The Pixel 4 XL is one of the best camera phones you probably shouldn’t pay full price for.
When it launched at $899, Google’s big Pixel was asking flagship money while quietly cutting corners on battery life, storage, and even some headline features. Drop it to $699, though, and the story shifts from “overpriced science project” to “seriously tempting if you know what you’re getting into.”
Design and Display: Finally Normal, Not Exactly Modern
Google finally killed the bathtub notch from the Pixel 3 XL and replaced it with a 6.3-inch OLED at 19:9, 1440 x 3040, around 537ppi. On paper, it’s exactly what a 2019–era flagship should look like. In practice, it still feels a generation behind Samsung and even OnePlus on front design.
The reason is that forehead. The Pixel 4 XL keeps a chunky top bezel to house the Soli radar, 3D face unlock hardware, and selfie camera. It’s cleaner than the old notch, but asymmetrical and a bit dated next to edge-to-edge panels elsewhere. If you care about screen-to-body ratio, this isn’t your phone.
The back is much more cohesive. Google ditched the dual-tone glass and went all-in on a soft-touch Gorilla Glass 5 panel on Clearly White and Oh So Orange, with a standard glossy finish on Just Black. The soft-touch glass actually feels closer to powder-coated metal and hides fingerprints better, though the camera square still smudges like any glass module.
Build-wise, you’re looking at 160.4 x 75.1 x 8.2 mm, 193g, IP68 water resistance, and a matte-finish frame with pleasantly clicky buttons. No headphone jack, of course.
The display itself is good, not class-leading. You get a 90Hz “Smooth Display” OLED that looks sharp and accurate. Adaptive, Natural, and Boosted color modes are tuned sensibly, with Natural hitting an average deltaE of 1.9 and whites staying within 2 deltaE across modes. However, brightness tops out around 436 nits in testing, well below Samsung and Apple flagships that clear 700 nits. Outdoor visibility is fine, just not flagship-best.
Google also adds Ambient EQ, which subtly shifts white balance based on ambient lighting, similar to Apple’s True Tone. It’s one of those features you forget exists until you turn it off and everything suddenly looks wrong.
The 90Hz story is less clean. Out of the box, the display only hit 90Hz above 75% brightness and in specific scenarios. Google pushed an update to expand when 90Hz engages, and you can force it on in Developer Options, but that costs battery. For a phone already struggling on endurance, that’s not a trivial trade.
Performance: Fast Enough, Tuned Conservatively
Under the hood, the Pixel 4 XL runs Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 with 6GB of RAM. Not the 855+, and not a huge RAM figure by late-2019 standards when 8GB and 12GB were becoming normal on high-end Chinese phones.
Benchmarks put it a step behind other Snapdragon 855 and 855+ devices. Single-core and multi-core CPU scores trail the same silicon in competing phones, and Antutu shows roughly 25% uplift over the Pixel 3 XL but still behind the pack. GPU tests land the Pixel 4 XL in line with other QHD+ flagships like the Galaxy S10+ and OnePlus 7 Pro, but again, never at the top.
This isn’t a hardware limitation as much as a tuning choice. Google has been here before: the Pixel 2 and Pixel 3 also underperformed identical chips used by other OEMs. The upside is thermals — the 4 XL stays comfortable even under gaming or extended load — but if you want every last frame in demanding titles, this isn’t the obvious pick.
In real use, though, the phone feels fast. Moving from a Pixel 3 to the 4 XL, the Snapdragon 855 and extra RAM clean up the app-killing issues and camera lag that plagued last year’s model. The UI feels fluid, the camera opens and shoots quickly, and daily performance is stable. Compared to technically more powerful phones from Samsung and OnePlus, some reviewers still describe the Pixel 4 as the “fastest” in real-world feel, which says a lot about Google’s software optimization.
The catch is future-proofing. With only 6GB of RAM and 64GB of non-expandable base storage, this is not a spec monster. If you keep phones for several years, you’re buying into Google’s software efficiency rather than raw headroom.
Battery and Charging: The Weakest Link
Battery is where the Pixel 4 XL stops being competitive as a full-price flagship.
