![]() But if you want the best of Google and a phone that will get better and better over the next year as Google (ahem) actually finishes its new Android version and all the applications that go with it, then £869 ( or similar, wherever you are) is the price of admission. There are so many factors to quote to try and justify the 2018 Pixel pricing, but I don’t think anyone will quite manage it – quite simply, Google is aiming at the premium phone market. So the question then becomes how much you also value the various injections of Google secret sauce (security, through the Titan M chip plus Camera, though this is usually available for side loading on Nokias), the years of free full resolution photo and video backup, the IP68 waterproofing, the tuned stereo speakers, the extra live wallpapers, (eventually) the Assistant Call Screening features, and so on. Not least those from Nokia that run Android One, effectively also as ‘stock Android’ as you can get, and yet with prices starting from a quarter the cost of the 3 XL. Given the ubiquity of a glass sandwich form factor, genuinely off the shelf components, including a Snapdragon 845 chipset and 4GB of RAM, competing handsets with similar basic specification are dramatically cheaper. In the UK, the Pixel 3 XL is a whopping £869 inc VAT for the 64GB version and £969 for the 128GB variant. Now, without bundled software and services to help subsidise the phone, you’d expect to pay more for it, and you’d be right. You build up your software load out almost from scratch, with just the stuff you want included, just the online services you choose. Anyone who has used a Sony, Samsung, LG, or Huawei/Honor phone in the last decade will recognize all of this and there’s a massive ‘breath of fresh air’ factor with Google’s first party phones. At last we can review this properly.Īs I mentioned with the ‘3’, there’s a significant market for Android phones with no manufacturer skin, no bloat, no add-on services to push. Why the delay in looking at the Pixel 3’s larger variant? Because the Pixel 3 XL has been decidedly buggy until a day or so ago, when the December 2018 update hit from Google. The XL involves several design and spec decisions that are well worth talking about. Having reviewed the standard sized Pixel 3 already here on AndroidBeat, you’d think that a review of the XL version would involve a lot of copy and pasting – but that’s not entirely true.
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