Five years of development has gone into Google's biggest addition to the Pixel 4, the company says. Its radar system — officially dubbed Motion Sense — sits above the phone's display and is intended as a gesture interface. It detects when your hand is above phone and responds to your movements. But at this stage, it doesn't really do a lot. When playing music, through Spotify for instance, you can skip to the next song by waving your hand from left to right.
The phone doesn't have a headphone jack. You can silence alarms and call through the same gesture.
Radar and camera(s)
When it works — it can be intermittent — the feature is neat. It's a use case that is intuitive and natural, but not something anyone really needs. There's definite potential here, but we would like to see the radar chip have a deeper range at the moment it seems to work with your hand about cm above the screen and installed in Google's smart devices. A smart display with gesture control makes complete sense. As much as Google wants us to focus on the new facial recognition and radar hardware, it's impossible to ignore the cameras.
The Pixel has been about the camera since day one. This time around, the company has added a second lens for the first time, following the general industry trend. As is typical with the Pixel, the camera setup is fantastic. Images are clear, crisp and the new telephoto lens lets you zoom more than ever before in Google's phone range. The night mode is one of the best out there. The quality of images is more than good enough for whatever you want to do with your photos.
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Let's face it, you're probably going to post them to Instagram and then forget about them. While the second camera does mean you can zoom in on practically everything, Google has missed a trick by not copying its rivals, including the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro. It hasn't added a wide-angle lens. The previous wide-angle selfie camera on the front of the Pixel 3, which has now been removed, worked well. The Pixel 4 would have benefitted with a third rear camera. For the first time in four years, Google has acknowledged the Pixel's internal specs need a bump.
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The big performance issue is the phone's battery. The XL has a 3,mAh battery and the smaller 4 comes with 2,mAh battery. As it stands, the battery will get you through a whole day, but it often feels touch and go to whether it's going to make it. On heavy days of phone use, I've been hitting the 30 per cent mark at around 7PM each evening.
The remaining juice is enough to get you through toned time, but being that low does make you feel uneasy — especially when it could be avoided with a slightly bigger battery. Mobile operating systems — Android and iOS — don't usually feature in our reviews. However, things are a little different with Google's Pixel devices. And also after taking a video or a picture without the victim knowing, that we could have deleted it from the storage after sending it to the hacker.
So there is absolutely no trace. LO: Right. Now you guys were using the Google Pixel 2 XL on the Google Pixel 3 when you started researching the Google camera app, but then you found after further digging that the same vulnerabilities are on camera apps of other smartphone vendors, right?
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How many vendors are potentially impacted? And they actually contacted all the vendors of the Android ecosystem. They indeed told us that there are some vendors that are affected by the same thing. And we did not actually bother to check because our goal is basically to let everyone know that they need to check their apps.
There might be other companies that have. LO: Yes, I mean, speaking of disclosure, you mentioned in the research that when you reach out to Google, you had a positive experience in terms of disclosure and rolling out patches, can you talk a little bit about what they did to mitigate the issue and the process of rolling out those fixes. Usually they are very serious with triaging the issues. And the same happened here.
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Quite quickly, they triaged it and decided that this the severity of this issue is high. The first release of the patch fixed the issue, but they were not sure that it does not break other functionalities. So we decided to wait with the publication until they release the final patch. And we definitely understood that. But when it comes to third party app permissions in general, I feel like this is really becoming a bigger issue in terms of data privacy and data collection, especially because videos and photos are so personal.
Definitely if there are children or the specific app is, is really trending. This is something that we need maybe to put more more focus and awareness on and education of consumers. And if it makes sense. But in general, try to download only applications that you really feel secure about. Are these patches automatic at this point, or do they need to update?
So if users have automatic updates on your phone turned on then they should be safe. If not, turn it on and to update all the applications not only the camera application, in general to keep your operating system and applications up to date is always a good idea.
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This is just an example. But these findings are happening all the time with different severities and different applications. So this is just a general rule of thumb that should be followed. LO: Great. And Erez one final question. Was there anything else that stuck out to you in terms of this research or any takeaways or anything else you want to make clear as a final point?
It seems much more specific and lucrative for cyber criminals for sure. Erez, thank you so much for coming onto the Threatpost podcast today. Please submit your order again. Create store credit account failed. Please retry. Google Pixel 4.
The Google phone. Pixel 4. Phone X. Capture the cosmos. With a second camera lens, Portrait Mode is now even better. A lot of help. Coming soon. Get more done with your voice. View demo. Replay demo. Get things done. Navigate your music. Snooze and silence. App protection inside. Terms and restrictions apply. Just Black. Clearly White.
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Brilliant sound. More from Google. I agree to receive future email communications regarding devices from Google.