Google’s 2019 Pixel event: all of the rumors, news, and announcements

Every major phone launch has a “-gate”: a drama about some problem or worry with the hardware. With the Pixel 4, there are several: the battery may be too small, the face unlock works with your eyes closed, and now the conditions at which the screen will refresh at 90Hz and when it will ratchet down to 60Hz are pretty confusing. Google calls the feature “Smooth Display,” but its reception has been anything but smooth in the past 24 hours.

Google previously said it adjusts the refresh rate depending on what’s happening on the screen to improve battery life, but yesterday some Redditors figured out that refresh rate also drops down to 60Hz if the screen brightness is set below 75 percent. Further investigation from the Android community revealed that it may stay up at 90Hz at lower brightness levels if the ambient lighting in the room is bright enough.

With the Pixel 4, Google has finally added a second lens to the back of its phones. Speaking onstage at yesterday’s launch event, Google Research’s Marc Levoy explained the decision with a relatively simple statement of fact. “Some subjects are farther away than you’d like,” he said, “so it does help telephoto shots to have a telephoto lens.” 

It seems like a weirdly obvious point to make, but Levoy had to spell it out because until last year Google was claiming that its phones could get by with just a single rear camera. Check out this interview with Wired, where one of Google’s product managers said that a second lens was “unnecessary” because of the company’s expertise in machine learning. The Pixel 3 included a feature called “Super Res Zoom,” which used a burst of photos to increase resolution while you’re zoomed in; no telephoto lens required. For context, Apple had already been adding a second camera with a telephoto lens to its iPhones for two years.

Google may have introduced a lot of new Pixel camera tech at its 2019 fall hardware event this week, but it quietly retired a camera product as well: the Google Clips camera has been removed from Google’s online store (via 9to5Google).

Google confirmed Clips’ removal to The Verge and tells us that Clips will continue to get support until December 2021. In addition, the Clips mobile app, which is required to transfer videos off of a Clips camera, will stop working in December 2021, according to Google — so it sounds like the device will essentially become useless in a little over two years.

After two years without releasing a new laptop, Google has finally announced the Pixelbook Go, a 13.3-inch Chromebook that starts at $649. Based on my colleague Dieter Bohn’s hands-on, it seems pretty good, and it’s a lot cheaper than the $999 Pixelbook.

So now that there’s a midrange Pixelbook, it could be much harder to pick which one of the many Chromebooks should be your next laptop.

After Apple’s iPhone 11 event, I noted that while the company was catching up on features like ultrawide and night mode, it was unclear whether it’d be able to get on the Pixel’s level in terms of basic image quality. Over the course of our review process, it became clear that Apple had indeed achieved that. Apple says it has a class-leading camera every year, but this time it actually does.

The next question, then, is how big a leap will come with Google’s new Pixel 4. We still can’t answer that yet, just as we didn’t know how good the iPhone 11 was the day after its announcement. (You can see some quick comparisons here, but stay tuned for the full review.) We can, however, take a lot from what Google did — and didn’t — have to say on stage yesterday.

Google’s Pixel 4 and 4 XL are here at last, after a mountain of leaks. But the choice isn’t quite as easy as “big” or “small" because Google’s new phones are expensive, at $799 and up — and because the excellent Pixel 3 and Pixel 3A are still sticking around for hundreds of dollars cheaper.

Here’s the full lineup as of today:

Google announced today that it will be rolling out a new version of its Nest Aware subscription service starting in 2020, with simplified pricing and new features.

Since 2015, Google has offered Nest Aware as a premium subscription for its Nest security cameras for $5, $10, or $30 per month. The subscription gives you 24/7 continuous recording, access to video history, and more options for alerts, but if you wanted to use Nest Aware with multiple cameras, you had to pay a discounted monthly fee per additional camera.

Google’s latest phone, the Google Pixel 4, doesn’t include a pair of earphones in the box, nor does it come with one of the company’s USB-C to 3.5mm adapters. With its own true wireless Pixel Buds not due for release until next year, Google just offered every other headphone manufacturer a nice opportunity to capitalize on any new Pixel 4 owners who might not already own wireless headphones.

Every previous Pixel phone offered a wired headphone option in the box, whether via a traditional 3.5mm headphone jack, a bundled pair of USB-C headphones, or a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter. (The original Pixel and Pixel 3A had the built-in jack; the Pixel 3 came with both accessories.) This will be the first time Google has shipped a phone without any of those options.

