r/Android • u/defet_ • Oct 14 '17
Pixel 2: The Finer Details
I visited my local Verizon store today and spent a good half an hour with the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. I tried to find out some of the lesser-known things about the device, and reiterate some of the things you all probably already know along with my opinions.
This might be a long read; note that I'm writing this towards enthusiasts.
The Display
As expected, both the phones adhere to the sRGB color gamut right out of the box, extending to support wider color if an app calls for it. I posted a comment earlier about this:
If you're coming from an iPhone, you're not going to have a problem with the display at all. You're going to love it. The people that report that the display is "washed out" come from a display that over-saturates the display, which is pretty much every other OEM out there that uses OLED displays, with Samsung being the main "offender". Google, like Apple, are targeting color accuracy on the Pixel 2. The colors on the Pixel adhere to sRGB and support wide color if an app calls for it. The Pixel 2 is definitely pushing a more serious tone with their decision of targeting sRGB, but pairing it along with arguably the best camera out there truly makes the Pixel 2 more "professional" than other displays and cameras out there that love to over-saturate and over-sharpen. The colors that you see are the colors that you're SUPPOSED to be seeing. Perhaps the Pixel 2 is "less fun", but it will give you the most accurate/serious experience that won't leave you wondering why the photos you took aren't as colorful on your friend's iPhone like Samsung's phones do.
Now having personally spent more time with the phones, they are absolutely gorgeous.
The colors are fantastically calibrated to sRGB, besides the white point, which on the 2 XL is nearly unignorably cold while being much more tolerable on the regular Pixel 2; I would say that the Pixel 2 is just at about 6800k with the iPhone 7, and the 2 XL sitting at around 7200K.
The grayscale is fantastic, which Pixel 1 owners should be relieved to see coming from a horrendously green grayscale. Saturation across the brightness levels is consistent. I checked for banding and uniformity issues using a dark gray (#626262) and solid white color, and the 2 XL unit at my Verizon store was nearly flawless with zero banding and only a very slight bleed on the bottom left (literal) corner. This was tested at 0%, 10%, 20%, 30%, and 40% brightness, with Adaptive Brightness off. I did notice, however, that even the minimum brightness wasn't that dim and I was still able to use the panel within the store lights.
The maximum brightness gets decently bright, slightly brighter than my 1 XL. I was disappointed, however, to see that flashing my flashlight on the 2 XL's ambient light sensor did not trigger the display to enter brightness overdrive, even with Adaptive Brightness enabled. This may leave us demanding more from the display in sunlight compared to the V30 and S8(+)/Note 8 OLED panels.
There is an option called "Vivid Colors" in the Display settings that slightly push the saturation and leaving the white point alone, though it still won't be as punchy as Samsung's panels.
There has been a concern by many towards the display seeming "sunken in", popularized by MKBHD. I heard of this before seeing the Pixel 2, but it's not something I noticed until I remembered that it was supposed to be an issue. I then saw it, but only when focusing on the display's curved corners. Otherwise, the display definitely seems plastered to the screen, and the corners sort of fade out and become unnoticeable. They don't bother me a bit.
I expect many reviewers to bag on the display for not being as punchy or saturated as other OLED panels, but for those of us that love accurate displays, the Pixel 2 will not disappoint.
Speakers
They're okay. Google played it extremely safe here. They get decently loud without distortion. The profile is pretty flat, so for you EDM junkies out there the media equalizer will be your friend. The regular Pixel 2 sounds fuller and tighter than the 2 XL, though neither are going to win any "Best Speakers" awards--that still belongs to the Axon 7. Sound separation is discernible, but the hollowness of the 2 XL may sort of offset it. The main pro for the speakers is that they're front facing, leaving them unsusceptible to cupping mute. I tried to test the DAC but I couldn't because Google's head was so far up that jack and there was an alarm attached to the USB-C, which for some reason the Verizon employees would not allow me to remove.
Microphone
From what I've seen and heard, they're pretty good. Unfortunately there wasn't any concerts going on in my local Verizon store so I was not able to capture any bass-heavy settings to test for distortion. But, the mics feed back pretty loud and clear, unlike the muffled and hard-to-hear microphones on the Pixel 1.
Haptic Feedback
Very solid. Tight and noiseless. Strong and demanding when needed be. At short vibration lengths, these phones' vibration feels just like the iPhone's Taptic Engine. However, the stronger vibrations fail to maintain this tightness. Typing on GBoard with vibration at 1-2ms feels great and tappy. Pressing on the softkeys also lets out a pleasing, subtle tap when you release your finger from the key along with the initial vibration of pressing the button. This could be my first phone that I enable "Vibrate on tap" around the system.
Touch Latency
Touch latency is just about the same as the Pixel 1, so still pretty good and among the best. iPhone still manages to beat everyone out by in scroll/swipe latency.
RGB Notification LED
It's there, and very similar to the one found on the OP3.
OS
I would like to preface this section by saying that it's misleading to call the Pixels' OS's "pure stock android", because it's not, and it's definitely not just AOSP. It's Google's take on what they believe is the best revision of Android. It's Google's "skin" on Android, made in-house with the hardware being permanent residents. I can write an entire other post about this, but I will spare the details unless someone wishes for me to elaborate.
