Mastodon
Birchtree
By Matt Birchler
I've been writing here since 2010! Back when personal blogs were all the rage. Kids, ask your parents.

Who Hated the Google Pixel 4? Google, Apparently

Google unveiled the Pixel 5 today (9to5Google has a good roundup), and nothing makes the Pixel 4 looks worse than seeing how few of the things Google said they were excited about last year being straight up gone this year.

  • All that face sensor tech? Gone.
  • That radar sensor that was such a big revolution? Gone.
  • Proud bezels? Gone.
  • An $800-1000 price range? Slashed! This is a good one, actually.
  • A telephoto lens? Kicked to the curb.
  • A tiny, 2,800 mAh battery? Blown up to 4,000 mAh! Again, a good move.

I’m not saying the Pixel 5 looks bad, far from it, it looks like a respectable phone, and is getting closer to the phone that I think Google should be making. I wish the price was $100 cheaper, but hey, $699 counts as a lower end premium phone in 2020.

What I am saying is that I don’t know what the hell was going on with the Pixel 4. The iPhone line has a pretty clear, linear progression from one year to another, as do Samsung’s lines. Even the Pixel 1 and 2 made a ton of sense together, and while the 3 was a bit weird, the 4 feels like a phone made by a rogue group of Google employees who had a whole different set of priorities than the rest of the company. I don’t know what that was all about last year, and based on the fact the Pixel 5 throws out most of the headline features from the 4, and the fact that Google stopped selling the Pixel 4 just nine months after it launched and before its replacement was available, neither does Google.

Show Comments