ISSUE 68 • ANDROID ADVISOR 33PortraitThen there’s Night
Sight, the crown jewel
of Google’s camera
app, and the target of
extensive imitation over
the past 12 months. It’s
been tweaked subtly
- mainly to improve
white balance – but the
biggest addition is an
astrophotography mode
that will take up to 15
successive long exposure
shots of the night sky, in
a process that will take
up to four minutes.
It’s a remarkable
promise, but take it with a pinch of salt. First, if you
live in a city (like me, making it impossible to even test
this feature) you’re not going to get much use out of
it at all – thanks, light pollution. Secondly, those long
exposures will require either a tripod or a good rock to
lean the phone on, as your hands are not going to be
steady enough. Finally, even if you live in the country
with beautiful stars and great rocks, how often are you
really likely to use this? This is a very, very cool feature
that you should absolutely not buy a whole phone for.
So that’s everything that the Pixel 4 camera does.
But it’s just as important to talk about what it doesn’t.
First of all, the ultrawide elephant in the room. At the
launch event Google executives claimed that the
company opted for a telephoto over an ultrawide