The 3,700mAh cell is only a modest bump over the Pixel 3 XL’s 3,450mAh and is literally the same capacity as the cheaper Pixel 3a XL. In testing, the Pixel 4 XL pulled a 73-hour endurance rating with 90Hz enabled — “meh” in a year when most high-end phones were pushing hard on battery life.
Breakdown numbers aren’t bad individually: around 23.5 hours of 3G call time, roughly 10 hours 49 minutes of web browsing, and 11 hours 29 minutes of video playback. But taken together, and compared to rivals, it’s just not impressive.
Disable 90Hz and Motion Sense and you can squeeze more life out, but now you’re paying for features you’re not using. In day-to-day mixed use, the XL fares better than the smaller Pixel 4 and can usually survive a full day with 10–15% left, but this is table stakes, not a selling point.
Charging is at least clean and standards-based. The included 18W USB-C Power Delivery brick takes the phone to 44% in 30 minutes, 77% in an hour, and a full charge in about 80 minutes. That’s nowhere near the proprietary 30–40W systems from rivals, but it works with any PD charger and doesn’t lock you into vendor-specific bricks.
Wireless charging via Qi has quietly improved too. Where the Pixel 3 series was effectively capped at 5W on non-Google chargers and needed the $80 Pixel Stand to hit 10W, the Pixel 4 XL now supports 11W on regular Qi hardware. It’s a small but meaningful quality-of-life win.
Still, none of this compensates for the basic math: in 2019–2020, a $899 flagship with a 3,700mAh battery and power-hungry perks like 90Hz and Soli radar is a hard sell.
Software, Face Unlock, and Motion Sense: Smart Ideas, Mixed Execution
The Pixel 4 XL ships with Android 10 and Google’s vision of how it should look and behave. That includes gesture navigation, a revamped Google Assistant, and a big bet on Face unlock.
Google dumped the “Pixel Imprint” fingerprint scanner entirely. Unlock is now handled via IR-based Face unlock using dot projection and an IR camera, similar in concept to Apple’s Face ID. In practice, it’s fast and accurate, works at any angle (even upside down), and is tied into Motion Sense so the phone wakes and starts scanning as you reach for it.
The problem: early on, it happily unlocked with your eyes closed. That’s an obvious security gap, especially for banking and payment apps. Google acknowledged the issue and said it would patch it “in the coming weeks,” but for a biometric you’re forced to rely on — there’s no fallback fingerprint sensor — this should have been rock-solid on day one.
App support is a second hurdle. It took years for fingerprint APIs to be widely adopted in banking and password managers, and Face unlock is repeating the cycle. Google Pay already works, and apps like LastPass have added support, but many banking apps that used your fingerprint simply don’t talk to the new system yet. If you rely on biometric login everywhere, you’re left waiting on developers.
Gesture navigation has improved over the clunky 2-button system of Android 9. You get a thin home bar, iPhone-style: swipe up for home, swipe and hold for multitasking, swipe horizontally on the bar to quickly switch apps, and swipe in from the sides for back. Google Assistant can be triggered by corner swipes or the familiar Active Edge squeeze.
On the customization side, the Pixel Launcher now lets you tweak icon shapes, system accent colors, and fonts from a Style tab in the wallpaper picker. Android 10 also brings a system-wide dark theme, more granular notification controls (including daily/weekly notification frequency stats per app), and tighter, more transparent permission prompts.
Two new apps stand out. An emergency app centralizes medical info and emergency contacts. The new Recorder app uses on-device transcription to turn audio notes into searchable text in real time, no internet required. For students, journalists, or anyone who records meetings, that’s legitimately useful.
Then there’s Motion Sense, powered by Google’s Soli radar at 60GHz — the headline feature that justified that big forehead and a chunk of the BOM.
In theory, Soli can detect precise gestures like finger pinches and subtle hand movements. In the Pixel 4 XL, Motion Sense is limited to:
- Skipping forward or back in supported music apps with air swipes.
- Silencing alarms, timers, and calls with a wave.
- Detecting when you’re reaching for the phone to pre-wake the display and Face unlock array.
That’s it.
In daily use, the “reach detection” part is actually the most useful, since it makes Face unlock feel instant. But the gesture side feels half-baked. It can even mis-trigger if the phone is near a mouse and keyboard on a desk and you move your hand around. And it’s nothing close to the early Project Soli demos Google showed back in 2015.
