Top 5 Google Pixel 5 features

The Google Pixel 5 just launched, and you can already pick it up from both Vodafone’s own website and the Google Store. I reviewed mine on XDA-Developers if you want to check that out, and I posted our hands-on with the Google Pixel 5 here too. I picked out 5 of my favourite features to show off on the Google Pixel 5!

Buy from Vodafone Ireland | Buy from the Google Store

Google Ireland sent us the Google Pixel 5 for review. They did not have any input in the contents of this article.

Top 5 Google Pixel 5 features

1) The Google Pixel 5’s camera

Want a smartphone camera that’s one of the best in the business? The Google Pixel 5 is right up there as being one of the best smartphone cameras you can get and the Pixel line has been for years. It takes great photos from regular still photos of your pets, to photos of your family, to beautiful sunsets and even astrophotography. The Google Camera application that comes preloaded on the Pixel 5 is one of the best camera apps too, offering many different features and helpful alignment guides to help you get the best possible picture.

2) A 90Hz smooth display

While you may not necessarily consider yourself to be too big into the specifications of your smartphone, you will always notice a 90Hz display, even if you don’t realise that’s what you’re noticing. Most smartphones are 60Hz. The display is incredibly smooth, as it has more frames per second drawn on the screen. That means smoother animations, better scrolling, and a more comfortable smartphone experience. Higher refresh rate displays have been one of the biggest advancements in smartphone technology in the past couple of years, and the Google Pixel 5 packs a stellar 90Hz panel for all of your day-to-day needs. The display is the most important part of a smartphone, so you’d hope it has some of the best technology around to power it.

3) Now Playing

I’m a bit of a music nerd, and the Now Playing feature of the Google Pixel 5 is my personal favourite feature. How it works is simple – it’s basically an always-on, always-working Shazam. I know what you’re probably thinking…. something along the lines of Google and always-listening, and something about privacy concerns, right? Completely understandable. The beauty of the Now Playing feature is that it works entirely offline. I tested it myself. How it works is it downloads a local database of some of the most popular songs in your area, and then compares audio it detects as music against the database. Nothing is ever sent to Google servers.

4) Google Recorder

The brand new Google Recorder app has a pretty neat feature – transcriptions. You can record a voice note (or anything, really), and the Recorder app on your smartphone will try to transcribe it into text. You can even export it then as a video, which shows the waveform and transcription if you want!

The @madebygoogle #Pixel5 has a really cool new voice recorder app, and you can effectively use it to generate voice tweets! Might start using this one quite a bit 👀#teampixel pic.twitter.com/5fByB7bKqZ

— Adam Conway @ XDA (@AdamConwayIE) October 14, 2020

5) Live captions

Live Captions is a great accessibility feature on the Google Pixel 5, and can easily be accessed from the volume menu. When you increase or decrease the volume, you may notice that there’s a small chat bubble-like icon to the left of the volume menu. That’s the button for enabling and disabling Live Captions. Live Captions effectively try to make captions for any content currently playing on your smartphone, even if it doesn’t have any official subtitles. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely better than nothing!

Buy from Vodafone Ireland | Buy from the Google Store