Briiiiiiing!
I scrambled for my phone. I was on hold for only five minutes, but for the first time, I didn't need to put my ears through terrible hold music. That's thanks to Google's new smartphone, the Pixel 5. It has a unique feature that uses the artificially intelligent Google Assistant to monitor when you've been put on hold with a 1-800 number. You'll hear a loud chime when you're finally connected to a human, so there's no need to attentively sit with the phone in hand and listen to Kenny G for hours on end.
It's small, helpful features like this that make me appreciate Google phones. Like how the Recorder app now lets you edit snippets out of a recording by highlighting and removing a sentence from the automatically generated transcript. And, of course, returning staples like Now Playing, which identifies songs playing around you, or Call Screen, which monitors and automatically declines robocalls.
But there's not much dramatically different with the Pixel 5. The few new features aren't as dazzling compared to previous announcements, like when Google endowed the Pixel 3 with Duplex, a service that has the Google Assistant schedule salon appointments and restaurant reservations on your behalf. There's nothing wacky, like last year's Pixel 4 that had a radar chip to detect hand gestures for controlling music playback. Google even took out its Face ID–rivaling authentication and stuck the tried-and-true fingerprint sensor on the back.
Even though Google has played it safe this year, it's made its best Pixel ever. Every prior Pixel has had one major compromise that bogged it down, like inadequate battery life on the last two models, display quality issues on the Pixel 2, and zero water resistance on the original. All of those kinks and quirks are gone on the Pixel 5.
My partner has a Pixel 4. She likes it a lot. But it's painful watching her plug it in to recharge two to three times a day just to keep using it.
The batteries Google stuffed in previous Pixels are criminally small, but this shortcoming has finally been addressed with the 5. The new phone has a 4,080-mAh capacity cell inside, and it easily lasts through a day and a half of average use. If I play Genshin Impact for too long, we can shave that down to a full day. Driving home the point is a new Extreme Battery Saver mode that shuts down Wi-Fi and pauses apps (you can un-pause certain apps) to give you up to 48 hours of additional juice. Point is, you won't be hugging a charging port every few hours with this phone.
The next best thing? How it feels to use it. This 6-inch device is not as small as the Pixel 4A or the iPhone 12 Mini, but it's nowhere near as ginormous as most other phones today. It's super lightweight, and I can wrap my entire palm around it. It's the Goldilocks phone; just right.