Google Pixel 2 64GB 5" 12MP SIM-Free Smartphone in Just Black

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Also, like on the iPhone 8, Google absolutely insists that its augmented reality system works just fine with one camera. It showed off a few AR demos at a media event—the usual furniture-placement app, a game, and an app that adds 3D fictional characters to your photos—but it still feels like Google's ARCore is well behind Apple's ARKit in terms of developer support so far. Multimedia and Camera Both Pixels are able to maintain slightly faster shutter speeds in low light than the Galaxy S8 does, which gives you more of a fighting chance against blur, and they don't do the hideous overprocessing that the LG V30 does. That makes them the best smartphone cameras out there right now.

Google Lens has some promise; it's a feature that automatically recognizes text in photos or lets you look up books, albums, artwork, and locations in Google Photos. It worked easily on books I tried, but it's not a huge differentiator, and I kept forgetting it was there. Front-facing stereo speakers have become rare among smartphones, which too often fire onboard audio out of the bottom of the phone through a single speaker. Having them increases the size of the top and bottom bezel, but stereo speakers are part of the functionality-over-fashion trade-off we’re talking about.

Still has one of the top smartphone cameras

As for getting the best price on your new phone — take a look at our buying guides. Hopefully, with the credit or cash you earn from letting go of your old Pixel, you can get the shiny new device you’ve been hoping for at a reasonable price. Update : Google Pixel 2 remains one of our favorite phone in 2018 – despite some technical issues of reliability at launch – for one reason: it has an amazing camera and starts at a normal smartphone price. And it has recently gotten even better thanks to Google awaking the Pixel Visual Core, the phone's co-processor dedicated to imaging, in the February software release. Opening apps, flipping through Tiles, switching watch faces, and anything else I've wanted to on the Pixel Watch 2 has been about as fast as I could hope for. I felt the same way about the first-gen Pixel Watch, too, so I'm not sure how necessary the horsepower bump was. Still, more performance headroom today means the Pixel Watch 2 should age better than the first-gen will — and the newer silicon really helps with battery life (more on that later). The Google Pixel 2 price didn't increase year-over-year, so like its dated design, it isn't keeping up with the competition. This is surprising for a phone announced on October 4, and a release date of October 19. Keep future trades/sales in mind.The better you take care of your new phone — for instance, by purchasing insurance, a case, and/or a screen protector — the higher your eventual trade-in or resale value is if you want to undergo this process again in the future.

Selling your phone directly to another person takes more time, but can be more financially rewarding. It depends greatly on the market environment when you put your Pixel up for sale, though, which is in itself an ever-changing thing. The best time to sell your phone is generally before a new generation comes out, but since that’s not possible with Pixel 2, you’ll have a bit of competition. Still, there are plenty of people looking for inexpensive Pixel 2s following the Pixel 3 launch (especially the notch haters out there), so it shouldn’t be too hard to find an interested buyer.

Wi-Fi support is excellent, on par with the Samsung Galaxy phones. The Pixel 2 XL also has Bluetooth 5.0 and NFC. This becomes a question of sweet spots, and I just don't think the Pixel 2 is it. If you're just looking for a good, affordable Android phone, the OnePlus 5 is pretty great. If you're looking for the Pixel experience, the XL is superior. And I still love the body design of the Samsung Galaxy S8, the most elegantly built phone on the market.

But the star of the show, clearly, is Google Assistant, Google's voice interface that's more conversational, flexible, and knowledgeable than Siri or Bixby. You can activate the Assistant in a bunch of different ways. You can turn on an option to have it recognize your voice even when the phone's screen is off, for example. I ended up using the squeeze sensor a lot. Introduced originally on HTC's U11, the sensor lets you squeeze the phone slightly below its midriff to launch the Assistant (but no other app). It even works when the phone is in a case. Google's Pixel camera software is very simple, without RAW support, manual mode, or many scene settings; Google encourages you to strike out and get that stuff through third-party camera apps. Currently, the flagship software feature is Motion Photos, which, like Apple's Live Photos, capture a snippet of video with each picture. The phone also has a software bokeh mode that works on both the front and rear cameras. We tested the Pixel 2 against the Pixel 2 XL and the Samsung Galaxy Note 8/S8. They're all terrific in good light. In low light, we were surprised to see some differences between the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL models, given that they supposedly have the same camera. But we saw them: Every once in a while, the Pixel didn't judge colors in low light quite as well as its bigger counterpart. Maybe that was because of shifting light when we were taking our test photos, but it was enough to cement our decision in favor of the Pixel 2 XL.

This isn't to say that the Pixel 2 is a bad phone. It's suffering from the same problem that the iPhone 8 is, which is being the lower-middle child in a crowded field of good choices. As it is, it's our fourth (or so) choice for a higher-end Android phone, which is more of a statement about the strength of the Android field than the weakness of the Pixel 2. If you're aching for a Pixel this year, go big.