The thing with covering tech is sometimes, it's hard not to get caught up in the hype train yourself.
I've spent so much time talking about how exciting it is
that the Pixel 8 and the Pixel 8 Pro come with seven years of software support
that I haven't stopped to ask myself, are these phones I would wanna use for seven years?
I guess it's time to answer that. Wow, that is a hard, that's not a camera bump,
that's a camera lip. Truth be told, I haven't daily driven a Pixel
since, good Lord, gen four, gen five?
So this Jordy from Star Trek, next generation,
whole thing that they've got going on here is kind of a new experience for me.
Wow, that's really sharp. Does someone have like a, do we have a seven handy?
David, are you seeing this? That's pretty wild.
I mean, yours has that same hard edge on it, but man, they needed to rethink that on this.
I could see that getting caught on your pocket.
Hold on, let's try it.
Oh, no, no, she slides, she slides, okay,
hold on, let's try it again.
Okay, all right, maybe I'm making a mountain out of a small mountain here.
Compared to the seven, rather than the seven A though, the difference is, wow, really subtle, like,
can you see that?
Like, barely, it seems to be there,
but it's not that noticeable. Of course, the polarizing camera bump
is not the star of the show here. That honor goes to the new Tensor G3 processor.
It has a nine core CPU, one high performance core,
four mid cores, four low performance energy efficient cores,
and it's accompanied by either eight or 12 gigs
of LPDDR5X, depending on whether you go for the eight
or the eight pro. Either of them is gonna be equipped with a seven core Mali-715 GPU,
so we should see pretty strong gaming performance on the Pixel 8, but there are some key features
that are different between the two devices, some of which are hardware,
and some of which are really more software,
which makes it feel kind of arbitrary, like, oh, you didn't spend enough,
well, I guess you don't get those features. Talk about that in a minute.
First, let's have a look at what comes in the package. You get a cable.
And an adapter for your cable. I was gonna say this,
surely this can't be to do anything with this cable.
I mean, you could jam that in there, but you might cause a short, don't do that please.
Hopefully you have a USB-C wall wart or computer to charge this thing off of,
because this is not a type C to type A adapter,
rather this is just a transfer adapter so that you can move all of your data off of your old phone.
In fact, that's one of the cool software features that is applicable to both of these devices.
Google has beefed up their transfer wizard to allow you to move over not just your apps and data,
but even things like your home screen layout, which, if you're a creature of habit like me,
is actually kind of a big deal. I'm pretty excited about that.
Wow, that's bright. And that is apparently by design.
Google claims that on top of the better processor, these phones, particularly the 8 Pro,
have the best screens they have ever put on their devices,
with the 8 Pro boasting an LTPO OLED panel
that can do from one to 120 Hertz variable refresh rate
and up to 2400 nits peak brightness.
Now, we weren't able to replicate those results.
Our peak brightness was measured at about 1900 nits,
but it should be noted we measured that in SDR. We don't have the tools for HDR yet,
so it's not impossible that this would reach those lofty highs.
By contrast, the Pixel 8 does not get quite the same capabilities.
It only supports a 60 to 120 Hertz refresh rate window,
so there could be some efficiency losses there,
and it only reaches 2000 nits peak brightness
according to Google's marketing materials. In a 5% window though, we saw about 1600 nits again.
It's possible we do 2000 in HDR, we just aren't sure yet.
On the subject of efficiency, they do get different sized batteries.
What's funny though, is our battery life testing didn't reveal an advantage for the 8 Pro
in spite of the fact that it has a larger physical battery. And there's a number of reasons for this.
One, is that it has a larger, well, brighter display,
but two, it also has a higher resolution display.
So that's going to be more expensive for the GPU
to drive in terms of power consumption. The last reason is that our battery life testing
is actually done running full screen apps like video playback.
So you're not gonna be able to take advantage of that super low refresh rate display
when it isn't sitting idle and it's actually displaying moving content.
So in the real world, you may end up with a much more similar experience between the two.
One thing that was similar was the charging speed. They both reached over 90% in one hour of charging
and managed a full charge in about an hour and 15 minutes.
And modern fast charging just makes the whole charge
at night paradigm seem kind of quaint and antiquated.
