Google Pixel 2 XL
Expensive, lacks key features and the screen is problematic. Only the camera helps to justify the price
Say it quietly, but there’s nothing all that special about the Google Pixel 2 XL. It might be the search giant’s flagship smartphone for 2017 but there isn’t a single thing it does that rival manufacturers haven’t done already – and done better.
You want a screen with barelythere bezels and curved corners? Take your pick. A phone that responds if you squeeze it? Yep, HTC got there first. How about water-resistance, an 18:9 aspect ratio display, and ridiculously high prices? So passé.
Google will point to its imageprocessing technology and the exclusive Google Pixel launcher as features to mark out the Pixel 2 XL from the Android competition. And, in the absence of major problems elsewhere, those would be enough to push the LG-built Pixel 2 XL to the top of the tree. The trouble is, there are problems with this phone and they’re serious enough to trip up the Pixel 2 XL before it even gets started.
Screen has-been
Despite looking so good on paper, it’s the display that undermines everything. The specifications are enticing. It measures 6in across the diagonal, its resolution of 1,440 x 2,880 means photos, videos and game graphics look stupendously sharp, and the P-OLED panel ensures there’s oodles of lovely contrast.
Fire up “Costa Rica in 4K 60fps” on YouTube and you’ll witness a freakish amount of detail, rich colours and smooth motion. Placed side by side with a Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus the colours look more balanced and less saturated. So what’s gone wrong?
It becomes obvious once you load up a web page or ebook: tilt the screen even slightly (left, right, up or down) and it takes on a blueish tint. You might be more forgiving than me, but I read a lot on my phone and I found it horribly distracting. Plus, if you’re not demanding perfection from your smartphone screen when you’ve spent £800 on it, then I suggest you spend rather less.
Technically, it’s a touch below par as well. Brightness peaks at 445cd/m2 , which means it will be readable in most conditions, but there will be situations where you’ll have to shield the screen with your hand to read it. Then there’s the irritating flickering it exhibits when transitioning from one brightness level to another in auto-brightness mode. And as if that wasn’t enough, we’re now hearing
problems with screen burn-in on early samples of the phone.
Put simply, the Pixel 2 XL’s display is not good enough. Not for a phone that costs this much, or even one that costs half the amount. And that’s a huge shame because there are so many things that the Pixel 2 XL gets right.
Design par excellence
The design, for instance, is great. The two-textured glass and sand-blasted aluminium rear gives plenty of grip and, because there’s less glass at the top compared to last year’s Pixel XL, it’s less likely to scuff and scratch and end up looking unsightly.
The curved corners bordering the display give the phone an attractivelooking frame and, despite the elongated aspect ratio, video content doesn’t leave unattractive borders to the left or right. You can zoom to fill with a simple pinch out.
On the rear, the centrally located fingerprint reader is easy to reach and unlocks the phone with almost alarming speed. Even the front-facing stereo speaker grilles look elegant. The screen’s Gorilla Glass 5 topping feels smooth under the finger, is easy to keep clear of smudges and, so far, has resisted any hairline scratches or scuff marks despite my abusive treatment. You also get IP67 dust- and water-resistance, a feature missing from the first Pixel XL. I was sent the black version of the phone to review, which looks smart, but it’s also available in white, and two-tone black-and-white.
Groans of disappointment will come from fans of the 3.5mm headphone jack, now removed. At least the Pixel 2 XL comes with a USB-C adapter in the box, and you can always use Bluetooth headphones.
Burst of speed
The Google Pixel 2 XL’s internals are impressive, but there are annoyances even here. You get a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 with 4GB of RAM and the phone comes in either 64GB or 128GB storage configurations. There’s no microSD expansion option, nor the option to add a second SIM card.
That top-end processor does mean it’s quick. As you can see from the performance graphs on p61, it’s a match for every Android smartphone on the market, including the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus, with only the iPhone 8 Plus stretching out any kind of lead.
That translates to a phone that’s ultra-responsive and snappy, as you’d expect. The only thing to note is that, because you can’t drop the screen resolution as you can with the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus, demanding games may not run quite as smoothly.
We’ve seen superb battery life results from many Snapdragon 835-based phones this year, with the OnePlus 5 leading the pack on 20hrs 40mins in our video rundown test, so I had high hopes of the Pixel 2 XL and its 3,520mAh battery. In the event, the Google Pixel 2 XL lasted 15hrs 9mins, falling more than five hours short of the OnePlus. For context, the Exynos 8895-based Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus also lasts much longer in this test, keeping going for 20hrs 33mins.
That’s not to say it’s bad, though. Last year’s Pixel XL scored much the same in our video test but tended to need a top up well short of a day’s moderate use. So far, the Pixel 2 XL is performing much better for me, lasting a full day and well into the next. In fact, after a few days of use, the GSAM Battery monitor app is reporting an average battery life per complete charge of well north of 30 hours, which is better than any other phone I’ve used recently.
While it’s a shame there’s no wireless charging, the Pixel 2 XL does charge reasonably quickly. Using the cable and charger supplied in the box, the 2 XL reached 36% in half an hour and was fully charged in 1hr 27mins.
“At least with the camera the Pixel 2 XL takes some steps towards redemption. Image quality is the best I’ve seen from any phone”
Stand-out photography
And so to the camera, and at least here the Pixel 2 XL takes steps towards redemption. At launch, Google made great play of the fact that camera test website DxOMark had awarded it a score of 98 – higher than any other smartphone on the market – and in my testing the camera largely lives up to this billing. (For context, last year’s Pixel scored 86.)
