The Google Pixel 4: everything we know so far

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’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’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.

The Pixel 4, Google’s next flagship phone, is coming tomorrow. We’ll be live from Google’s October 15th event with the official word. But you don’t need to wait another second to know what’s almost certainly coming — because this phone is so out it feels like the only step left is to toss it up on some shelves.

If you’ve read an earlier version of this story, you already know the alleged Pixel 4 XL has repeatedly made its way into the real world, where it’s been captured from every angle in three different colors. You know its spec sheet. You know that freaking Pikachu — from Pokémon — will teach you how to use the Pixel 4’s built-in radar. (Yes, radar.) You know that Google basically threw in the towel this year when it comes to leaks, deciding to reveal the Pixel 4’s design and Face ID competitor itself to get ahead of the game.

Google’s annual fall hardware showcase is happening on Tuesday, October 15th, and we expect it to be a big one. The star of the show will almost certainly be the Pixel 4, with its second back camera packed into an iPhone 11-like camera square, face unlock tech that might rival Apple’s Face ID, and a motion-sensing radar that Google’s been quietly developing for years.

And that’s just what Google has already told us. The rumor mill suggests there’s way more to the Pixel 4, and we might also see a much faster Google Assistant, a more affordable Pixelbook, new-and-improved Pixel Buds, and additional devices.

Google appears to be working on a 5G version of the Pixel 4, and it’s possible the phone will be shown as early as next week, according to Nikkei. The standard versions of the Pixel 4, which will be announced at an event next Tuesday, will only support LTE. But Nikkei says that Google has begun “test production” on a model of the phone that includes 5G, too.

It’s not clear when the 5G model will be previewed or released, though. Nikkei says it could be shown next week, but its sources said the announcement could also be held until spring to appear alongside a new budget phone, a successor to the Pixel 3A.

We’ve moved beyond a flood of Pixel 4 leaks. Now, it’s like the all-encompassing wave that appears when a Pokémon uses Surf. Google seems to have Pokémon on the mind, too, because it apparently plans to help teach you how to use Motion Sense — its Soli-powered motion-sensing technology baked into the Pixel 4 — using a short, adorable Pokémon demo.

9to5Google obtained the demo, which is apparently called Pokémon Wave Hello. It offers instructions for brief interactions with Pikachu, Eevee, and the three starters from the upcoming Pokémon Sword and Shield. The whole thing looks like it can be finished in about two and a half minutes. It’s unclear if it’s designed as both a Motion Sense demo and a teaser for Sword and Shield, or just the former.

Some of Google’s internal Pixel 4 marketing videos appear to have leaked, showcasing demos for two neat features for the company’s flagship Android handset: a revamped Google Assistance experience and the new Motion Sense gesture control system.

Google previously confirmed both features publicly, but it stopped short of showing detailed demonstrations working on the Pixel 4. Thankfully, like virtually everything else about the upcoming phone, detailed videos have surfaced on the internet, this time courtesy of 9to5Google.

We already seem to know a lot about Google’s upcoming Pixel 4, including one of its new apps: “Recorder,” a new voice recorder app. In a recent 9to5Google hands-on, the app seemed pretty basic — hit a button to record, then share that audio file with other apps. Surprisingly, though, Google seems to have updated Recorder before it’s even been released, with one particularly handy feature: automatic audio transcription.

XDA Developers tested the new transcription feature, and it seems like it worked decently enough. The transcription of XDA Developers’ test recording messed up the name of the speaker (Mishaal Rahman) and added a few too many periods, but it’s still pretty readable:

The Apple Watch’s fall detection has already been credited with saving lives, and now Google is applying that sort of thinking to car safety. According to XDA Developers, Google is at work on a Personal Safety app with “car crash detection.” With the help of various sensors including the accelerometer and even the microphone, Pixel phones will attempt to detect an accident. If one occurs, the phone will loudly sound an alarm, and if there’s no response, it will automatically call 911 and provide your location to emergency services in the US.

XDA Developers managed to catch the Play Store listing that Google posted prematurely, which included several screenshots of the Personal Safety app. Based on those images, people will have more than one opportunity after a detected accident to confirm that they’re okay and prevent an emergency call from being placed; the demo apparently asks twice for a response before initiating the 911 process.

