20 ANDROID ADVISOR • ISSUE 46
REVIEW
photos. A purchase of the original got you unlimited
Google Photo storage for life, whereas the Pixel 2 gets
you unlimited for three years. Google hopes you’ll pay
for it after that, or buy the next Pixel. It’s a small detail
that likely won’t bother you, but it’s worth noting.
Overall, the Pixel 2’s software is uniformly excellent,
but if you like the slick futurism of Samsung’s latest
Android skin you might find this a little bland.Verdict
The Pixel 2 is a boring phone until you turn it on. The
uninspiring hardware melts away to present you with
a bleeding edge vision of the Android future, with
machine learning fully integrated. It’s not quite there
yet, but this is where we are heading.
The camera, one lens down on some competitors,
is better than all of them in most situations thanks
to the superior software on board. You only get that
benefit when you buy Google hardware, and the
company is finally realising the end to end product
that Apple has been making for a decade. If you want
a phone to fawn over and make your friends jealous
with, you won’t want the Pixel 2. But it’s faster than
the Galaxy S8 and takes better photos. It delivers the
best overall camera and software experience on any
Android smartphone to date. Henry BurrellSpecifications
- 5in (1920x1080, 441ppi) display
- Android 8.0 Oreo
- Qualcomm MSM8998 Snapdragon 835 processor
- Octa-core (4x 2.35GHz Kryo, 4x 1.9GHz Kryo) CPU