Google Pixel 2 Mobile Phones & Smartphones

Google Pixel 2: Arguably the Best Camera and Software Experience on a Phone

Made by HTC and marketed by Google, the Google Pixel 2 is a smartphone offering pure Android. Since Google sells the phone directly under the Pixel brand, the Pixel 2 also is first in line for software updates. Find the Google Pixel 2 on eBay in different colours and configurations.

Besides camera and software, the Pixel 2 has all it takes to be a flagship Android smartphone.

• The display is a 5-inch 16:9 1080p AMOLED affair with a sharp 441 PPI pixel density. It’s protected by Gorilla Glass 5.
• The phone is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 octa-core chip with Adreno 540 GPU.
• There are two storage options: 64GB and 128GB. Both versions come with 4GB of RAM.
• The rear camera is a 12.2-megapixel sensor that can record 4K footage at 30 FPS, Full HD footage at 120 FPS, and HD footage at 240 FPS. The 8MP selfie camera does 1080p videos at 30fps.
• The phone has IP67 water and dust resistance, a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, USB Type-C, and a host of sensors. There’s a 2700 mAh battery running the show.

The Google Pixel 2 has one of the best cameras on a smartphone. It received a DxOMark score of 98, which was the highest for any smartphone camera in 2017. Unlike other smartphones that primarily rely on hardware to produce high-quality images, the Pixel 2 derives equally from its software, or Pixel Visual Core (PVC).

• Custom designed by the consumer hardware team at Google in association with Intel, PVC is a string of ARM-based SIP (system in package) image processors.
• It’s a completely programmable vision, AI, and image multi-core DSA (domain-specific architecture).
• The Pixel 2 camera has optical image stabilisation (OIS), which the original Pixel didn’t have.
• The phone also employs ‘fused video stabilisation’ that reduces problems with motion blur, camera shake, focus breathing, and rolling shutter distortion.

The Pixel 2 uses a 2700 mAh battery. On paper, the battery capacity doesn’t sound generous, but the real-world endurance of the phone is more than acceptable. A large reason for this is software optimisation and also the fact that the Pixel 2 has a smaller 5-inch screen that draws much less battery than the 6-inch behemoths on most other phones.

One of the biggest draws of a Google Pixel phone, besides its camera, is its software support. Released in October 2017 with Android 8.0 “Oreo”, Google promised three years of software support for the device. This means you should get major Android software updates until October 2020, along with the monthly security patches. This makes the phone one of the oldest hardware to run the latest software. It is currently running Android 10 (as of 2019).