Regulators also complicate Motion Sense. Because Soli runs at 60GHz, it’s only approved in 53 whitelisted regions. Outside those, gestures are disabled based on carrier and region checks. Modders quickly found a rooted workaround: there’s a hidden debug flag in the OsloFeedback app that disables regional checks. Flip it via shell commands or an Xposed module (after unlocking the bootloader and rooting with Magisk), and Motion Sense will work anywhere.
Technically, using the radar in unapproved regions is risky territory laws-wise, even if the range is extremely short. From a user perspective, it underlines how niche Motion Sense really is: people are going through root-level hacks to unlock a feature that, practically, doesn’t do very much.
Cameras: Still Google’s Ace, with a Big Asterisk
Cameras are where Google still punches hardest.
The Pixel 4 XL pairs a 12.2MP main sensor with 1.4µm pixels and f/1.7 OIS with a 16MP telephoto at f/2.4, also stabilized, outputting 12.2MP images. Both feed into Google’s HDR+ pipeline and Super Res Zoom.
Google spent years claiming a single camera plus software was enough. Then it added a second — not the ultra-wide the market has largely standardized on, but a telephoto. The logic is that zoomed shots are more common than ultra-wide scenics. In reality, most flagships at the same price give you both.
On the main camera, image quality takes another incremental step up from the Pixel 3. HDR+ now previews its look in the viewfinder via Live HDR+, so what you see is much closer to the final shot. A new dual exposure control UI lets you separately drag sliders for shadows and highlights before capture, giving you some creative control without full manual mode.
Daylight photos are detailed, with excellent exposure balancing and a slightly cool white balance that’s very “Pixel.” Noise is cleaner than on the Pixel 3. In complex high-contrast scenes, the phone does what Pixels do: rescue highlight and shadow detail aggressively. In flat, shaded scenes, some noise creeps in, and in some tricky cases (like backlit golden hour shots), colors can look washed while the phone fights to hold dynamic range.
Against something like the OnePlus 7T, it’s more nuanced than “Pixel always wins.” The Pixel usually grabs more micro-detail, but the 7T’s HDR and color can be more pleasing in certain scenes. Google’s lead in daylight isn’t unassailable anymore.
The telephoto is better than you’d expect from its specs. At 2x, images are very close in character to the main camera — similar color, exposure, and only slightly more noise on close inspection. In low light, the f/2.4 aperture starts to hurt and quality drops, but that’s expected.
Super Res Zoom extends this further. At 4x, shots are usable and not a noisy mess, with visible detail even on distant objects like anchored ships. But if long-range zoom is your priority, Huawei and Oppo’s periscope systems simply do more.
Portrait mode, now aided by the telephoto’s extra depth data, is genuinely excellent. Edge detection is near-DSLR-level in many cases, and the bokeh has a natural falloff, particularly in shots with foreground and background depth like portraits against hedges.
Night Sight is still one of Google’s showcase features. Regular low-light shots without it are predictably noisy and soft. With Night Sight on, scenes brighten dramatically, become usable, and show far more detail. Noise is still there on close inspection, and white balance sometimes diverges from the normal mode despite Google’s claims of unified AWB, but results are impressive for a handheld phone.
The telephoto with Night Sight is much less convincing. The narrow aperture plus long exposure and stacking produce images that just aren’t very good. OnePlus doesn’t even allow its Nightscape mode to use the telephoto, and in this specific case, that might be the more honest approach.
Astrophotography mode is the most headline-worthy new trick. Stabilize the phone on a tripod or solid surface, Night Sight flips into an Astro mode, and the camera stacks up to several minutes of exposures automatically. The sample images are genuinely striking for a smartphone: dense fields of stars, visible texture on lit objects in the foreground, and manageable noise. It’s niche — you need dark skies and patience — but it showcases how far computational photography has come.
On the front, Google dropped the dual selfie setup from the Pixel 3. You get a single 8MP camera plus 3D ToF for depth, with a 22mm-equivalent, 90° field of view — wider than many single-camera rivals, and between the two focal lengths the Pixel 3 offered.
Standard selfies are well-exposed with accurate skin tones and solid shadow detail. Portrait selfies are less consistent: edge detection can halo in tricky backlit scenarios, and Google’s choice to preserve fine facial detail means you’ll see every pore compared to softer, more flattering processing from phones like the OnePlus 7T.
