out. I couldn't ask for more out of a cell phone camera. Never had issues with apps for checking mail, instant messaging, browsing or third party app use. Face recognition was just about perfect unless it was in the zone of trying to authenticate me with a PIN (it would do that occasionally and would not let me unlock by face) or I was wearing a mask. (Damn you, 2020!)But at what cost to my peace of mind? At $650 paid up front, it shouldn't be like this. There are several idiosyncrasies this phone has that just drove me crazy:What gives with the battery life? - There were days where the battery would regular slip down fairly quickly to nothing and other days where it withstood my usage valiantly. I played with the battery settings and app settings on a regular basis but could find no rhyme or reason why the battery life performed worse on some days and better on others.Screen brightness - If you read pro reviews for this phone, you'll see them complain that the brightest display setting is only adequate in bright light environments. That is actually pretty on the mark. If you mess with the phone's auto-detection of ambient light, beware. It will keep that setting and you may find yourself looking at a very dark screen when you need to know which freeway exit to take. Or it will go bright and eat away mercilessly at your battery. The term auto-brightness with this phone is to be taken with a grain of salt.Thumbnails? What are those? - Another little issue that made me grit my teeth is the lack of thumbnail support when browsing your pictures using File Explorer. You cannot see picture previews if the pics are on your phone and you are using a computer to view them. Does. Not. Work. You must view the pics on the phone by date and either open them one by one or copy them off to your computer whereupon the thumbnail function will once again miraculously work. Apparently a Pixel speciality.Weird texting issues - occasionally, my text messages to certain users would start timing out and would never work again unless I either a) deleted the entire conversation with that contact or b) delete the contact and text to the phone number instead. Not a dealbreaker, but certainly annoying when no other phone I've owned has ever had this kind of glitch.Smart Gestures - Switching tracks by moving your hand was sketchy at best. It would often misinterpret shifting gears or touching the car's screen as a request to switch tracks. I couldn't keep the squeeze features enabled because when turned OFF the phone would pause music tracks or the Bluetooth connection would start freaking out when I held the phone's edges too firmly. Turning that feature on just invited madness in. I have screen attention turned on, but that doesn't stop it from going to sleep anyway and that's without battery saver mode turned on! The only smart sense I appreciated was the SHH feature of flipping the phone over to put it into do not disturb mode.Bluetooth issues - This is certainly not the death knell for this Google offering but more like the last straw for me. About a week ago, I installed PowerAmp to listen to local tracks since Amazon Music has issues when selecting tracks that aren't in the cloud or doesn't detect them altogether... or it was this PHONE! (Don't think I don't suspect you, you pos!) Recall how above I complained that the smart gesture function to move tracks didn't work? Although it was working fine before, suddenly the artist and track info no longer get transmitted from my Pixel to my car AND I can't use the car's touch screen to skip or rewind tracks. I have to start playing with my phone while driving now to either find out what I'm listening to or change tracks. How is this progress and concern for public safety? I can't use Alexa because my music is so loud, I would have to pause it first to talk to the phone. I tested this with my iPad and song track and forward / backward functionality work fine.The solution, I'm afraid is to pack up this phone, trade it in and get another Samsung, which I'm doing.

When the new Pixel 4 was released I took a look at my two-year-old Pixel 2 and wondered if I really needed to upgrade, given what a great phone it had been, and still is. Giving in to a bit of retail therapy is easy, so I did.It's an expensive business getting a Pixel phone in this country (New Zealand) since it's a buy from Amazon in the US, shipping to the other end of the world, paying GST (our sales tax) converted to NZ dollars added up to $1,550.Was it worth it? Let's take a look.** Edit: After nearly a year, I just love this phone, absolutely rock-solid even with over a hundred apps installed, I'm revising from 4 to 5 stars **I've owned a lot of android phones and had the Pixel 4 for a few months now and it's performed pretty much flawlessly, both the software and the hardware - as I expected it would. I really like Google's own implementation of their Android O/S - it's clean and just works. There are some UI annoyances that I'll come to later. Other makes (Huawei, Samsung) all seem to be clogged up with unnecessary and buggy extra apps and take years to get Android updates through. I get Google's updates within days of release and I've never had a bad one.In their attempt to regain a handful of pixels from the bottom of the screen, Google have removed the Home and Back on-screen buttons and replaced them with gestures. This has or will probably occur on other makes of phone as Android 10 rolls out. The new gesture needs a swipe from the bottom edge (home) or from either side (back), and I pretty much hate it. ** Edit: You can turn that off and now I like it **If you miss the edge (it's tricky if you have a case with a raised edge) then you end up swiping the app off to somewhere unwanted. If you get a bit close to the edge when you're scrolling within an app, you suddenly go home or back. It doesn't happen to me very often but when it does happen it's infuriating. Hint: When buying a case, look for one with a low profile on the screen side - though that won't protect the screen quite as well.As for other features, I'm not so sure there's a lot to say. The main one is the face recognition lock which I've turned on and also the "Keep phone unlocked while I'm looking at it" option. I like that one, it saves the phone going black when I'm taking my time reading, or something. It's also nice to just pick up the phone and look at it, it's so natural, quick and easy. People seem unduly worried about the security of this feature, I'm not sure why except maybe for the unlock while you're asleep. If someone is in a position to do that, then they are also in a position to do many awful things to me and additionally, the banking and other vulnerable stuff on my phone has a further level of security.The screen is up to par, and the glass is nice not picking up oily finger goop like all my others did after a while. I've given up on screen protectors, my phones are pretty safe being mostly in my pocket, and I like the feel of the screen. Feels like a solid build to me without being too heavy, though it's heavier than the Pixel 2 and has quite a bit more screen, mostly in the length.People seem to rave about the camera and I agree it's good, but so was the Pixel 2 so the step up doesn't seem huge to me - but then I'm no camera buff. The Pixel 2 was a bit better at close-ups which I do a lot of when working with electronics. The Pixel 4 can be zoomed up to 8x but can't focus closer than about 120mm which limits its use as a macro camera. The P2 was good down to about 60mm. (4.7" and 2.4")Sound is surprisingly good watching a video. There's nothing at the bass end but that's to be expected in such a small body. The volume is good and the sound spread is wide though perhaps a bit overdone. I'm not in a cathedral. I regularly use speakerphone and also Sennheiser Bluetooth headphones, and they perform very well on both phone calls and music. Bluetooth, WiFi, and 4G connectivity all seem solid.Battery life is marginal, my only real complaint about the hardware. An overnight charge to 100% would all be gone by 7pm if I wasn't quite careful. To counter this I bought a charger for the car so I can give it a commute-time top-up and things are better now. Wireless charging is cool and Qi chargers all seem to work fine. Makes charging in the car a breeze with a charger built into the holder. Wireless charging is not fast, about 0.9 amps, compared to a fast charger which charges at nearly 3 amps (~1 hr full charge time) but it turns the phone into a hotplate and could affect battery life.I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Active 2 Smartwatch (SM-R810) and paired it up easily with the Pixel via Bluetooth, but with a fair amount of convoluted messing about with the Samsung apps got it all working reasonably well though it's a bit crazy and somewhat buggy. I sure wish Samsung would produce practical software like Google does. I did a review on the watch too.So was it worth it? Probably not, but mostly because my old Pixel 2 was such a nice reliable workhorse that has never slowed down even with 150 or so apps. Every other phone I ever owned has slowly ground to a standstill. I use quite a lot of apps.Am I glad I bought it? For sure, but I just can't part with the Pixel 2 so now that one's a spare.