NOW TRY THIS...
1 BUTTON YOURSELF UP
Google’s powered up its power button, adding a bundle of options to the power-off menu. If you’ve assigned a credit or debit card for Google Pay mobile payments, the feature’s given pride of place here, along with shortcut access to store cards. This is also your place to toggle lights, control smart speakers and manage other smart home bits – perfect if you’re sick of saying “Alexa” and “OK Google”.
4 SHAKE OFF THE SHAKE
Don’t let the dinky looks fool you: this is a mean, green-ish filming machine. Loaded up with optical and electronic image stabilisation, it has four options when shooting video. To access these, fire up the video camera, tap the ‘shaky hand’ icon and choose from Standard (for light movement), Locked (for faraway objects), Active (for heavy movement), or Cinematic Pan (for smooth panning shots).
2 GET IT ALL IN WRITING
Google’s speech recognition is stellar, and on the Pixel 5 it’s put to excellent use in two ways. The first is Live Caption, which adds real-time subtitles to anything playing on the phone. To activate it, press the volume button then select the box that pops up below the slider. The other is transcribing with the Recorder app: when capturing sound that includes speech, the Pixel 5 outputs it as plain text.
5 FEEL RIGHT AT HOME
Long-press your home screen, select Styles And Wallpapers, and you can enjoy a richer choice of customisation than ever on a Pixel phone. Choose from a range of grid sizes, filled with as few as four big icons or 25 dinky ones. This is also where you can mess with typefaces, icon styles and highlight colours… plus you get a host of animated Come Alive wallpapers that add a subtle dash of fun.
3 CHARGE AROUND
Reverse wireless charging means you can power up a compatible device (earbuds, a watch, another phone) by firing up the feature and placing the second device on the back of your Pixel. But here’s a neat new trick: this phone turns the feature on automatically when you plug it in to charge. The result: you can power up two devices (the Pixel 5 and its charger) with one cable.
6 BOOST THE BATTERY
With great power management comes great battery life. Fire up this Pixel’s smart power-saving skills by selecting Adaptive Battery in Settings > Battery. If you need your phone to last as long as possible, engage Battery Saver, which shuts off a handful of background processes; or for maximum longevity switch to Extreme Battery Saver, which disables all but the most essential apps.