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The perfect phone is not one that vies for more of my attention. But the Pixel 4 marks an awkward first step into that future, like a poor baton pass in the middle of a relay race. Perhaps, one day, Google will realize this vision. It needs to scan the environment and know its context. In theory, a phone designed to enhance our well-being needs to literally see us and sense us. I can imagine how the Pixel 4 emerged out of this thinking. If you can look beyond the privacy concerns raised by that concept just a moment, it’s downright inspiring: What if all of our technology, from our thermostats to our laptops to our lamps, was optimized for our health and well-being? At the recent Milan design fair, the company demonstrated how rooms designed in various ways could literally calm your body down. After spending a lot of time talking to designers at Google over the last year, it’s clear that the company sees its next big play as your environment. I get why the Pixel 4 was designed the way it was. A phone that points to Google’s ambitions But in practice, wouldn’t you rather just hit a button on a screen than mime a gesture above that screen? Air swiping is neat! It makes for a futuristic-looking video. According to one piece of research ( PDF), midair swiping actually requires more cognitive load than swiping or pressing a button on an actual screen. The current Soli gestures do work, but it’s unclear whether they’re truly an improvement over conventional touch interactions. For instance, Google has proven Soli can be used to identify any object it sees, though this feature doesn’t appear to be in the Pixel 4. Eventually, Soli may lead to other gestural functionality. Soli does allow you to swipe to dismiss an alarm, or move forward or back a track in Spotify, though. Meanwhile, the phone’s Soli features don’t allow you to swipe back in midair without actually touching your phone for whatever reason they don’t mirror the on-screen gestures. If you refuse to use the new swipe gesture, have fun using the in-app interface buttons in the upper left corner of the phone-literally the farthest possible spot for your thumb to reach. In any case, it’s no better than the old, dedicated back button, and in many cases, it’s notably worse. It’s also an uncomfortable stretch of the thumb to get just right in my experience. But guess what? That doesn’t always work, and you can accidentally do it when you don’t mean to. To go back using the Pixel 4 default UI, you need to swipe perpendicularly across the screen. This was immensely helpful, for instance, for exiting out of those links you open in email, which take you to an in-app browser. No matter where you were, it was easy to return to where you’d been. But it always allowed you to tap the bottom left corner of the screen to go back on a web page, or back out of an app.
It was originally a hard, physical button on phones and has become a virtual button on the screen over the years.
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(Note: You can actually reactivate the back button in the settings.) Android users have loved this button for a decade now. The Pixel’s back button, a feature which Steve Jobs himself reportedly wanted in the first iPhone, is also gone.
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Even if you do prefer a passcode to the facial recognition tech, Android Q is shifting the entire Google software ecosystem away from buttons and toward swipes and other on-screen gestures.
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You have to password unlock your phone constantly, a pain I’d taken for granted since shifting over to a fingerprint. You can turn Soli and the face unlock feature off, but using the Pixel then becomes a punishment.
It often completely defeats the purpose of glancing at my phone at all, because it can actually unlock itself all the way to my apps, at which point I can’t see the date and time anymore. In practice, both of these features mean that, sometimes, just walking by the phone will wake it up like an overeager puppy (“are you going to play with me now? Please play with me now!”). In a single design iteration, the Pixel has gone from a quiet appliance to an aggressive, attention-hungry machine that tries to be part of your environment, powered by new airborne and on-screen gestures that are akin to carrying around a tray of wine glasses, hoping you don’t drop them. Then a Pixel 4 review unit arrived at my house. It embodied an alternate future for smartphones, a place where minimal design could live in harmony with super-powered AI and capable digital design. It was the stupidest, simplest, and best feature I’d had on a phone for years. And the Pixel’s spartan black lock screen, which just showed the time instead of notifications, saved me countless lost hours I’d once spent thinking I was just checking the time, only to be sucked into Twitter, email, and Instagram. Its dedicated back button, a feature that was coveted by Steve Jobs, was incredibly useful. The Pixel 2’s user interface, which lacked the quirkier animations of iOS, was quiet and refreshing.
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