After 3 years of ownership, I am switching from my LG V20 to the brand new Pixel 4 XL, which I bought for $200 off in Google’s Black Friday sale. I generally like the V20, I like the replaceable battery, I like the fingerprint sensor, I like the external SD card storage, but over the past year, it’s performance has diminished massively, so it’s time to upgrade to something better, especially in the camera department, where the LG V20 is severely lacking, even in well-lit conditions, since the last firmware update.
I was not going to buy a Pixel 4 because it does not have a removable battery, but most new phones no longer have removable batteries, so that point is moot, no SD card expansion, again, something most phones omit in 2019, or no fingerprint reader, a feature I like, but I’ll see how I get on with Face unlock.
The biggest reason I’m upgrading is for the photography capabilities, despite LG claiming the V20 was a photographers phone, it’s never lived up to that claim, it was fine initially in daylight, but over time, it has gotten ‘foggy’, even when the phone is focused, the resulting picture is soft at best and blurry at worse. While low light photography is horrendous, so much noise that it obliterates the subject of the photo.
I’m not a big user of smartphones, I don’t often have the phone in my hands, while at home, I prefer to use a computer. I don’t play games on my phone, so the latest CPU or GPU is not important to me. I use the phone to look up something, or check my Email, while out and about, but, my main use is photography at live music gigs or family events, as I don’t want to have to carry my Sony RX100V, as well as a phone, something I had to do with the V20, as the low light performance is so terribly bad.
The thing that has tipped me into buying a Pixel 4 is battery life. Yes, I know that I can buy a new battery, but all the other things that I am dissatisfied with on the V20 means that an upgrade is the only option. The battery on some days will last less than four hours, with little to no usage, and when I plug it in to charge after the phone had turned off, it claims that it has 40 – 67% remaining, but it won’t turn back on.
The Pixel 4 XL will arrive by Wednesday, and I am looking forward to giving it a test run, especially the camera, I’m really hoping it lives up to the hype that Google is generating with their newest Pixel phone.