At Google I/O in May, Google showed off an impressive new accessibility feature coming to Android 10: Live Caption, which can automatically transcribe spoken audio from videos or audio playing on your phone. My colleague Dieter Bohn spent some time with Live Caption when it was announced and found it to be one of the most exciting features coming to Android 10. It’s not just about accessibility, either; think of the moments where you’ve wanted to know what’s being said in a video but didn’t have headphones nearby. Now you can do it without annoying anybody with the loudspeaker, since Live Caption works even if the volume is turned all the way down.

However, Live Caption wasn’t ready in time for Android 10’s release (despite it being advertised on Google’s Android 10 website) — but new evidence suggests it could debut on the Pixel 4 next month.

A list of the apps that will support the Google Pixel 4’s “Motion Sense” gesture controls has been discovered in the phone’s pre-release software, and all but one of them are audio-focused apps, 9to5Google reports. The list was discovered within the unreleased phone’s Motion Sense app, and includes nine pieces of software in total; Amazon Music, Deezer, Google Play Music, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, Spotify Stations, YouTube Music, and YouTube.

While a separate leak suggested that the phone’s gesture controls will be able to check the phone’s lock screen and silence calls, this list implies that the phone’s app-specific gestures could be focused mainly on music playback. Both Google’s original announcement of the feature, as well as a leaked promo video, showed gestures being used to skip forwards and backwards through tracks.

Leaks of the Pixel 4, a phone that we already seem to know a lot about, just keep coming. Nextrift got its hands on what appears to be a production Pixel 4 XL, and it posted impressions and some new details, including what seems to be the first public look at the next-gen Google Assistant, which Google announced in May at Google I/O.

Google says the next-gen Assistant would be “up to 10 times faster,” could respond to questions or requests without requiring you to say “Hey, Google” each time, and queries will be processed on the device instead of being processed at Google’s servers. In Nextrift’s testing of the next-gen Assistant, it says it was “noticeably quicker” at processing requests, and it could actually make requests of the Assistant without prompting with “Hey, Google” for each question. It’s unclear from Nextrift’s impressions if Assistant was actually working on the device. Nextrift also has a picture of Assistant running on the Pixel 4 XL with what appears to be a slick new Assistant UI:

Google’s mesh Wi-Fi router — Google Wifi — is nearly three years old, but it may be getting a radically different design next month. 9to5Google is reporting that the company is prepping a new “Nest Wifi” that pairs a single new hub router with two new “beacons” that will double as Google Assistant smart speakers, giving you the equivalent of two additional Google Home Mini speakers to cover additional rooms of your house with both Wi-Fi and sound.

You may note that Google would be effectively copying Amazon’s second-gen Eero router by going with a pair of beacons to extend Wi-Fi coverage across your house, which could have pros and cons. In our review, we found the second-gen Eero to be just as capable as the first-gen model overall, but it doesn’t necessarily deliver as much bandwidth at the beacons as Eero’s full-size routers do.

Google has been steadily revealing information about its new Pixel 4 lineup almost as fast as the leakers. The company just revealed a new orange color for the upcoming device in perhaps the least-subtle way yet: a massive Time Square billboard advertising the upcoming October 15th reveal, spotted by Reddit user LousyTX (via 9to5Google).

Photos of the orange Pixel had already been floating around the internet (of course), but the Times Square ad marks the first official confirmation from Google of the color. It’s not clear whether the new orange color is coming to both the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, or if it’ll only be available for one of the sizes of the new lineup. But it couldn’t be any clearer that Google will be releasing at least one orange phone in October.

Google has invited media to a hardware event on October 15th in New York City. The company is expected to formally announce the Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL, and other devices, including a Pixelbook 2 and new Google Home speakers. The invite says “Come see a few new things Made by Google.”

Google made an unusual move among tech companies in June when it confirmed the Pixel 4’s existence months prior to its planned release. We all know it’s coming, so Google decided to offer an early glimpse at the new device’s design. Google has also already revealed that the Pixel 4 will include its own take on Face ID, with an array of sensors that scan a person’s face for secure authentication. The Pixel 4 will also support hand gesture commands that utilize the company’s Project Soli technology.

