 Well, will you look at that? It's the Pixel 2, and it's the Pixel 2 XL. The Google phones are back for another round, and they might not be all that much to look at, but they're good, really good. This is only the second year of Google making its own phones, but you can already tell that the company is sticking to a few consistent themes. It wants to make something that's really practical. These are phones that are more impressive to use than they are to behold. They just do dozens of little things better than you might expect, given their kind of unassuming form. And it starts with the hardware. The nice thing about these phones is that other than the size of the screen and the battery, they are basically identical. Google isn't making you miss out on too much by choosing the smaller phone. And for both the different sizes, there are a few different colors, and they all have slightly different textures. The white and the blue ones look nicer to me, but the black ones are a little bit easier to grip. Even so, I really prefer the Pixel 2 XL because of the screen. It's got this huge six inch 18 by nine OLED screen that goes nearly edge to edge with curved corners and a ridiculously high 538 pixels per inch. And the screen looks good to me, but I will tell you that it has been polarizing. You see, lots of Android phones have these phantasmagoric colors, especially compared to the iPhone. But here, the Pixel screen is tuned to sRGB, and so the colors are much more toned down. It's better than your worst LG V30 fears, but it is not up to Samsung quality. If you're into the smaller Pixel 2, the five inch screen there isn't quite as technically good, but it's still really nice. It's just smaller and squared off. So we should talk about bezels. Both phones have them, and they look especially big and dumb on the smaller Pixel 2. But even the XL has some thin bezels that go all the way around. So yeah, the bezels are not awesome, but they do make space for dual front-facing speakers. And yo, the speakers sound great. They get really loud without too much audio distortion. They've got pretty good stereo separation, and they even manage to convey a little bit of bass. Now, they're not gonna replace a separate Bluetooth speaker, but I am finding I'm using them way more often than I expected. Speaking of sound, there is no headphone jack, which is frustrating and annoying. It's the one impractical design decision that Google made, and I still feel like it's gonna be a year or two before the accessory world gets caught up. I have precisely zero faith that USB-C headphones are going to be standard or any good anytime soon. So yeah, don't lose the dongle that comes in the box, and sorry, there are no headphones in the box. Oh, but on the bright side, Bluetooth here is 5.0, and I experienced way fewer drops in audio stutters than I did on the last Pixel. Google kept the glass shade on the back. It's pretty much already the Pixel trademark now, but they did make it smaller. There's also a tiny bit of a camera bump. Google also kept the fingerprint sensor in the same easy-to-reach spot, and it's a crazy fast fingerprint sensor, by the way. It's faster than any I've used on any other Android phone. Specs, sure, let's run them down. They're totally standard for flagship Android phones. It's a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with four gigs of RAM and base storage of 64 gigs. The bigger Pixel has a bigger battery, so I am getting a little bit more of a day of use out of it. The smaller one didn't quite go that long for me, but it should still hit a day of light to medium use. Unfortunately, there is no wireless charging, but the fast charging over USB-C is, in fact, very fast. The new Pixels are also finally water and dust resistant. They're rated at IP67, which is good enough for a short dunk, but you probably shouldn't go swimming with them. Honestly, it seems like Google went out of its way to make these phones feel kind of plain. So, for example, they're made out of Gorilla Glass and aluminum, just like every phone, but Google coated the aluminum in this textured finish that makes them easier to grip and also hides the antenna lines. Think about that. Google took a metal phone and covered it in material that makes it feel like plastic, just so that it's easier to hold. You really won't impress anybody with the look of these things. See, if you want to impress somebody with the Pixel 2, you should just take a picture of them. Yes, the most impressive thing about the Pixel 2 is its camera, both because of the pictures it takes and because the 12 megapixel camera is just endlessly interesting from a technical perspective. The Pixel, you see, it takes pictures a little bit differently from other phones. You've probably already noticed that there's only one lens on the back, not two. Google thinks that's all that it needs to do the same kinds of camera tricks that other phones do with multiple lenses. Instead of a dual camera, Google is switching to something called dual Pixels. Basically, each individual Pixel on the sensor that reads light is split into a left and a right Pixel, which doubles the number. That gives Google more raw data to work with and makes portrait mode possible without an extra lens. Another major change this year is the addition of optical image stabilization, which should help keep blurring down if you have shaky hands. But the most important thing that Google is doing is constantly shooting photos while the camera app is active and then stacking a small set of them whenever you hit the camera. And then stacking a set of them whenever you hit the shutter button, combining them with, you know, math. Google calls this HDR Plus, but it's much more than just high dynamic range. It's using algorithms to take a bunch of very noisy data from a bunch of shots and combine them into one good image. Now, to be clear, Google is not the first to use HDR Auto. It's not the first to use OIS, and it's not the first to use dual Pixels. What it does seem to be doing is taking all of those technologies and combining them algorithmically with a lot of other things. And it's not the first to use HDR Auto. The only thing that's really changed is the image saturation, which is a huge plus. It's not as intense as the Pixel 4, but it's not as intense as the Pixel 4, and it's not as intense as anybody else. Photos you take with the Pixel seem to pick up more detail and provide sharper images than you're gonna see on an iPhone 8 Plus or a Note 8. I'm consistently impressed with the results I'm getting in even challenging situations, including backlit subjects and low lighting