Google Pixel 5: a mini-review

It’s been a few months since Google announced the Pixel 5 – Unfortunately, we were unable to get a timely review of the device due to other important industry coverage. Today I wanted to revisit the phone in a brief format review, revisiting some important aspects of the phone, such as performance, battery life and adding some comments on the camera’s features.

The Pixel 5 is a tactical change for Google, with the company choosing to follow the path of a low-cost or high-midrange “premium” component configuration, rather than configuring the Pixel 5 as a full-featured flagship phone . Given the pace of launch of the company’s products over the years, always launching new phones at the end of the year, almost at the corner of the launches of the next generation of spring. This timeline has always been a handicap for Pixel’s flagships, so maybe Google’s strategy shift here to go mid-range is a more sensible approach.

Starting with SoC, as we discussed in recent months, the big difference for the new Pixel 5 is that it comes with a Qualcomm premium range Snapdragon 765 chipset, instead of using the contemporary SoC Snapdragon 865 flagship. This is undoubtedly a cost-cutting measure for Google to reach that new $ 699 / € 629 price point.

The SoC should still have a lot of performance for daily use thanks to the two large Cortex-A76 cores, with one with frequencies up to 2.4 GHz and the other with 2.2 GHz, however, it will still be a noticeable downgrade compared to the main SoCs, which employ the two most recent CPU cores and also increase them. SoC’s Adreno 620 GPU will also be a key factor in the overall performance of the Pixel 5, making some great gaming performance commitments that we will cover in more detail in the GPU section.

Google dresses the Pixel 5 with 8 GB of LPDDR4X memory and a single 128 GB storage option, without any expandable storage.

The front design of the Pixel 5 adopts the same uniform frame design introduced with the low-cost Pixel 4a, and is a departure from the chin and forehead style of previous generations, while also avoiding the use of strange camera notches. Instead, we have a camera cutout on the screen in the upper left corner, which works great. It is definitely a much more modern design that we saw on the previous generation Pixel phones.

The actual display is a 2340 x 1080 OLED screen with a 90Hz refresh rate. This year, I didn’t see any problems with the display panel, as it is of a very high quality, although the specifications are not exactly the same as those of the 1440p 120Hz competitors.

With 6.0 ”diagonally and only 70.4 mm wide, however, 1080p resolution is not an issue, as pixel density is very viable.

Setting up the camera on the Pixel 5 is quite simple, but Google has made some important changes to the secondary module over the last generation, replacing the dedicated telephoto module with an ultra-wide-angle camera. You can always pinch to zoom in to get closer to the subject (albeit with a drop in quality), but you can’t pinch to get a wider field of view if you don’t have the camera hardware for it. This was a major criticism of the previous generation Pixel phones, as they were the only relevant devices on the market that did not actually use a UWA module. The camera here is a 16MP and 1.0 µm unit with a f / 2.2 aperture and a 107 ° FoV – not the widest, but still very competitive and very usable.

The camera’s main module remains a 12.2 MP and 1.4 µm sensor module with f / 1.7 and OIS optics – it’s the same module we saw on Pixel 4 and a general camera formula that we haven’t seen changed in many generations of Pixel phones. This year, Google announced improvements to the HDR algorithms – although you can’t say that the overall camera experience is as innovative as it was a few years ago.

The only aspect in which the Pixel 5 really differs from almost any other contemporary phone on the market is its construction materials and build quality. Unlike the usual glass sandwiches of recent years, the Pixel 5 uses an aluminum monoblock. It is not aluminum, as it has a special plastic coating, which gives a sense of grip, but it is also not exactly the same as a fully plastic phone.

The special thing about the aluminum body is that Google still managed to employ wireless charging through a cutout in the frame, which is obviously invisible to the user due to the plastic coating on the top.

In general, I found the design of the Pixel 5 very good and had excellent ergonomics. It is very rare to have good small phones nowadays, and at just 70.4 mm wide and 151 g in weight, the Pixel 5 does very well to serve this part of the market. Google chose not to launch a Pixel 5 XL this year, so you really have no choice if you prefer a larger variant of the phone – you would have to go with the Pixel 4a XL, or another competing device.