Video tops out at 4K 30fps on the rear, 1080p 30/60fps, with no 4K 60 option. Google downplays this, and for many users, 4K60 isn’t essential. But again, this is a flagship-priced phone lacking a checkbox its peers have had for years. The footage it does capture is solid: detailed 1080p, well-exposed 4K, consistent colors and dynamic range, and effective stabilization in both 30 and 60fps modes.
Pricing, Value, and the Black Friday Question
At launch, the Pixel 4 XL started at $899 in the US for 64GB. That put it $100 under the iPhone 11 Pro but $200 above the base iPhone 11. All three share the same 64GB non-expandable starting point.
The problem for Google is that Apple’s phones in that cycle nailed the basics. Camera performance was strong across the board, the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro offered excellent battery life, and Apple added ultra-wide cameras to every new iPhone while Google chose a telephoto only. On top of that, Samsung’s Galaxy S10+ and Note10 line offered brighter displays, bigger batteries, and longer feature lists, often at similar or discounted prices.
Then there’s Google’s own Pixel 3a XL, which brought a very similar camera experience, cleaner battery endurance, and a much lower price by accepting mid-range hardware. If you didn’t need gaming power, the 3a XL was arguably the smarter Pixel buy for most people.
Against that backdrop, the 4 XL at $899 looked like a camera champ bolted onto a bunch of compromises: small-ish battery, no ultra-wide, no 4K60 video, only 6GB RAM, and limited storage options. Motion Sense felt unfinished, Face unlock shipped with a glaring security flaw, and 90Hz wasn’t properly tuned out of the box.
Drop the price to $699, and the calculus changes. At $699, the Pixel 4 XL undercuts phones like the Galaxy Note10 and iPhone 11 Pro by around $300. Suddenly, the trade-offs feel more reasonable if you specifically care about Google’s camera tuning and software experience. The existence of cheaper options like the OnePlus 7T complicates things, but those devices don’t always have the same distribution, carrier presence, or user trust in every market.
After a month of daily use, some reviewers who were lukewarm at launch found themselves calling the Pixel 4 XL their favorite Pixel yet, largely because of day-to-day performance and software polish. The camera is still a joy to shoot with, Android 10 feels cohesive on this hardware, and Google has already shipped updates to improve 90Hz behavior and Face unlock support in third-party apps.
So is it “worth it” at $699? If you value Google’s take on Android, prioritize still photography over video specs and ultra-wide flexibility, and can live with middling battery life, the answer leans yes. At $899 and up, it’s a much tougher sell.
Verdict: A Great Experience, If You Accept the Trade-Offs
The Pixel 4 XL is exactly what Google has become known for in hardware: a phone with flashes of brilliance and obvious, avoidable flaws.
On the plus side, you get:
- One of the most consistently excellent still cameras, especially for portraits and HDR scenes.
- A genuinely useful Night Sight and an impressive, if niche, Astrophotography mode.
- Clean, fast-feeling Android 10 with thoughtful touches like on-device Recorder transcription and granular notification/permission controls.
- Face unlock that, once patched and widely supported, is fast and convenient.
- A unique soft-touch design that feels better than most glass slabs.
On the minus side:
- Battery life that’s merely acceptable, not competitive, especially with 90Hz and Motion Sense enabled.
- Motion Sense that doesn’t come close to the promise of Project Soli and is limited by regional approvals unless you’re willing to root.
- No ultra-wide camera, no 4K60 video, and only 6GB RAM and 64GB base storage in a world where rivals offer more.
- Early execution missteps like the eyes-closed Face unlock and inconsistent 90Hz behavior at launch.
Cautious optimism is the only sensible stance here. Google’s software track record suggests the Pixel 4 XL will age better than its launch state implies: the Pixel 3 series ended life far better than it started, and the 4 XL already feels off to a stronger start. But no software update is going to retrofit a bigger battery or an ultra-wide lens.
If you’re buying now at a discount and walking in with eyes open, the Pixel 4 XL can absolutely be a phone you enjoy for its camera and clean Android experience. If you want the most balanced flagship spec sheet for your money, you’ll find better value elsewhere.
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