conditions. But the best part is that the Pixel 4 is still able to take all of those dual pixels. Even though they're less than a micron apart, that's enough for Google to detect depth. Combine that with the multiple shots that you take every time you click the shutter button, and you end up with a massive pile of data for the Pixel to use machine learning on to make a portrait with a blurred background. Hell, you can even do portrait mode on faces in the selfie camera, even though it doesn't have dual pixels there because of all that machine learning. Now, just like with the iPhone 8 Plus and the Note 8, the Pixel 4 is able to take all of that data and put it into the background. The Pixel generally does a better job cutting around the hair on a subject, and it is able to work with non-human subjects on the rear camera. But I can't say that it's unequivocally better because the Pixel only has one option for portrait mode, on or off, and you can't tweak the results either. There are some other camera tricks, notably motion photos, which are essentially a little video. They're not quite as nice as Apple's Live Photo to my eye, unfortunately I wish there were more ways to edit them after the fact. Google also combines both OIS and electronic stabilization when you shoot a video. It's still not a perfect system. You can get some fake looking video when you pan, but overall it does a much better job of accounting for shake and bounce. We'll do a full deep dive photo comparison once the iPhone X is out, but in the meantime, here's the bottom line. It's in the same class as the best phone cameras out there, and it's often at the head of that class. What's so fascinating about Google's approach is that it created a camera that gathers more data, not one that just gathers more light. It's an AI approach to photography. Because AI, if you haven't figured it out by now, is a very big deal for the Pixel 2. Now, if we're talking about AI, the most important thing to pay attention to is obviously the Google Assistant. It's good at things you might take for granted as an Android user. It can do a lot of stuff when you're offline. You can set Spotify to be your default music player. You can ask questions in a pretty normal language. There's a full history of your previous searches that's really easy to find. And you can type to it if you don't wanna talk, which I love. And now there's a new way to launch the Assistant by squeezing the phone. It is a little gimmicky, but it's also surprisingly convenient and it works well. You can adjust how hard you need to squeeze the phone to launch the Assistant, and you can also set it to silence the ringer when you squeeze it. What you can't do with this so-called active edge feature is remap that squeeze to anything else. It's Assistant or nothing. The Assistant does a better job of worming its way into my everyday use of the Pixel than Siri ever has with the iPhone. It just tends to be more generally useful, with results that point to what I actually want more often. And sometime soon, you're gonna get another input method for the Assistant, your camera. The feature is called Google Lens, and for now, it's limited just to a button inside the Photos app. It can recognize stuff like artwork or landmarks or books, movies, and some other things that are pretty easy to do an image search on. Lens will be much more interesting when it's built into the Google Assistant or the camera app or Google Keep or whatever else you could think of. Long-term, Lens is supposed to be another input method next to text and speech. Short-term though, it's basically just a parlor trick, albeit one that's occasionally useful. Oh, you know how the Pixel is also always listening for you to say, okay, Google? Now, it also listens for music. It shows you what's playing on the lock screen without you even needing to ask for it. All of that identification happens locally on the phone. It doesn't send anything to Google's cloud, and it even works if you don't have data. So hopefully, it's not too creepy for you. Anyway, it is a nice subtle touch. In fact, there are a lot of nice subtle touches on this phone, and most of them aren't actually AI. They're just iterations on the software. Every time Google makes a phone, it moves some stuff around on the home screen. This time, the Google search button gets moved to the bottom, integrated into the dock. That search box now does double duty as your on-device search too, which is smart. The home screen also has a new widget, which shows your next calendar appointment, the weather, and the date. There are a few artfully animated wallpapers, but I wish there were more of them, and there's no way to make your own with motion photos. But there is one neat trick. If you have a dark wallpaper, the app drawer and the notification shade switch to a dark theme automatically. The lock screen can be set to always on, and show little icons for your notifications. I do wish there were a few more customization options for it though. Also, there are some other neat features on the way, like augmented reality stickers inside the camera app, but unfortunately, they're just not ready for the launch yet. But really, the most important thing to know is that this is Android as Google sees it. It's pretty clean, there's no extra gunk that you don't want, and it has the fastest and most consistent access to OS updates. And overall, performance has been pretty great. I just hope it doesn't get crufty over time like some Android phones tend to do. But the Pixel's been pretty good in that regard. I just really like the direction that Google is taking the software here, and I really like this phone. A lot of phones are designed for one thing above all else, to give you a dazzling first impression. The Pixel 2 doesn't go in for all that. In fact, the first hardware impression you get isn't going to blow your hair back. But then you start to use it, and you notice those little things, like your hair not getting cropped off weirdly in portrait mode. And you notice yourself using the Assistant more, and that it's giving you better answers. And you notice that the software is fast, and it helps you be more productive. Those impressions don't get mentioned often enough, but they're super important. The Pixel 2 and the Pixel 2 XL are phones that are designed to be of use. They're not the nice dining room table where you lay out the fancy silverware for your guests. They're the kitchen counter where you actually eat. It's those everyday impressions that show why this year's Google phones have great design. In fact, there are a lot of them. In fact, there are a lot of them.