GRAMoogle seems to have triumphed again. The new Pixel 7 offers the same top-tier software, camera, and smart AI systems that have made its phones winners, but at a knockdown price that significantly undercuts rivals.
Costing £599 ($599 / A$999), it sits between the best £849 Pixel 7 Pro and the budget £399 Pixel 6a, competing very favorably on price and specs with rivals from Samsung, Apple and others that are generally in the £700 -800 range.
The new phone looks like a smaller, stripped-down version of the Pixel 7 Pro. It has a 6.3-inch flat OLED display that’s bright and attractive. The screen is pretty good. It has a 90Hz refresh rate to keep everything flowing smoothly. But it doesn’t hit the heady 120Hz peak or dynamically adjust to save battery life as is common with Android rivals.
The Pixel 7 is shorter, narrower, and lighter than its big brother and last year’s Pixel 6, which is a good thing. It makes the Pixel 7 a good balance between screen size and device size, similar to Apple’s iPhone 14.
The back of the phone sports Google’s camera bar design, which blends into the brushed aluminum sides. It looks and feels more premium than last year’s model.
Inside, the Pixel 7 has the same Google Tensor G2 chip as its big brother and works in a similar way, with particularly fast AI systems like text-to-speech.
Battery life is similar to other Google phones, lasting about 35 hours between charges with the screen in active use for five hours. That’s good enough for a day of heavy use but below the competition, some of which last almost two days.
Specifications
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Screen: 6.3-inch 90Hz FHD+ OLED display (416 ppi)
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Processor: Google Tensioner G2
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RAM: 8GB
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Storage: 128 or 256GB
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OS: android 13
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Camera: 50MP + 12MP ultra-wide, 10.8MP selfie
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Connectivity: 5G, eSIM, Wi-Fi 6E, UWB, NFC, Bluetooth 5.2 and GNSS
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Waterproof: IP68 (1.5m for 30 minutes)
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Dimensions: 155.6×73.2×8.7mm
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Weight: 197g
Sustainability
Google doesn’t provide an expected life for the battery, but it should last more than 500 full charge cycles with at least 80% of its original capacity. The phone is repairable. by Google and third party stores with original spare parts available directly by iFixit. Out-of-warranty screen repairs by Google will cost similar to its predecessor, around £140, and battery replacements around £100.
Pixel 7 is made from 100% recycled aluminum, which is approximately 19% of the phone by weight. The public company environmental impact reports for some of their products. google will recycle old devices free.
android 13
The Pixel 7 runs the same version of Android 13 as the Pixel 7 Pro and Google’s other smartphones, with some exclusive features including the ability to blur faces and objects using AI in the Google Photos app.
Google will provide at least five years of software and security updates including at least three major versions of Android. Samsung backs many of its phones for five years, while Fairphone targets six years and Apple backs its iPhone for up to seven years.
Camera
The Pixel 7 has two cameras on the back, including a 50-megapixel main and a 12MP ultra-wide, without the 5x telephoto lens of the Pixel 7 Pro.
The 12 MP ultra-wide camera produces good images with very little distortion, even at the edges. But its 0.7x magnification isn’t quite as wide as the 0.5x on the 7 Pro or its rivals, so it won’t be able to fit as much. It also lacks the ability to function as a macro camera like on the 7 Pro, which isn’t much of a loss.
The 50MP main camera is the same as the 7 Pro and is simply brilliant, capturing a wealth of detail in a wide range of lighting conditions, producing images at 12.5MP. You can also “zoom in” to 2x optical magnification, which works surprisingly well in matching what you’d normally get from a 2x optical zoom on its rivals. Digital zoom takes over from there with reasonable results at 4x, but then it’s soft on detail.
Google’s Low Light Night Sight mode is faster and better than ever, creating attractive and generally sharp images in near darkness. With your phone on a tripod or propped up, you can even take stunning pictures of the stars with a special extended shot.
The selfie camera takes great 10MP images in a variety of lighting conditions. Video capture is overall upscaled to 4K at 60 frames per second in HDR, catching up with the rivals.
Overall, the Pixel 7 has a really great camera for the money, just missing an extended zoom.
Price
The Google Pixel 7 costs from £599 ($599/$999) with 128 GB of storage.
For comparison, the Pixel 7 Pro costs £849the Pixel 6a costs £399does the samsung galaxy s22 cost £769 and the iPhone 14 costs £849.
Verdict
The Pixel 7 is a great high-end Android phone at a great price.
It offers most of what makes the Pixel 7 Pro one of the best smartphones of the year, with some corners cut for under £600 at a time when technology is getting more expensive, not less.
You get an attractive, well-performing device with lots of smart features and good software with at least five years of support. You will be hard pressed to find a camera this good for the price. The 6.3-inch screen is a good size, if not the most advanced, and battery life is solid, if a bit short at best.
With rivals costing over £750, the Pixel 7’s biggest problem is that Google’s other most affordable phone, the Pixel 6a, offers 70% of the performance of the new phone for around £400.
Advantages: great camera, good screen, good performance, solid battery, face and fingerprint unlock, Android 13 with five years of security updates, beats the competition on price by far.
Cons: limited zoom, face unlock option not as secure as some rivals, battery life less than best in class, charging quite slow, not much of a performance jump.
This article was modified on November 1, 2022. As made clear elsewhere in the article, the Pixel 7 retails for $599/A$999, not $899/A$1,299 as a reference stated in an earlier version.
