The publicity around the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 6 Pro has been CRAZY and I'll be honest: I fully bought into the hype and I've been more excited about this device than any other device in recent memory. Now that I've been using this phone for a month, let's see if it lived up to my high expectations and dig into some features that I've never been more excited about, but also some that were truly disappointing.
Let's talk about the build quality and the screen: I love the 6.71-inch screen and 120-hertz refresh rate it is buttery smooth and very responsive and it's just been overall a pleasure to use the screen gets bright it is not the brightest amongst flagship phones but I do wish that sometimes in direct sunlight it was a bit brighter on the flip side the extra dim feature that's built into the pixels has been great because I've been able to read in bed and not wake up my wife and it's been easier on my eyes and now about the infamous camera bump so it's been talked about quite a bit and I'm glad google went with this look I love it and it is unique and it is very different from what every other company has been doing with most of the camera bumps being pushed to one side one of the convenience factors is when you have the phone down on a surface there will be zero wobbles when you're using it.
Now let's talk about the build quality of this phone it does feel premium and it has a curved screen which i wish they'd gone with a flat screen but when you use a phone case on this phone it does get rid of some of the curve so you're not accidentally touching the edges or hitting the back button when you didn't want to one of the bigger issues i've had with this phone build is how slippery the back is but if you're prone to dropping your phone a lot i would highly recommend you get a case for this because it is much too slick to be carrying around without a case so another thing that google change on their phone is they move their volume buttons onto the same side as the power button and it's nit-picky but it's really been annoying taking screenshots because now i have to use two hands to do it and to make it easier luckily google does have a quick tap feature so what i've done is i've enabled the quick tap on the back to take a screenshot the haptics on the pixel 6 are some of the best i've ever used on an android phone and they really add to the premium feel that google is going for So one of the issues for us android using social media addicts has been that the quality on snapchat and instagram have just been terrible so previously when you're uploading stories on snapchat or instagram they actually haven't used the camera itself they've used the screen grab or screen record to upload the videos and pictures seriously seriously and to get around this issue i used to use the native camera app and then upload it into Snapchat or Instagram to get that full quality but now google has opened up their camera api for instagram and snapchat google has announced that there's going to be an update coming soon where quick snap to chat quick tap to snap good tap quick tap to snap with a double tap on the phone the snapchat camera app opens before you've unlocked your phone so you can immediately upload content directly to snapchat i'm just glad that google has opened up their camera api so you don't have to work through other workarounds to upload high quality photos and video onto social media So over the course of the last 30 days i've loved using the camera on this phone. I've loved the videos it's put out I've loved the telephoto lens and generally, it's been very consistent except the first day we had a few hiccups and if you want to see what those hiccups are about check out our video on the blind camera test but since that blind camera test I've had completely consistent video and photos so I'm not sure what that was about. Maybe some early bugs because of the new tensor chip who knows one thing on the camera that i've used more often than i thought i would use is the telephoto lens so i have used it quite a bit for photos and for video and i've especially loved the skin tone accuracy it's been some of the best skin tone accuracy i've seen on a phone yet so this isn't going to be a thorough camera review there's plenty of videos out there and i'm not a photographer but what i can say is that some of the ai features on this camera make me feel like i'm a part of the photography crowd the ai camera features i'll be talking about next are some of the most exciting on the pixel that really make photography and editing fun for a simple user like me let's begin with the magic eraser here you'll see that the software does a great job of detecting everyone behind my friend and some people on top of the bridge and erases every one of them this is our newly adopted dog Momo and here you can see that i'm trying to erase the leg and the boots that are behind him and since the magic eraser didn't detect it automatically i'm manually selecting the leg in the boot to get rid of it and you can see that it does a pretty good job and it's ready to be uploaded on instagram you can actually use the magic eraser on any old photo here's a picture from my trip back home to Nepal a few years ago and the magic eraser detects every person in this photo but leaves behind all the shadows which can be manually erased.
