Google Pixel 5
Google’s latest flagship takes a small step back in terms of specifications, but one giant leap forward for usability
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PRICE £499 (£599 inc VAT) from store.google.com
The Pixel 5 is a phone for our times. Instead of a £1,000 handset stuffed with cuttingedge components, this stripped-back affair shuns flourishes such as the sleek glass finish of the Pixel 4 ( see issue 304, p83). It’s replaced by a recycled aluminium chassis that’s almost identical in design to the Pixel 4a ( see issue 313, p60), with the main differences being a larger camera housing and a lightly speckled finish that adds texture to the shell.
I also like this phone’s compact dimensions, which mean it fits nicely in the hand, but despite Google’s best efforts – including a light green colour option dubbed “Sorta Sage” by its naming wags – the Pixel 5 feels like a downgrade on the glass-laden Pixel 4.
Happily, one thing that hasn’t been downgraded d dd is the h AMOLED screen. Sporting a resolution l of f 1,080 x 2,340, the h 6in edge-to-edge d d panel l is a cracking performer, with a maximum b brightness h of f 468cd/m2 d and 95%
“The 4,080mAh battery powered it to a time of 22hrs 54mins in our test, which is more than ten hours longer than the Pixel 4”
coverage of the sRGB colour colo gamut. It also supports HDR H video and a 90Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling. In s short, it’s everything you could want from a phone display. displa
The biggest area of compromise is internal hardware. The Pixel 5 is f fitted with one of Qualcomm’s mid-range Snapdragon 765G 7 processors, as opposed to the more powerful Snapdragon Snapdrag 865 chips found in rivals such as the OnePlus 8T opposi opposite, although it’s paired with a respectable 8GB of RAM.
Sure enough, the Pixe Pixel 5’s benchmark scores lag behind beh the OnePlus 8T. Its single and multicore results of 597 a and 1,609 are dwarfed by the 8T’s scores of 883 and 3,217, an and are on par with the Pixel 4a’s results. However, the difference isn’t noticeabl noticeable in practice, and there are obvious benefits in both p price and battery life.
On that subject, the Pi Pixel 5 has the best battery life o of any phone in the Pixel series by b some distance. The 4,080 4,080mAh cell powered it to a total t time of 22hrs 54mins in our video-rundown test, which is more than ten hours longer than the Pixel 4. That’s more than enough to see you through hrough a full day of intensive use, and d some way into the next day to boot. . It also supports wireless and reverse e charging.
Google continues s its excellent form when it comes to the e simple but effective cameras. The he rear camera still uses two sensors, s, but the second lens is now a 16-megapixel gapixel ultrawideangle rather than a 16-megapixel 2x telephoto. For my money, the wide-angle is the more ore useful. Sadly, Google has done away ay with the front-facing g wide-angle ngle camera seen on the Pixel 3, with a simple 8-megapixel unit here. re.
Photos are as crisp, p, detailed and colour-balanced as you’d expect from the Pixel range, with h Google’s clever camera software once ce again giving it a clear advantage g over r rivals. Night Sight automatically matically activates in low-light ght conditions, making it t even easier to get good shots in the dark, and the already impressive ive portrait mode has been n enhanced with a Portrait it Light feature. This adds ds an adjustable effect simulating mulating the kind of “fill light” ght” you’d use in a professional sional studio portrait; it’s t’s added automatically lly when using portrait rtrait mode (with AI calculating lculating the best angle and intensity tensity to use) but it can also be added to portraits you have taken ken outside of portrait mode. The he results work particularly well ell for black-and-white portraits, rtraits, giving them an arresting resting high-contrast effect.
The Pixel 5 captures equally excellent cellent video. It shoots up to 4K K resolution at up to 60fps, with th footage benefiting from new w video stabilisation tools such ch as the “cinematic pan” effect fect for smoother and, well, cinematic nematic footage.
Elsewhere, IPX8 waterproofing aterproofing helps it survive accidental cidental dunks, and Google’s Titan tan M security chip provides hardware-level rdware-level protection. There here are also several software safeguards feguards built in to automatically tomatically flag suspected spam am calls and phishing links. As with all Pixel phones, the Google oogle Assistant is baked into to the device, and it works just st as well as ever – although the e Active Edge feature, which hich allowed you to summon the e Assistant by squeezing your r phone, has been consigned to history.
The Pixel 5 is Google’s first phone to support 5G, alongside the newly upgraded Pixel 4a 5G (£499), but note that the plain 4a is a tempting £349. On the surface, it looks like the difference between Google’s flagship and mid-range devices is much less stark than with previous generations.
Look closer, however, and you’ll see that Google has made tweaks in all the right places, which add up to a drastically improved experience. First, the battery life is now up there with the best Android phones. In concert with wireless charging and powersharing, that alone could be enough to sway the decision in the Pixel 5’s favour, but it’s also backed up by improved camera software and 5G. All told, it’s a very impressive package that proves a phone doesn’t need to cost the earth to be genuinely excellent.
Eight-core 2.4GHz/2.2GHz/1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 765 8GB RAM Adreno 620 graphics 5G 6in 90Hz AMOLED screen, 1,080 x 2,340 resolution 128GB storage dual 12.2/16-megapixel rear camera 8-megapixel front camera Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac)
Bluetooth 5 NFC USB-C connector 4,080mAh battery Android 11 70 x 8 x 145mm (WDH) 151g 1yr warranty