Google Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL: Price, Specs, Release Date

Pixel devotees will also notice that the back of the phone is missing something: the fingerprint sensor. Google has ditched this in favor of a face unlock feature, something that every other maker of premium smartphones now offers, though they may use varying technical approaches.

The Pixel 4’s OLED display has the same resolution as the OLED display on the Pixel 3, but the new one is shipping with HDR support and is UHDA-certified, meaning it reaches a certain standard of high dynamic range. It also has a 90 megahertz refresh rate, which means scrolling through apps on the touchscreen should feel extra smooth.

A strip across the top of the Pixel 4’s screen contains all the front-facing sensors. This includes a single, eight-megapixel wide-angle camera, an IR dot projector, two near-infrared cameras, and an ambient EQ sensor for auto-adjusting color temperature.

The Pixel 4 charges via USB-C, which also serves as the audio port for headphones. The battery in the Pixel 4 has shrunk slightly from last year’s phone, while the Pixel 4 XL has a larger, 3700mAh battery. But like other smartphone makers (such as Apple), Google is wagering that features like the screen’s adaptive refresh rate, its power management tools, and even Dark Mode, which rolled out with Android 10, will be more critical to extending battery life than the actual battery size.

The Pixel 4 will ship running Android 10, and it’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor. But Google likes to tout its custom-designed coprocessors on the phone as well. This year’s model includes Google’s Titan M security chip as well as something called the Pixel Neural Core chip. This is a rebrand of earlier Pixel Visual Core chips, and that’s largely because this dedicated co-processor now supports certain audio features.

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The Pixel’s camera is another one of its standout features, and it’s usually one of the areas where Google’s software-first pedigree stands out. Last year’s Pixel 3, for example, had only a single rear camera lens, but thanks to computational photography, it was capable of shooting remarkably good nighttime photos, and was able to select the best shot from a burst of images. Now, thanks to added lenses on the back and this new Pixel Neural Core chip, Google claims the camera is even better.

First, the basics: Its front facing camera is that a wide-angle eight-megapixel camera (although its field of view isn’t as wide as last year’s), while its rear camera block includes a 12-megapixel wide angle lens and a 16-megapixel telephoto lens. There’s also a spectral sensor on the back of the phone, something that was included in the Pixel 3; it’s a way of measuring light flickers so that when you shoot a video and there’s a screen somewhere in frame, it doesn’t appear to flicker. Like the new iPhones, and as every prior leak about this phone suggested, the Pixel 4 has a square camera module on the back.

Personally, I think the square camera module is the new “notch,” which is to say, some people will hate the look of it and will not be able to ever unsee it so long as they own the phone, but I believe most people will stop talking about how unsightly it is if the phone manages to perform some sort of new function. And it seems the Pixel 4 camera does have some new tricks up its (square) sleeve.

For one, the phone’s Portrait Mode is supposed to be better, although you’d expect that with the wide angle and telephoto combo on the back. Super Res Zoom is better, too. The new camera app will also have dual exposure controls, so you can balance color and exposure in particularly challenging shots, like when someone is backlit. Night Sight, the name for last year’s nighttime mode, is said to be improved, and now it even has an “Astrophotography” option for all those times you’re stargazing and want to capture the moment (although, a tripod is still recommended).