I'm not gonna get too much into gaming performance other than to say that both of them are notable upgrades
over the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. Genshin Impact in particular is really playable now
with 1% lows that are over 30 FPS. But knowing from our thermal testing
that most of the heat is escaping from this phone via the aluminum frame and the camera bump,
I am a little bit worried about how hot those components got
while we were doing our gaming testing. The outside of the phone reached as high
as 44 degrees Celsius, which isn't enough to burn you
immediately. Actually, I should look that up.
45 is enough to give you a second degree burn
after two hours. So if you're at 44 and you game for two hours,
you could conceivably burn your skin. Of course, I would expect you to be a very smart person
who shifts their hands around a little bit every once in a while,
but I don't know, I've met some people who get pretty dialed in when they came.
It's pretty hot. I do have to say I like the overall just fit and finish
of these. Like I said before, it's been a while
since I've daily driven a Pixel. Man, have they ever come a long way.
It actually feels like a thousand dollar phone now, which it should because it is $700 for the eight,
a thousand dollars for the eight pro.
I gotta say, I actually like the matte finish on the eight
better than the gloss on the eight pro. This feels, it almost feels like it's made of plastic.
Do you guys, do you guys find that? Here, come touch it. Somebody come touch it.
Like honestly, if I told you this, is this the edges?
If I told you that costs more than that.
Feels greasy. Yeah, and I like- This size is so much better too.
My hands are not even dirty. Anyway, yeah, I'm not a huge fan,
though I do like the frosted back compared to the glossy glass back.
Why can't I have the best of both worlds, Google? Like look, oh man, look at that.
You see how much glare there is in the eight compared to the eight pro?
That's a really, really nice blasted glass back.
Speaking of glass backs, they both do wireless charging with the pro doing 23 watts
and the non-pro doing 18 watts, which is a little slower than what they do over a wire,
but not that much. I mean, that's within striking distance, which is not bad.
Both phones get Wi-Fi seven and they get this new class three biometric face unlock,
which is still just face unlock,
except instead of needing an array of sensors, they're able to do class three
with just the front-facing camera. Kind of ironic given that one of the controversies
around this phone is the blurriness of the front-facing camera.
Okay, we'll look at the camera in a second. First, I wanna just try setting up that facial unlock.
Let's start.
That was it? Wow, that was,
it's pretty fast.
I'm still not a huge fan. I'd still rather just use a fingerprint.
If I'm gonna have to touch the screen anyway, okay, let's see how fast the fingerprint is.
Let's try fingerprint unlock. Boom.
But, but, I'll have to wake it first, really?
Okay, it should wake when I pick it up though.
Blah, I mean, maybe that was an outlier. Outlier, right?
Okay. I am on the thing.
Oh, that's, that's, oh, that's terrible.
Okay, it's fast when it decides to finally start actually reading it.
Physically, aside from the camera bump, I mean, there's not a lot to say.
Lock button, volume rocker, USB-C port,
got some speakers on there, sim card,
and yeah, all the same things, but smaller.
And overall, the theme kind of feels like, yeah, it's better than last gen,
but we didn't really think outside the box on this one,
which incidentally is the theme of this message from our sponsor.
Hey, press power button twice to open up the camera. Love it.
Can you also switch lens? Nope.
That is not how this one works. That just doesn't do anything.
You still got some things to learn from your old Powell Samsung.
Double click. Okay, it's a note nine.
It's pretty slow. Double click. Ooh, selfie camera, what's up?
Oh, that's sick. It tells you up your level?
Shut up. Oh, yeah, that's not me. Yeah, no, I believe you.
Like I said, I haven't daily to pixel them forever. I mean, it's not the kind of thing that I would need,
but that idiot I had my camera to when I'm on the Las Vegas strip or whatever,
and I just want to get a picture with the wife, and they're like, oh, yeah, I have a,
I don't know, it seems pretty good. Really?
Eyes closed in the picture, James? I don't know what you're doing. He's like napping over here.
Naturally, it's flipping sharp, even shooting directly into a light.
It's kind of shocking how much detail it retains, and I can even see things that my own eyes can't make out.
Start. Oh, interesting.
That's cool. It prompted a fingerprint scan in order to start screen recording.
