Almost as suddenly as it arrived, the Age

of the Notch seems to be on the way out.

Apple aside, Samsung and Huawei have

managed to shrink theirs down to pinholes,

while OnePlus, Oppo and Xiaomi have

ditched them completely and opted for

natty pop-up selfie-cameras to make

space for more screen.

That makes the full ‘forehead’ at the top

of Google’s new Pixels something of a

throwback, but it’s worth it when you find

out what they’ve crammed in up there

above the smooth-scrolling 90Hz OLED

display. The Pixel’s radar-based Motion

Sense tech knows when you’re around, so

it’ll turn the display off when you’re not

within reach and fire up the face-unlock

sensors when you go to pick it up; plus it’ll

enable more responsive gesture controls

for snoozing alarms, silencing calls and

skipping songs sans hands.

Google has also multiplied the cameras on

the back for the first time, promising better

background blurring on your portraits and a

low-light mode that’s so good it’ll allow you

to take photos of outer space. Perhaps the

Age of the Bezel wasn’t so bad after all.

As hot as... running the Venus marathon

in under two hours

£829 / store.google.com

NOTCH ON

THE ROCKS

Google Pixel 4XL

HOT

FIVE

Like I’m gonna

confuse you

This year the standard 5.7in

Pixel and 6.2in Pixel XL look

identical. The only difference,

aside from screen size, is

the battery: 2800mAh

compared to the XL’s

3700mAh.

SMARTPHONE

SUPERTEST p