4 reasons the Google Pixel 4 was better than you remember

08 Nov 2024, 18:08 by Taylor Kerns · Android Police

The Pixel 4 and 4 XL recently turned five years old. Google's fourth-generation Pixel phones are remembered today for their awkward, who-asked-for-this air gesture controls, but there was a lot more to them than that. The 2019 Pixel lineup was forward-looking in a way not many phones are anymore. It may not be as consequential as the very first Pixel, or the Pixel 6 that debuted Google's in-house Tensor chips, but I think the Pixel 4 is a bona fide Android classic, and set the tone for Google's later phones in a big way.

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1 The Pixel 4 was an early 90Hz adopter

High-refresh rate phone displays are fully mainstream today, with the base-model iPhone 16 the last notable 60Hz holdout. Back in 2019, though, the Pixel 4 was relatively unique in the US market with its 90Hz panel — a first for the Pixel series. The OnePlus 7 Pro did beat Google to the punch by a few months, but Samsung's first phone with a high-refresh rate display didn't come until months later in the Galaxy S20; Apple didn't hop on the bandwagon until 2021's iPhone 13 Pro.

To their credit, Apple and Samsung came out swinging with 120Hz displays, one-upping Google on speed. But the Pixel 4 and 4 XL set a precedent in Google's phone lineup: all of Google's phones today have high-refresh rate displays. The Pixel 8a is actually Google's only current-gen device still rocking a 90Hz panel — the base Pixel 8 graduated to 120Hz last year.

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2 The first dual-camera Pixel phone did it right

Google was relatively late to adopt dual rear cameras on its phones. Android phones experimented with multiple rear cameras in one way or the other as far back as the HTC Evo 3D in 2011, and the iPhone 7 Plus launched with a standard and ultrawide shooter in 2017. By late 2019, a smartphone with multiple rear cameras wasn't exactly innovative.

But the way the Pixel 4 adopted dual rear cameras was experimental. Rather than the now-common dual camera setup of a standard and an ultrawide camera, the Pixel 4 had a 12.2MP standard shooter paired with a 16MP 2x telephoto. I'm absolutely in the minority here, but I think a telephoto camera makes infinitely more sense than an ultrawide as a secondary rear camera. Standard phone cameras are already very wide, and when I shoot with my phone, I zoom in way more often than I want to zoom out. I'm tapping the 2x zoom button almost every day.

Aside from the unconventional hardware, the cameras were noteworthy for Google in another way: the Pixel 4 and the Pixel 4 XL shared the same rear camera hardware. They actually have that in common with all the Pixel phones that came before, but camera parity between sizes wouldn't make a comeback until this year's Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL.

3 Now-signature Pixel features premiered

Google's take on Android is defined by considered software features that change the way you interact with your phone, and the Pixel 4 premiered a couple of features die-hards still don't want to live without. Google's Recorder app debuted on Pixel 4, complete with automatic transcriptions. Google's still putting its full weight behind Recorder, with regular app updates and even a Wear OS version that debuted on the Pixel Watch 3.

The Pixel 4 was also Google's first phone to feature the Now Playing feature, which automatically identifies and logs songs playing around you — one of a handful of Pixel features I miss any time I'm using a phone from another manufacturer. At the time, Google billed these features as powered by on-device AI — a bellweather of the next half-decade of smartphone software development and marketing, and not just from Google.

4 Secure face unlock on Android

The Pixel 4's taken plenty of flak for its Project Soli gesture control hardware, and rightfully so — radar-based gesture detection doesn't make much sense in a device you're meant to carry around. (It eventually found purchase in the recent Nest Learning Thermostat, where it handles proximity sensing.) But packed away in the sensor cluster that enabled Soli functionality were two front-facing infrared cameras and an IR flood illuminator that enabled secure face unlock.

Apple took IR facial recognition mainstream with 2017's iPhone X, but outside diversions like Samsung's experiments with iris scanning, fingerprint authentication has always been the name of the game on Android. The Pixel 4 ditched fingerprint sensors entirely, offering in its place secure facial recognition that worked in the dark. People miss older Pixel phones' rear-mounted fingerprint scanners to this day, but I'm very pro-face unlock — I love it on the Pixel 9 Pro, but it's limited there by the use of the standard RGB front-facing camera. It only works in good light.

According to leaks, infrared-based face unlock could make a comeback in 2026's Pixel 11 — using under-display IR cameras. Face unlock might just dethrone fingerprint scanners in the Android world over the next few years, and if it does, we'll have the Pixel 4 to thank (at least in part).

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The Pixel 4 was a classic

I liked the Pixel 9 Pro enough to buy one, and the Pixel 5 is probably my all-time favorite Google phone — but the small Pixel 4 (actually small at 5.7 inches!) will always hold a place in my Android nerd heart. It might not have been the first phone to do any of the things it did, but it offered a weird, interesting hodge-podge of ideas that felt unique in the 2019 landscape, and a lot of the features it adopted informed the Pixel series evolution in major ways. It also came in a killer orange-and-black colorway (that AP Phones Editor Will inexplicably hates).

Project Soli was misguided and, on balance, the single most interesting thing about the Pixel 4, but I don't think it should be the phone's entire legacy. As a whole, the Pixel 4 was a pretty great little phone — and today, it's a classic.

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