The Google Pixel 5: A Mini-Review - Small Package, Small Value?
by Andrei Frumusanu on January 22, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- Pixel 5
Camera - A Quick Recap
I’m skipping the camera comparisons for this piece as it’s out of the scope of the short-form review today (they are very time consuming!). We’ve included the Pixel 5 in low-light photography in recent reviews such as the iPhone 12 piece and we’ll be publishing a more extensive camera investigation article in the coming weeks as well as the upcoming Galaxy S21 article coming soon, so I’ll reserve myself to just posting camera samples and commentary of the Pixel 5 performance.
In daylight, where the Pixel 5 seems to perform better than its predecessors is seemingly in terms of colours and colour temperature. Whereas the Pixel 4 and previous iterations seemed to have had a tendency towards warmer colours, the Pixel 5 more often tends to get things in a more natural and correct colour – at least in my own subjective experience.
One area that’s still prevalent in the Pixel processing is that I feel that it doesn’t do as well in preserving highlights of textures, giving them a flatter look compared to what we’re now seeing from the processing of the likes of Apple and Samsung.
The ultra-wide-angle module on the Pixel 5 is a definitive great addition to the phone and really augments the capture experience of this generation of Pixel phones, addressing a much lacklustre aspect of Google’s devices last year. The optics of the UWA isn’t as great as some of other competitors, but decent enough.
What is weird about the UWA is that although Google advertises as employing a 16MP sensor, the actual pictures coming out are sampled down to 12.2MP, matching the resolution of the main sensor. I’m not sure what the rationale is here, and I’m generally never a fan of this matching of resolution across different sensors in a phone as it never actually ends up in good quality results.
In low-light scenarios, the Pixel 5 is a bit of a mixed bag by today’s standards. On one hand, Google’s Night Sight computational photography mode is excellent in terms of bringing out light in very dark situations, but on the other hand the camera processing here doesn’t seem to have changed much since the Pixel 3. Night Sight in this sense can be a two-edged sword – produces high quality low-light photos, but sometimes it overdoes it in terms of brightening a scene too much, it no longer being representative of the subject. Night Sight also has a particular tendency to grossly over-correct for colour-temperature, losing the actual ambience of a scene.
In scenarios where there’s very low light, Google’s aging camera hardware really cannot compete against the newer generation sensors from the competition, which by now have caught up or also even surpassed Google in computational photography.
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Flunk - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
Correction, the US version of the Nord uses the slightly inferior Snapdragon 690 SoC so it should be slower. It's still crazy cheap.Fulljack - Sunday, January 24, 2021 - link
snapdragon 690 uses newer cortex-a77 while snapdragon 765g still uses cortex-a76, clockwise it's slower by 16,66% but the ipc gain is 20%, so snapdragon 690 are actually faster. qualcomm products naming are weird, I knowiphonebestgamephone - Monday, January 25, 2021 - link
The gpu would probably be slower on 690.Spunjji - Monday, January 25, 2021 - link
@iphonebestgamephone - correct, the 690 uses the Adreno 619L which is actually around 50% slower than the 620.Qualcomm's naming system is b a n a n a s
eastcoast_pete - Monday, January 25, 2021 - link
For how long does OnePlus guarantee software (system and security) updates for? That's an important part of a phone's value proposition. And, while it pains me as an Android user, not leaving owners of older phone models behind is something Apple actually does well. I was, however, pleasantly surprised when Xiaomi made an OS update for my decidedly middle-class (at time of purchase) phone available even after >2.5 years of ownership. I took note of that, and it might help convince me to buy another phone from them.Arbie - Saturday, January 23, 2021 - link
The Pixel 5 also has a much larger battery than the 4a. Which is why I would have considered it as an eventual replacement for that.Except they removed the headphone jack so no dice.
rahvin - Saturday, January 23, 2021 - link
Those aren't the only differences, the battery is quite a bit longer lasting (owing to the extra 200mah deleting the 3.5mm jack). The glass is also GG6 versus GG3 like on the pixel 2/4a5G, it's the smoothest glass I've ever encountered, if I set the pixel 5 down (screen down) on a table that is even slightly out of level it will slide off. It's like I'm carrying around an air table puck. The GG6 is also significantly harder to scratch based on what's happened to mine since I got it. I honestly wouldn't have expected that much improvement in glass between GG3 and GG6 but IMO there is.Spunjji - Monday, January 25, 2021 - link
Same conclusion I came to. The 2GB of RAM isn't really useful. The 90Hz screen would be *nice*, and the same goes for IP68 rating - but you can get most or all of those with other companies' $400 phones. I haven't used wireless charging since my Palm Pre 2 🤷♂️BrokePeopleBuyBadStuff - Monday, January 25, 2021 - link
...yeah that stuff isn't free and it's faster than last years BUDGET phone. Don't get me wrong, it's still a budget phone but yeah...broke people get broke joke phones I guess.Great_Scott - Monday, January 25, 2021 - link
The Chart says that the Pixel 4a (5G) is the phone to get of the three.