34 ANDROID ADVISOR • ISSUE 68
for the second lens because it’s more ‘useful’. And
that may be true – but why not both? If Google was
finally willing to admit the benefit of additional lenses,
there’s no good reason it couldn’t go all in and throw
in an ultrawide too.
Besides – the Pixel’s digital zoom was already
good enough to do a solid approximation of a
telephoto. What the Pixel can’t do, with any amount
of computational trickery, is zoom out to an ultrawide,
orcreatetheuniquefisheyeandmacroeffectsa
wide-angle lens delivers. Sure, the Pixel 4 doesn’t
need a wider lens, but it didn’t need a telephoto
either – and I know which I would have preferred.
It especially stings since the phone actually just
lost a wide-angle lens. Last year’s 3 and XL featured
a second wide-angle selfie lens, which has been
dropped here. Instead the main selfie camera will be
a bit wider than normal at 90 degrees – similar to the
cheaper Pixel 3a earlier this year – to negate the need
for the proper ultrawide lens, though I’m sure the
omission will still be disappointing to some.
Then there’s video. The Pixel 4 shoots both 1080p
and 4K video, but the latter is capped at 30fps.
Google attributes the choice both to file sizes (funny,
it’s almost like 64GB base storage with no microSD
card support doesn’t cut it any more) and the fact
that most people only shoot in HD. That’s probably
true, but most people don’t buy Pixels, and those
that do are almost invariably there for the camera
first and foremost.
I still think that stills are far more important to
most users than video, and Google’s right to focus on