A slew of new Google products is coming, with the new Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL phones heading the list. If you’ve already got a Pixel phone and are in the mood to upgrade or if you’ve finally decided that this is the year you’re going to take the plunge, we’ve got all the info you need. 

Available for preorder today and shipping on October 24th, the Pixel 4 and 4 XL are (for the first time) going to be available from all the major US carriers, in addition to major retailers and, of course, Google’s online store.

I just spent a few minutes with the new Google Pixel Buds hardware — the $179 truly wireless earbuds aren’t shipping until Spring 2020, and the units at Google’s fall hardware event aren’t actually turned on and working. So there’s no way to tell how they’ll actually sound, and how Google’s various software tricks work in practice.

What I can tell you is that Google has produced a set of small, minimally designed earbuds that look like nothing more than little circles in your ears when you’re wearing them and fit snugly thanks to the little wing coming off the side. The earbud itself slides down into your ear, providing a modicum of passive noise reduction, but Google says the design is vented to reduce discomfort and provide some outside sound. They have touch controls for play, pause, and volume, and Google says they’ll run for five hours of continuous battery life on a single charge, and up to 24 hours of battery life using the case.

By now, you’ve heard: the new Google Pixel 4 has a tiny radar chip inside it, which allows you to swipe or wave your hand to do a few things. More importantly, Motion Sense (as Google has branded it) is designed to detect your presence. It knows if you’re there. The technology comes from Project Soli, which was first demonstrated publicly in 2015 and is now inside the Pixel 4 as its first major commercial implementation. Responding to a few air gestures is fairly minor, but Google sees the potential for it to eventually become much more.

That’s always the way with new computing interfaces. The mouse and the touchscreen led to giant revolutions in computing, so you see the potential for a new one to do the same thing. It’s a trap Apple CEO Tim Cook himself fell into when he introduced the Digital Crown on the Apple Watch, saying it was as important as the mouse. (It wasn’t.)

Google has announced the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, joining the ranks will all the other 2019 flagship phones. If you’ve been following along with the numerous leaks, you might already have a good idea as to what this phone offers. That’s simply because most of the leaks were actually true.

Both phones have a fast 90Hz refresh rate display that makes scrolling around more enjoyable, and games that support it animate smoother. Each has a Snapdragon 855 processor and 6GB of RAM, and comes with Android 10 pre-installed. They differ when it comes to screen resolution, as well as their screen and battery size. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn has a first look with the devices that does a thorough job of breaking down their differences.

Google showed off some new camera features on the Pixel 4 today at its annual hardware event, focusing on improvements to its Live HDR and Night Sight mode. The back of the Pixel 4 houses dual cameras in a new subtle square camera bump. There’s a 12.2MP main camera and a 16MP telephoto lens, which is a hybrid of optical and digital zoom.

New Pixel 4 features include Live HDR+, with dual exposure controls in the viewfinder, which shows how photos will look in real time. There are HDR sliders to adjust brightness and shadows when you compose. A learning-based white balance feature is applied to all photo modes, so shots come out with true-to-life colors.

Google’s big 2019 hardware event has concluded. The company announced a bunch of products, including the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, new Pixel Buds, Stadia, Nest Wifi, Nest Mini, and Pixelbook Go.

If you want to see our insights on the minute-to-minute updates from the event as they happened, check out our live blog. But if you just want the headlines and takeaways with the context that you need, we’re putting them all below.

Google is debuting a new voice recorder app on the Pixel 4, and it has some features that very much set it apart from traditional recorder apps. The app, simply called Recorder, also has the ability to transcribe your recordings. That alone is uncommon among voice recorder apps — let alone free ones — and Google pushes that even further, creating those transcriptions on-device and in real time, without sending data to the internet.

For whatever reason, Google hasn’t made a voice recorder app before now. It’s been an odd absence on Pixel phones. And while it could be remedied by downloading any number of apps from the Play Store, having a simple one built into a phone should very much be an expected feature.

The new Nest Wifi from Google does the thing that everybody has been asking for since we first laid eyes on smart speakers: combine them with mesh Wi-Fi routers. The Nest Wifi will be available this November in the US at various price points, but the pack Google will want you to buy includes one main router and one “Point” that also acts as a smart speaker for $269.

Both devices are bulbous little cylinders. The router is slightly larger than the Points and only comes in white, while the slightly smaller Points come in three colors: snow, mist, and sand. They are made of a matte plastic and are about as close to characterless as a Wi-Fi router could possibly get. Each Point is about the size and shape of one of those scented candle jars, I suppose, which is fitting as the first Google Home was teased for looking like an air freshener.

