The camera to beat.
FOR THE PAST two years, Google has distinguished the Pixel line on the strength of its superb camera. This year is no different. While smartphone vendors typically tout camera upgrades of dubious utility (“larger sensors!”, “more megapixels!”, “three cameras!”), the Pixel 3 XL has incorporated features that actively help users take better photos.
Top Shot, for instance, uses AI to automatically pick the best shot out of a selection of images that are snapped in quick succession when you press the shutter button. It means no more closed eyes, wonky smiles, or missed once-in-a-lifetime moments, and while Google hasn’t done a great job of making this feature visible (you’ll need to set the motion auto setting to ‘on’, not ‘auto’), it works a treat in practice.
Where dual rear cameras have become the new standard for flagship handsets, Google continues to buck the trend with only a single rear 12.2-megapixel camera. But that’s not to say it’s inferior – far from it. In fact, the Pixel 3 XL consistently outperformed the other smartphones in almost all of the photography tests we did, with exceptional HDR processing (which is where it exposes light and dark parts of the image properly), highly accurate colour reproduction, and an astonishing attention to detail.
Flip around to the front of the device, though, and you’ll see that Google has actually added a second camera with a wide-angle lens. This one feature will really up your selfie game, as it lets you cram more people into the foreground of the shot, as well as see more of the background – things that were previously only possible using a selfie stick. We’re also a big fan of the Night Sight mode, which does an amazing job of snapping clear, low-light images without needing a tripod.
One of the benefits of having a phone made by the same company that makes the software is you get access to the latest updates immediately. Google made its latest mobile operating system, Android 9 Pie, available for older Pixels back in August, and it’s installed out of the box on the Pixel 3 XL.
As far as the rest of the hardware goes, the Pixel 3 XL offers just enough to qualify as a flagship device – but there’s nothing here that’ll blow your hair back. The 6.3-inch OLED display is sharp and vibrant, with a high-res 2,960 x 1,440 pixel display – but it’s not as bright as the screens on competitors. The handset design is simple yet modern, and there’s a rear-mounted fingerprint reader that’s fast and responsive.
Oddly, Google has opted for only 4GB of RAM, which seems skimpy given the asking price. It’s no surprise, then, that it consistently performed the worst of the lot when it came to benchmarks. Google has had to employ very aggressive memory management, and this means that frequently used apps often take longer to load as they aren’t actually running in the background anymore.
Google has also capped the Pixel 3 XL at a maximum of 128GB storage, with no memory card expansion like you get on the Samsung and Huawei. This is probably the biggest disappointment, given it’s such an amazing content creation device. That said, Google offers Pixel users free unlimited storage for photos and videos for three years, and there’s a ‘smart storage’ setting you can enable that automatically deletes backed up photos and videos off your device after 60 days. GOOGLE PIXEL 3 XL CRITICAL SPECS