Google Pixel 4 Review

The Pixel 4 tried more new ideas than any Pixel before or since, and the one it got wrong was the battery. Google fitted 2800mAh into a phone with a 5.7-inch 90Hz OLED and a Snapdragon 855, and the result was the worst endurance of any 2019 flagship: a day of light use, an afternoon of heavy use. The 90Hz panel, the first on a Pixel and lovely to scroll, made it worse, and at launch it fell back to 60Hz below 75 percent brightness until a November update loosened the rule.

Above the screen sat Soli, a miniature radar that let you wave to skip tracks and woke face unlock before your hand reached the phone. Face unlock was fast and secure enough for payments, replacing the fingerprint reader entirely, but it worked with your eyes closed until an April 2020 patch added the check. Soli's 60GHz band kept the phone out of India altogether, and Google dropped the radar after one generation.

The camera paired the 12.2-megapixel main sensor with a 16-megapixel 2x telephoto and gained astrophotography, still excellent for stills but no longer the clear leader once the iPhone 11 Pro shipped an ultrawide it lacked, and this was the first Pixel without unlimited original-quality Photos storage. The on-device Assistant, the Recorder app with live transcription and Live Caption were real advances that outlived the hardware. Google stopped selling it in August 2020, ten months after launch, and support ended at Android 13 in October 2022.