JANUARY 2020 PCWorld 51phone. App crashes and hangs, laggy
scrolling, and general slowness has plagued
my time with it. Worse, the November update
that should fix things has been slow to reach
my phone. Software problems with new
phones are hardly uncommon—Apple
certainly has its share of them each year—but
the Pixel is supposed to represent the best of
Android, and so far the Pixel 4 doesn’t.
Winner (Android): OnePlus 7T
MISCELLANEOUS FEATURES
Each phone offers apps and features that are
unique to the experience. The Galaxy S10+
has its Edge shortcuts, which let you swipe
from the curved area of the screen to access
apps. The OnePlus 7T has a Reading Mode
that desaturates the screen to make it easier
on the eyes. The iPhone 11 has Animoji and
FaceTime.
They also all have some
form of water resistance,
though the OnePlus 7T isn’t
IP-rated, so we don’t know
how deep you can dunk it.
On paper, the iPhone 11 is
the most resistant, letting you
submerge it in 2 meters of
water for up to 30 minutes.
(The Pixel 4 and S10+
guarantee a depth of only
1.5 meters).
The Pixel 4 brings
something that you won’t find
on the other phones here. Called Motion
Sense, it lets you control parts of your phone
by waving your hand above the screen. It’s
limited to snoozing alarms, skipping tracks,
and silencing calls for now, but it works
extremely well and has incredible potential. In
a world of near-homogeneity when it comes
to smartphones, I commend Google for
thinking and engineering out of the box with
the Pixel 4.
Winner: Pixel 4 XLCAMERA
The camera is probably the main thing people
research when buying a new phone, and I’m
just going to say it here: Each of these
phones’ default cameras will take fantastic
pictures out of the box without adjusting a
single setting, despite some differences andThe iPhone 11 (left) and Pixel 4 XL (right) don’t have a ton of manual
controls, but they still take the best pictures.