This was the beginning of my descent into mobile phone buying madness. This phone was bought on a contract that heavily subsidised the cost of the device (I later found out why, hint; battery life) and worked out cheaper than a SIM only contract. It seemed a no brainer at a time when I was ready to have my own personal handset again.
Initially I thought the Pixel 4 was great. The pictures this camera produced were the best I’d ever seen from a smartphone, it also had some quirky experimental features under project “Soli” which gave the phone a little front facing radar scanner. this allowed for very secure face unlocking and meant the phone could detect hand movements and gestures in a bubble area around it. In theory this meant you could swipe the air to change track, it knew when your hand was approaching it to pick it up and other things. Ultimately it turned out to be a gimmick and the entire project was scrapped when the Pixel 5 released.
My one issue with this phone that made it an absolute deal breaker was battery life. This phone had a powerhouse chipset (Snapdragon 855) and a measly 2800mAh battery. In my ownership I never once made it through a full day without needing to charge. On full days away from a power source I could end up without a phone by 2PM. Google promised the battery would be big enough because their software optimisations would make up for it, they didn’t. They then promised it would be fixed in the next software update, it wasn’t. I lost patience with this, resold the device and paid the contract off. It turns out I was right to jump ship, the battery life issues were never resolved and this device went down as one of Google’s failures.
The 4XL did slightly better, because of it’s bigger size it packed a larger battery which masked the issues the device had. People still hold that version in fairly high regard today.
I wonder if blunders like this are why we see little to no innovation from manufacturers today? Fear of failure and losing a generation to their rivals. It only takes having a brief look at the notorious Samsung Note 7 to see what can go wrong in extreme cases.
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