Google has updated the Google Home Mini, creating a new version that looks identical but has a few new features and a new name: the Nest Mini. That’s part of Google’s larger plan of putting all of its smart home and smart speaker products under the Nest brand name. It still cost the same $49, though if the past is any indication, you will likely be able to find deals for it quite regularly.

The new Nest Mini is a minor update, so existing users really don’t need to upgrade. There are a few new features worth running through, though. First, Google has improved the speaker by making it ever-so-slightly larger inside the exact same body — though I suspect even the most obsessive audiophile would have a hard time hearing a big difference.

If you follow tech, you probably already know about the new features in Google’s Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL. They’re the most-leaked phones perhaps in history, and there’s only a tiny handful of things I can tell you about them that haven’t already been documented somewhere.

However, after spending an hour talking to Google’s product managers and playing around with the Pixel 4, I have learned a few things that could only come from directly using the phone. I know what it’s like to see the high refresh rate screen keep text readable as I scroll. I know that it feels better-made than any Pixel before it. I know what it’s like to tickle a pokémon just by waggling my fingers in the air.

For the first time, Google is making a Chromebook that actually approaches a reasonable price for most people instead of strictly catering to the high end. It’s the Pixelbook Go, a simple and clean 13.3-inch laptop that starts at $649 and has a total of four configuration options that cost up to $1,399.

I poked around at the Pixelbook Go for about an hour last week, and — true to the comprehensive leak 9to5Google posted last week — I think it’s a very nice-looking and nice-feeling laptop. It certainly needs to be, as it’s competing directly with many excellent Chromebooks that cost less. Google’s other big differentiator is the claim that the Pixelbook Go can last 12 hours on a charge

Google has announced the second-generation version of its Google Assistant software, which promises new capabilities, a design overhaul, and a noticeable boost to speed. That last upgrade means the new Assistant can launch and return answers to queries much faster than before. The service is coming first to Pixel phones, and Google made the announcement onstage at its Pixel 4 reveal event in New York City on Tuesday.

We already knew quite a bit about the new Assistant, thanks to Google’s initial reveal back at its I/O developer conference in May, but we also got to see it in action on the Pixel 4 ahead of release, thanks to a flood of leaks that included, among other things, new Assistant marketing videos.

Google has just shown off the Pixel 4’s “Motion Sense” features, demonstrating how you’ll be able to use it to skip tracks, silence calls, and even interact with the pokémon Pikachu, all without laying a finger on the phone. The functionality is powered by Project Soli, a radar-based technology developed by Google. Google advertises that the Pixel 4 is the “first smartphone with a radar sensor” and says that this allows it to offer what it claims is the “fastest secure face unlock on a smartphone.”

Google says that the Motion Sense feature allows the phone to sense when you’re reaching for it and get ready to unlock or maybe just lower the volume of an alarm if you’re reaching to silence it. Google’s Sabrina Ellis added that you’re able to turn the feature on or off at any time, and all the gesture recognition is done locally on the device, with no information saved or shared with other Google services. Ellis says that the Soli team is working on more features, covering areas such as gaming and personal wellness.

You’ve seen them, you’ve read plenty about them, and now Google’s latest smartphones are finally, really, officially here: the company just announced the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL at its hardware event in New York City.

The Pixel 4 comes in three new colors: white, black, and a limited-edition orange option. It goes up for preorder today, and it will ship on October 24th. The Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL will be sold by every major US carrier. The regular Pixel 4 starts at $799, and the Pixel 4 XL starts at $899.

You want working, reliable Wi-Fi in every room of your house. Maybe you’d like every room of your house to properly hear your Google Assistant voice commands, too?

Now, Google is about to offer a way to extend both your internet and the range of your voice at once — with the just-announced Nest Wifi mesh router system.

Google is changing the name of its Google Home Mini and integrating it into its Nest line of products. Announced today, the Nest Mini is an upgrade to 2017’s Google Home Mini. The Nest Mini looks nearly identical to the Google Home Mini, except it comes with improved speakers and an included wall mount. It’ll come in four colors: black, light gray, coral, and light blue.

Google’s particularly marketing the Nest Mini as an audio device. The company says the bass is twice as strong as the original Google Home Mini for more natural sound. If you’re listening to audio content, the speaker will light up when you place your hand close to the device for volume adjustment. It can also pair with other Nest speakers to create a larger sound system. This means people can make Google Duo calls through the Google Home app or use other Nest speakers as intercoms.