The Pixel 2 XL’s 12.2-megapixel sensor, coupled with a bright f/1.8 aperture, optical image stabilisation and both phase-detect and laser autofocus go together to produce fantastic image quality, the best I’ve seen from any phone. And with Google refining the performance of its superb HDR+ processing algorithms, it’s quicker to capture those images as well.
In fact, by default, the Pixel 2 XL no longer gives you the option of toggling HDR+ on and off from the viewfinder screen. You have to delve into the Advanced menu in the camera app to bring the feature back. Not that you’ll want to.
Compared with last year’s Pixel XL, which still holds its own among the very best smartphone cameras, photographs captured by the Pixel 2 XL have better colour reproduction in all conditions and a more neutral cast in low light. The original Pixel camera did many things well, but its white balance compensation often erred on the warm side, lending images a yellow tinge.
The difference isn’t night and day, and the new Pixel camera captures no more detail than last year’s, but images now look more natural, more balanced, with more richly saturated colours.
There are also a couple of new features here. “Motion Photo” mode captures a short segment of video to wrap around your stills – a bit like Apple’s Live Photo feature. It’s a nice thing to have, works surprisingly well, and is supposed to activate automatically only when it detects movement in the frame. However, it seems to activate even with the slightest motion.
Portrait mode is another me-too feature but it works well. It’s designed to replicate the blurred background bokeh you get when shooting with a DSLR with the aperture wide open. Usually, with this sort of feature, there’s a series of small areas that the algorithm gets a little wrong, resulting in a hard edge or a blurred bit of hair. With the Pixel 2 XL’s portrait mode, the transition is more natural, resulting in a far more convincing effect.
The Pixel 2 XL can also capture 4K video at
30fps, which isn’t all that surprising; most phones manage that feat these days. What’s good, though, is that the super-smooth electronic image stabilisation (EIS) is just as good as it was last year. However, compared side by side with the same scene shot on last year’s Pixel XL, the Pixel 2’s footage looks too dark and oversaturated; freeze the frame and it’s clear, too, that there’s less detail being captured.
Finally, to the front camera, which is pretty darned good. It’s an 8-megapixel effort and can use the display as a makeshift flash in low light or backlit conditions. It produces cracking selfies that burst with texture and detail. Once again, there aren’t too many toys to play around with – just a skin-smoothing beauty mode and countdown timer – but most people will be so pleased with the results that they simply won’t care.
Android 8 Oreo
The Pixel 2 XL runs Android 8 Oreo, but don’t expect dramatic changes. The best new feature is an always-on display. This shows the time, date and notifications on the lockscreen, even with the phone on standby, so you don’t have to keep pressing the power button to check up on things. And it has a neat trick up its sleeve: it’s constantly on the listen and will show you what music is playing nearby.
The feature, called “Now Playing”, does this locally, using a database of music stored on your phone, meaning it isn’t using your data to discover what you’re listening to. It works uncannily well, too: classical music is a bit of a challenge, but for pop music, all you have to do is wait 30 seconds or so and the artist and track name appear automatically in the lower portion of the screen. The fact it’s local, rather than uploaded to the cloud, avoids privacy concerns as well.
Next, there’s the “Active Edge” feature, which we’ve seen before on the HTC U11. All this means is that there are pressure sensors built into the frame of the phone that let you squeeze to activate various functions. It’s not as fully featured as it is on the U11 – you can only activate the Google Assistant and silence incoming calls – and it’s a bit of a gimmick. While you can activate Google Assistant from the lockscreen with it, you still have to unlock the phone to view results. I don’t see the point.
Google Lens, though, is far from an inconsequential gewgaw. Using Google’s scarily powerful vision AI technology, this promises, eventually, to analyse images live from your camera, identifying objects and text, delivering useful information to you on the fly. Think live translations of foreign languages text or even ratings of restaurants and bars when you point your camera at them.
When Google showed this off at its I/O developer conference earlier this year, it was one of the most interesting technologies announced; alas, what you get on the Pixel 2 XL is merely a preview. It doesn’t let you analyse the world around you live, only after the fact in Google Photos.
And it’s a little hit and miss right now, identifying a bottle of red wine as “liqueur” and the BT Tower as simply a “control tower”, although it did identify the Golden Gate bridge successfully from a holiday snap. Impressively, it also recognised a Redwood tree from the Giant’s Forest in California’s Sequoia National Park.
Not so Pixel perfect
It’s disappointing that the Pixel 2 XL’s potentially most useful – and exciting – feature isn’t fully ready yet, but I’m not at all convinced by the phone anyway. Yes, it has the latest, fastest processor inside it and, yes, it’s a competent all-round flagship smartphone. It looks nice, feels nice and has an excellent camera.
However, for every positive, there seems to be a negative lurking just around the corner. The software is great but Google Lens isn’t ready yet (and Active Edge is a pointless toy). The camera is brilliant but video quality has taken a step back from last year, and the screen… well, let’s just say that once you see the colour shift taking place you won’t be able to unsee it.
And so, although I’d very much like to, this is not a phone I can recommend. If you desperately want a Google phone then opt for the smaller, less attractive Google Pixel 2 ( see p60). If not, choose the best big-screened phone on the market: the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus, which you can now buy for a lot less than the Pixel 2 XL.
“For every positive point, there’s a negative nasty lurking just around the corner. This is not a phone I can recommend”