Pixel 4's Face Unlock Doesn't Care If Your Eyes Are Open

Google did its big fall hardware event on Tuesday in New York, and the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL are now official. $799 for the small one, $899 for the XL, preorders open now, phones ship next week. There's a new orange color they're calling "Oh So Orange" which is a genuinely fun name for a phone color and I respect it. There's also a 90Hz display, a new camera bump with two lenses stacked vertically instead of that weird single-lens setup from the Pixel 3, and an astrophotography mode that takes multi-minute long exposures of the night sky. I want to try that last one so bad, except I live in a city with enough light pollution that I'd basically be photographing an orange haze, so.

The thing everyone's actually talking about, though, isn't the camera. It's the fingerprint sensor. Or rather, the total absence of one.

Google ripped the fingerprint reader off the back of the phone entirely and replaced it with face unlock, powered by a little radar chip called Soli that can sense your hand approaching the phone before you even touch it. In theory this is neat, borderline sci-fi even. In practice, multiple people who got early hands-on time reported that the face unlock will open the phone even if your eyes are closed. Asleep, unconscious, doesn't matter, apparently the phone was fine unlocking for someone while they were dozing on a couch. Apple added an "attention aware" check to Face ID specifically to stop this exact scenario, where somebody grabs your phone and holds it up to your sleeping face to get in. Google, as of Tuesday, hadn't done the equivalent, though they've said an update is coming to add it. Should've shipped with it, honestly. That's not a minor polish item, that's a basic thing you'd want nailed down before you kill off the fingerprint option as a fallback.

And that's really my complaint here, not face unlock existing, but face unlock being the only biometric option. I liked having both. Phone's sitting flat on the desk, I don't want to pick it up and aim my face at it, I just want to tap the back with a thumb and keep typing. Fingerprint readers are fast and they don't care about the room being dark, or you wearing a mask, or the phone being at a weird angle in your other hand on the subway. Face unlock on a phone lying on a table is just worse, and I don't think this is a hot take, I think most people who've used both would agree if they were being honest instead of just excited about the new radar toy.

Speaking of the radar toy, Motion Sense is the other headline feature, and it lets you wave your hand over the phone to skip songs or snooze alarms without touching the screen. I'm sure it's a genuinely clever bit of engineering to shrink that kind of sensor down small enough to fit in a phone. I'm just not sure "wave hand, skip song" is a problem anyone was desperate to solve. We'll see if it's one of those features that seems gimmicky at launch and then six months later everyone's using it without thinking about it, or if it just quietly disappears from the marketing by Pixel 5.

One more thing worth mentioning, and this one got less coverage than it should have: Google isn't selling the Pixel 4 in India at all. Not a delay, not a later date, just skipping the market entirely. The reporting I've seen ties it back to Soli, the radar chip, needing separate regulatory clearance in India that Google apparently decided wasn't worth pursuing this time around. India is a massive smartphone market and a real growth opportunity for Google's hardware ambitions, so walking away from it over a spec that most buyers would never even use feels like a strange trade to make. Makes me wonder how much internal debate that decision got, or whether it was just easier to ship the marquee feature everywhere else and eat the loss in one country.

Anyway. Preorders are open, mine isn't one of them, I'm still happy with the fingerprint reader on my current phone and I'm not in a hurry to trade it for a face scan that apparently can't tell if I'm awake.