The OLED displays can always be on, showing time and date and notifications.
There's actually a lot of new Android stuff coming to the Pixel. Both phones work with Google's Daydream VR platform, too. Pixel owners will get the first glimpse of the new ARCore software Google's building for all Android phones, through apps from Houzz and League of Legends plus a Google-made feature called AR Stickers. The new camera also enables new augmented-reality features, which Google eagerly showed off at its launch event in San Francisco. It's hard to evaluate the camera from the two-minute demo I saw, but the selfie I tried looked excellent. Rather than dump as much raw camera hardware as it could into the Pixel 2, Google hopes to prove that taking great photos is mostly about software. Google's also updated its HDR+ algorithms, introduced a new feature called Motion Photos that is absolutely identical to Apple's Live Photos, and combined optical and electrical image stabilization to make video smoother. A special sensor in the rear camera adds some depth information to the equation to make the effect even better, but the Pixel 2 can do portrait-style shots even with the selfie cam. Google trained its algorithms on faces of people, and says it can now take soft-background photos akin to the iPhone's Portrait Mode without needing a second camera to do so.
Google pixel 2 xl fingerprint hardware unavailabel upgrade#
The biggest upgrade comes in the software, though. Google's using a new 12-megapixel system for the Pixel 2, with an f/1.8 aperture and optical image stabilization. The most important feature does work across both models: the camera.