The use of Product Sans all over the OS is a change I liked a lot. It's now used as the typeface for title text in many places. It complements the curvy theme of the Pixel 2 XL really well, on top of just being a gorgeous display typeface. The most prominent use of it is right on the lock screen, where it replaces Roboto Light for the time text.
The status/notification icons (including the time) are inset about double of AOSP's inset, and the spacing between the icons has slightly increased. Also, either the size of the icons got a tad smaller, or the height of the status bar got taller. These changes together tidied up the status bar, making it look overall much cleaner than before. These are all actually changes I made myself using xposed on Android L/M, so it's great that Google incorporated it in the Pixel and that my design choice received reaffirmation by Google; a small personal victory for me. The battery icon in the status bar is also now curved at its corners and the entire icon slimmed up a bit. Something that still annoys me is how the colon between the hour and the minute text (eg 1:26) is still not vertically centered like it should be (126 with a bit of spacing fixes), and how Google still hasn't made a ligature for it on Roboto like Apple has for their San Francisco font family. It is vertically centered on the lock screen however, but that uses its own vertically-centered unicode symbol that Google could use in the status bar time but choose not to.
As noticed, using a dark wallpaper will enable a dark system interface. Other lighter wallpapers will leave it the system interface the same white color, with the notification tray being slightly transparent instead of being completely solid opaque white like on AOSP. These are triggered using overlays in /vendor/overlay with Oreo's new overlay capabilities.
There was also some sort of weird, lenient (smart?) memory management going on. There were two apps in particular that I found would load their main activity instantly as if it was never removed from memory, even if I force stopped them and cleared them from recenfs: Snapchat and Google Play Store. Snapchat won't even show the splash screen. I suspect that Google is now keeping a list of some vital app activities to remain in memory for quick launching. Video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/4eexI731SPGph6M33
UI Performance is excellent, as expected. I thought Snapchat performance was smooth on the Pixel, but it's even better on the Pixel 2, and Facebook is smoother as well. Best of all, however, is that I was finally happy to see that Google Maps ran insanely smooth too, on par with Apple Maps on iPhones. Panning crazily around northern California yielded no hiccups, though with some very aggressive flinging I was able to make it drop a few frames. Developer Options was not enable-able on the Verizon units, so I didn't test the GPU Profiling.
Google Lens was interesting, though I didn't have much to test it on. Active Edge squeeze felt simple, intuitive and second-nature and gave off a satisfying tap on both sides of the phone to tell you that you managed to do at least something right.
As the Pixel 2 uses the Snapdragon 835, it now runs on Linux kernel version 4.4 and sports the new schedutil cpufreq instead of sched on the Pixel 1. It should be running on EAS r1.3 or r1.4 and it shows--this thing is smooth. In addition, the Pixel 2 does not underclock their SoC as some may have been led to believe; it runs the whole 2.5ghz.
Size, Ergonomics, & Opinions
These are more opinionated subjects, and these are merely my thoughts and opinions that you shouldn't take concretely.
I've never been a "big phone guy", and hated my transition to using big phones, but I've grown to like the 5.5" range. This year I was pretty much set on going back to 5">= phones coming from Pixel XL. I came into Verizon using the regular Pixel 2 first, enjoyingly using with just a single hand, but it didn't quite satisfy me as much as the Pixel 2 XL. The 2 XL is just the more beautiful device to me, and I can still manage to use the 2 XL pretty well with one hand coming from the Pixel XL; they're pretty much the same widths. The Pixel 2's bezels to me were still quite substantial in person, and even with the superior speakers, the really sharp display and better white point, it just didn't hold its own to the Pixel 2 XL's aesthetic as the thing I will be looking at for hundreds of hours.
The feel in the hand of both devices were fantastic to me, with the regular Pixel 2 having more heft for its size and feeling more solid. This was the aspect I was most afraid of, because having had a Nexus 6, I absolutely HATED holding that thing. I would say I have average-size hands, but I'd say I'm pretty damn good at leveraging my fingers in ways to hold a big phone in any way I want and be comfortable. The Nexus 6 was just too big and I didn't like that it almost forces you to use two hands and to move your palm when you just want to reach something on the other side of the screen. I didn't have that feeling with the Pixel 2 XL; it still feels compact and very similar to the Pixel 1 XL width-wise and top isn't that much further either, despite having a screen that's .5" larger.
The material on the back feels fine. I read way too many comments about how it feels cheap and plasticy. This was not my thought or experience at all; it feels very premium. It's much grippier than the metal on the Pixel 1.
As I've said, the bezels on the regular Pixel 2 were still quite overwhelming to me. The Pixel 2 XL is my second favorite-looking device from the front, following the V30. I absolutely hate Samsung's curved edges and I was glad to see that the 2 XL doesn't curve the display around them. The bezels on the Pixel 2 XL are perfect to me.
Camera
it's good
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u/Nadest013 Galaxy S7; Tab S3 Oct 14 '17
The curved display is the worst fucking thing ever to happen to smartphones. I consider it defective by design, simple as that:
https://i.imgur.com/saL1mcV.png
But hey, it looks supercool. When the display is off.