The Pixel 6 was a hit. Google’s first smartphone using their own in-house chipset and it delivered. Yeah, not as beastly as the established names in the form of the best from Snapdragon or Apple but close. Flagship grade. Let’s get the specs out of the way.
Google Pixel 7
- 6.37 inch, 90Hz OLED FHD+ display
- 50MP main camera + 12MP ultrawide
- 10.8MP selfie camera
- 4533mAh battery
- Google Tensor 2 chipset
- Wireless charging
- 8GB RAM
- 128/256GB storage.
Google Pixel 7 Pro
- 6.7 inch, 120Hz pOLED QHD+ display
- 50MP main camera + 12MP ultrawide + 48MP telephoto
- 10.8MP selfie camera
- 5000mAh battery
- Google Tensor 2 chipset
- Wireless charging
- 12GB RAM
- 128/256GB storage
Software tricks
But as with Google Smartphones, the highlights are always in software and this time around the software features focus on security, intelligent audio features, and imaging.
Security: Free VPN with an asterisk
In terms of security, the G2 chip powering the Pixel 7 is coming with the same chip-level security as their servers with their Titan M2 chip. On top of that, they are promising that the processing of personal data will be done on the device. And whilst on the topic of data, pixel 7 devices will come with a built-in VPN under the Google One service.
But if you are in Africa don’t celebrate just yet. The VPN service is not available in Africa yet. In Fact, it’s only available in 22 countries and you can only get the VPN for free on your Pixel 7 smartphone if you are already subscribed to Google One on the 2TB package going upwards. Something to keep in mind if a VPN is one of the biggest reasons you want to buy it.
Speaker identification in voice recordings
Intelligent audio. For voice memos, they have built up from the super accurate and real-time speech-to-text dictation from the Pixel 6 and added speaker tags. Essentially the speech-to-text engine is able to identify different voices within an audio and group all the speech sections of an individual together.
This should make transcribing audio much easier even for things like armature podcasts with multiple speakers or us journalists covering events with multiple panelists. Now, of course, it may not recognize the name of the various speakers so that’s something you would still want to keep track of.
Noise reduction on incoming calls
The audio chipset can now also use machine learning in voice calls to remove background noise as well as boost the voice in the incoming audio from the other person on the line in real-time. This is pretty much an improvement on the tech that suppressed background noise on the source device.
In-chat audio recording transcription
Oh, and the cooler one for me at least is transcribing audio within a chat. So picture this. You let’s say receive audio from that one sketchy contact. You don’t have any headphones or earphones and you know it’s chaos playing that audio on your phone’s loudspeaker. What do you do? You can just click on the transcribe option on the audio within the chat and it will be live captioned as it plays even if the phone is on mute! I think this might be one of the main reasons why I will buy a Pixel 7 Pro.
CAMERAS!
Star of the show. The cameras. The camera hardware on the Pixel 7s is pretty much similar on paper to the hardware on the Pixel 6s. But what is new is a beefier chipset meaning more can be extracted from this same hardware. The biggest benefit is motion blur in photos and how the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro is dealing with it.
The first method is just raw image processing power. Because the G2 chip just has more performance to spare, it’s able to run image processing much faster, especially exposure bracketing when performing HDR.
This is pretty much the camera capturing multiple images at different exposures and stitching the best part of each image into the overall picture for a much more pleasing and more evenly exposed image. The more powerful the image processor is, the less time the camera spends taking all these multiple shots and so the less chance there is for image blur to occur.
Number 2 is elegant and genius all at once. So when you take a pic, the phone will capture the same image as the other cameras as well then use AI to reconstruct the image with data obtained from the other sensors. Simple as that but also quite impressive.
The last one is being able to remove blur from images already stored on your device. Now the kicker is this feature on the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro works with any image taken by any phone or camera even if it is not a pixel device. So even if your homies send you blurry Saturday night party pics via WhatsApp you can maybe salvage 1 or 2 of them with a pixel 7.
Price
Almost forgot. Pricing. The Pixel 7 will start at US$599 and the Pixel 7 Pro will start at US$899 the same price as last year’s Pixel 6s. That’s all the interesting bits in the recently announced Google Pixel 7. Would you get this over the recently released iPhone 14s? Let me know in the comments.
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