I actually kind of like that. Now, with the Pixel 8,
I would expect the main shooter to behave in pretty much exactly the same way,
all the way down to James having his eyes closed. Thank you very much for that.
Oh, that's funny. It's trying to boost the completely covered lens
that is face down on this mouse pad, LTTstore.com by the way, into something usable.
Okay, can Night Sight do it?
No. At least it knows it can't do it though.
While they both have the same 50 megapixel main camera, the 8 has a 12 megapixel ultra-wide,
while the 8 Pro has a 48 megapixel ultra-wide
and a 48 megapixel 5x telephoto lens.
So theoretically, you should be able to, oh wow, 5x is a frickin' lot.
And what's really cool is not only are you getting a high resolution secondary sensor,
you're also getting advanced features like optical image stabilization.
So unlike older phones where, sure,
you have these secondary cameras, but realistically, you're better off just taking a shot with your main one
and then zooming in on it, you may actually be better off using your telephoto.
Like this looks really sharp. That is definitely, without question,
way sharper than what I would have if I just zoomed this in.
Not even close. I'm moving a bit.
Shake it baby. That's not bad.
It's definitely a little bit jello and it, it's kind of sticky, especially in 5x.
Do you know what I mean by sticky? Ooh, it's sticky in 1x too.
I can see what it's trying to do. It tries to kind of,
it seems like use an outer part of the sensor
to kind of compensate a little bit when I'm moving and then slowly catch up
once it figures out that my movement was intentional.
Obviously, this is just a quick and dirty test, but I can already tell
this screen is anywhere near color accurate. What it's recording is not.
And the iPhone is still gonna be king for video for another generation or two.
But I wanted to talk about the selfie camera, right?
Let's try it on both of them. That's interesting. I hit the shutter and made movement.
It didn't actually make the click until later in the movement, but it was blurry.
So it started capturing stuff for sure. On the subject of blurry,
I gotta say I feel like there might be a little bit of user error here
because that seems like a perfectly sharp selfie camera
to me. And it's kind of ironic because if they sharpened it too much,
they might end up in the same kind of controversy hot water that Apple's in right now with people saying,
oh, my selfies look so ugly on the iPhone 15 Pro.
It's too sharp. I was hoping to play around with some of the,
some of the tools for editing photos, but it looks like maybe some of that's pending.
We're recording this a little early. But there are some other things that were like that.
The temperature sensor on the 8 Pro, for example, didn't work until an update that we got this morning.
Google advertises their thermometer as being able to be used to check the temperature of everyday objects.
It is a little limited in that you need to be within
five centimeters or two inches of whatever it is
that you're trying to measure. But hey, here, let's grab a temperature reading from,
oh wow, not two inches, that is really close. From this box, 22.9 degrees Celsius.
Okay, that seems kind of believable. Let's validate that with a professional
grade thermal camera now. The FLIR camera says 23.7.
Okay, yeah, that's within a degree. I'd say that's pretty, oh, and it also depends
where on the box we're measuring. Let's try, oh, let's try skin, my skin temperature.
Okay, 34 degrees Celsius.
Here we go. Sorry guys, I just gotta check my temperature real quick.
Now, obviously these aren't using exactly the same method
for recording temperature, but I mean,
it's consistent at least. I don't know how useful that is.
But hey, I mean, we weren't sure how useful the accelerometer would be in the iPhone,
and here we are. Oh my God.
Just call it sRGB or like, allow me to set a white point.
This sucks. It's not loud yet, I haven't turned it up yet.
But that really does seem like unusually good imaging.
Max volume, obvious distortion.
Before max volume though.
Actually not bad. Not the best I've heard.
Not bad at all. How's the smaller pixelate though?
Mix a really big difference exactly how you hold it,
but I'd be perfectly happy with either of those. One thing I would like to say still is,
man, I do wish that you could get the eight in the bigger size
or the eight pro in the smaller size, because man, this is a lot more handle-able for me,
but I feel like especially having seen
what this camera is capable of, I would be very tempted.
The ultra-wide, for example, also has optical image stabilization
and better autofocus now, like Trey's compelling.
Trey's subscribed to ShortCircuit, and I'll see you in the next one.