Let's talk about the long exposure mode in the pixel 6 pro this is one of the easiest camera features to use and it only takes seconds to produce this photo i love how google has made long exposure photography so easy for someone like me that never plays around with manual camera functions next is the action pattern feature where you have to simply center a moving object to create a motion blur effect i'm moving quite slow on the bike but google's made it look like i'm moving at mach speed and finally the astrophotography feature is automatically detected when you point the phone up at the night sky in night mode this was a cloudy day yet it still produced some really fun results here while we're on the topic of ai let's dive into the other ai features that makes this phone a true game changer in the smartphone industry the live translate feature is surprising on how well it works and doesn't require the internet i've tested this feature out in Portuguese Hindi mandarin and Cantonese and they all work flawlessly in some cases even when the accent wasn't the best for the language i can't wait to try this feature out when traveling again once we're able to do so The dictation on this phone is almost flawless and can dictate accents as well it also very accurately inserts punctuation instead of a giant wall of text google's voice assistant is the best in the game and i've been using it primarily for text and emails to test it out would you use this function the call screen option is useful when you can't or don't want to answer your phone but you want to know what the call is about assistant speaks to the caller for you and the replies are live transcribed as well first of all this is really weird but second i want to see your new dog do you need to get a hold of them urgently i mean i really want to see the dog so yes and finally the hold for me feature has been very handy instead of staying on hold for a while this has been especially useful lately as every company seems to have longer than usual wait times now that we're at the top of this mountain on this brutally cold and windy day i think it's probably a good time to talk about the battery life so to truly test out the battery life during this last 30 days i've turned on all the notifications on every app i've had i've had this phone connected to my Garmin watch with all smartphone functions turned on i also have connected to my pc so i get phone calls text notifications so for 30 days it's been fully connected to all of my devices i've also turned on the now playing feature which basically the phone listens in the background and records all of the songs that are playing so if you're the grocery store it keeps a list of songs that i've been playing i also used it more so than i would have regularly to really test the battery so during the last 30 days i manually tracked my battery usage using the pixels digital wellness app so on average i had 25 of battery left at the end of the day and on average i also used 5 hours and 44 minutes of screen on time Accubattery's latest estimates are at 9 hours and 35 minutes of screen on time and Gsam Battery Monitor estimates it at eight hours and four minutes max on a full charge and because i'm ending every day with about 25 battery life left i don't always have to remember to charge it overnight which brings me to today and it is 4:15 and i have 81 battery life left so today it's been used pretty extensively i've been taking photos videos all day i've been using the apps in here and we climbed a mountain in a really cold day and it has held up really well so i did charge the battery overnight using the adaptive battery charging option which basically means it extends the life of your battery as it slowly charges it up and fully charges depending on when you set your morning alarm the adaptive battery feature on the pixel also learns your usage and optimizes the battery and i have noticed lately in the past few weeks that my battery life has gotten better.
Now let's talk about the os where google's made some good choices but also some really frustrating ones that you'll want to hear about with google's announcement of the pixel 6 and the pixel 6 pro of course came an update to their os and that is android 12 and material u the change was quite drastic but it did grow on me quite quickly i love how material u colors the theme of buttons notifications and sliders to match a shade of your wallpaper it is seamless and beautiful and it really feels like the whole user experience is about you and your choice i still dislike that it takes two swipes down to see the brightness adjustment and to see more than four options and i've gotten to the point where i'm in the habit of swiping down twice but that was a really unnecessary change for the worse i also don't love the permanent search bar at the bottom of course with any new os update you'd expect a few bugs in the beginning and most of the bugs i noticed were related to apps and in recent days i've noticed that these apps don't crash anymore so we're at least heading in the right direction the adaptive brightness on this phone is quite terrible and needs a major software update it increases and decreases abruptly and sometimes when it gets to a minimum darkness setting it's really slow to adjust back up i'm sure this can be updated and fixed easily with a software update but in the meantime i've actually disabled adaptive brightness as for one of the main gripes people have had about this phone it's the fingerprint scanner i personally haven't had a lot of issues with it i'm able to unlock on my first try in most cases and it might have helped that i did scan the same finger multiple times but even then it's not the fastest scanner having said that it has been raining a lot lately and i've found that the fingerprint scanner doesn't work as well when my hands are wet that it hasn't been ideal that google didn't include other biometric options such as iris scan or facial recognition this is especially annoying living in the Canadian rockies where i have to take off my gloves every time i want to unlock my phone or we're in a pandemic wearing masks everywhere and having iris scan would be really useful right now this phone has been great as my daily driver for this past month and it's really been a pleasure to use given that this is the first all google phone with the tensor chip it was expected that there would be software bugs but it's a bit baffling that they had their major oversight on biometric options so for 300 less the pixel 6 is actually the better option for most especially if you prefer the flat screen and are okay with losing the telephoto lens and the rest of the spec differences aren't going to be noticeable for most so those are my thoughts on the pixel 6 pro please let me know what you think in the comments below.
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