The Pixel 4 XL hasn’t been able to stop leaking this week, and now we have yet another set of photos showing off the unannounced, unreleased phone.

Several of the leaks we’ve seen this week have stemmed from a Vietnam-based shop that sells imported phones, called D Store Mobile. D Store declined to share how it acquired an unreleased Pixel 4 XL, but it told The Verge that the phone was not a final unit and was more likely a “test model.” It’s not a fake, though, D Store said. Google hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

The latest Pixel 4 XL leak gives us our first look at Google’s process for setting up facial recognition. It’s broadly similar to Apple’s Face ID setup, involving asking users to spin their head in a circle. But in a nice touch, it provides some helpful extra details and options along the way.

The leak, from GenK (via Android Police), shows that Google first presents users with a bunch of information about how face recognition is going to work. A note mentions four key points:

The Pixel 4 leaks are starting to feel even more frequent than the avalanche of early videos and photos that preceded last year’s announcement of the Pixel 3 and 3 XL. In the most comprehensive look yet at Google’s new phone, today we’re seeing two extensive video tours of the Pixel 4 XL.

The first comes from YouTube channel AnhEm TV, which has posted a six and a half minute clip featuring the white model. It has a matte back panel and matte black sides. The side texture is said to be reminiscent of the grippy metal finish from the black Pixel 2. There’s a lot going on, but it’s a nice callback to the “panda” styling of the older Pixel 2 XL.

The seemingly endless flood of Pixel 4 leaks continues with our best look yet at hands-on pictures of the larger Pixel 4 XL, thanks to a post from Reddit user u/gooGof.

The design seems to be nearly identical to that of the smaller Pixel 4, which has been shown in a number of leaks and an official teaser from Google. That said, the giant square camera array does look a little better on the bigger phone due to the larger scale.

It’s only been a few hours since the last Google Pixel 4 leak, and now what looks like an official promo video has appeared online. Spanish site ProAndroid has obtained a promo video of the Pixel 4, and it appears to confirm gestures, an astrophotography mode, and Google’s nighttime camera improvements.

Rumors that appeared last week suggest Google is preparing a new “Motion Mode” for shooting sports and actions shots. The rumors also revealed an 8x zoom and capabilities for astrophotography — the ability to capture night shots with the Milky Way in the background. This promo video certainly suggests that Google will focus on the ability to take photos of the stars with the Pixel 4.

Google’s annual Pixel unveiling is likely around a month away, but we’re starting to hear and see a lot more about the upcoming Pixel 4. A potential leak from Weibo (spotted by Android Central) suggests that the Pixel 4 may come in a new bright orange color this year. Rumored images appear to show the new color option alongside the large rear camera section on the device.

This bright orange looks like a nice addition if it’s genuine, and it’s certainly a good way to deflect from the off-center camera housing that both Google and Apple appear to be opting for this year. Google does typically offer a more colorful option for its Pixel handsets alongside the usual black and white options.

Fresh off our best look at the Pixel 4’s hardware, another batch of rumors has cropped up regarding what might be the most important part of the phone: the camera. A pair of leaks claims that the upcoming smartphone will offer 8x zoom, an improved Night Sight feature, and a brand-new “Motion Mode” for shooting action shots, via 9to5Google and XDA Developers.

We’ve known for a while that the Pixel 4 would have two rear cameras (a first for the product line): a 12-megapixel lens and a 16-megapixel telephoto lens. But these leaks are the first to detail the new capabilities of what those lenses will be able to do, with Google’s smartphones historically relying as much (if not more) on the company’s advanced image processing and AI tools for its incredible photos as it does camera hardware.

It’s not a Pixel phone launch until the entire device has been thoroughly examined on video, and with today’s leak, we’re getting a little bit closer. A video circulating today appears to show Google’s Pixel 4 (or perhaps the taller XL version) from all angles, revealing just how thick its bezels are, along with some previously unseen speaker cutouts along the bottom.

Unfortunately, the video is brief and — in classic gadget leak fashion — just a little haphazard and blurry. While it’s possible that this is a knockoff, the history of very real Pixel leaks means there’s a good chance this is the real thing. It appears to come from a Malaysian retailer, which we spotted via 9to5Google.