PIXEL 6 PINES : TECH ESSAY

 

PIXEL 6 IS NICE. - BUT it doesn't change the game :

For half a decade, Goggle, the maker of Android, the world's most widely used phone software, has had a dream of making a best-selling phone that rivals the gold standard, the iPhone.

Google's Pixel phones have consistently received positive reviews but sell tepidly because of a major weakness : They have relied on off-the-shelf parts from other companies.

As a result, they have felt sluggish, compared with the devices made by Apple, which tightly controls the quality of its iPhones by doing design in-house.

With the new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, which cost $600 and $900, Goggle believes it has phones that level the playing field.

These are the company's first phones to include. Tensor, ts own computing processor; similarly, Apple designs the silicon that powers its iPhones. The Tensor chip enables the Pixel phones to rapidly perform complex computing tasks, like voice transcriptions, Google said.

After a week of testing, I concluded that Google has made serious progress with the Pixels - but it is still dreaming. Its advancements were not enough to make a me switch from an iPhone.

The new Pixels feel zippy, but their computing power lags behind the iPhone's speeds by as much as 50%. And while many photos produced with its camera looked clear and well lit, some looked overly sharp.

The Pixel 6's ability to immediately translate languages into one's native tongue also felt unfinished - it didn't work well with some languages, like Japanese.

Here's what you need to know

MEET TENSOR

The tensor processor is the result of Google's long and expensive journey in smartphone technology, which included a $1 billion acquisition of the handset maker HTC in 2018.

To speed things up, Goggle embedded its most complex algorithm in the chips, including advanced photography effects and language translation, eliminating the need to connect to its online servers to complete those tasks.

The speed increases were noticeable. The Pixel 6's motion looked buttery smooth, compared with that of its predecessors, when scrolling through apps and websites. But when I tested some of the phone's special features, like the ability to watch a foreign language video and display subtitles translated into English in real time, the results were mixed.

When I opened TikTok and searched for videos of people giving language lessons in French, Italian and Japanese, the technology performed well with French and Italian.

But it struggled with Japanese. One TikToker demonstrated a basic conversation that, when properly translated, meant the following in English:

''Today is tiring.''

''Yes, the workload is a lot.''

''Yes, that's true. Well, see you.''

''Yes. See you tomorrow. Thanks for the good work.''

The Pixel's translation came out like this :

'I'm tired today.'

'Well, I had a lot of work,'

'That's right. See you soon.'

'Thank you for your hard work tomorrow.'

That translation probably would have earned a C. in a Japanese language class.

The results weren't surprising. The Pixel's software said that for translated captions, Japanese was in ''beta,'' meaning it's a work in progress. In another sign that this feature was incomplete, I wasn't able to test translated video captions for Mandarin speech, in which I'm somewhat fluent, because the Pixel has yet to support Chinese.

This technology publishing on Smartphone advances, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Brian X. Chen.