When I test mobile phones, I use them in a range of everyday situations where I don’t necessarily expect the phone to differ from other phones, but it is precisely by using the mobile phone a lot in everyday life that I discover any quirks and special characteristics.
Since I have birdwatching as a hobby, one of the apps I usually test is Merlin, an app that continuously records the sounds of the environment and in real time identifies birds it hears. an app that is so good at it that it has become popular even among those who are just generally interested in eel liver.
I don’t expect any differences in the results from the app, but it often says something about the battery life of the mobile. For some mobiles, the battery drains in no time when I use Merlin, while others are better at limiting the battery consumption of apps running in the background without affecting the functionality of the app.
When I test mobile phones, I use them in a range of everyday situations where I don’t necessarily expect the phone to differ from other phones, but it is precisely by using the mobile phone a lot in everyday life that I discover any quirks and special characteristics.
Since I have birdwatching as a hobby, one of the apps I usually test is Merlin, an app that continuously records the sounds of the environment and in real time identifies birds it hears. an app that is so good at it that it has become popular even among those who are just generally interested in eel liver.
I don’t expect any differences in the results from the app, but it often says something about the battery life of the mobile. For some mobiles, the battery drains in no time when I use Merlin, while others are better at limiting the battery consumption of apps running in the background without affecting the functionality of the app.
But when I tested Merlin on the Google Pixel 11 Pro, I just got differences in results, the phone heard almost no birds. I compared with another mobile and it was clear that the Pixel 11 Pro was significantly worse at picking up birdsong in the background than other phones are. Since the app doesn’t just record the sound but displays it as a spectrogram, it was possible to see the difference right on the screen.
What was clear was that the Pixel recording delivered a very clean sound, where the phone I compared it to had a greyish spectrogram of rustle from the trees and noise from a traiked road some distance away, the spectrogram in the Pixel was almost white.
The Pixelmobile is therefore very good at filtering out background noise from the microphone. Just what you want for phone calls and maybe video recording. Unless it’s the rustling of the trees you want in the video, of course. Or the birdsong, because apparently that was also counted among the background disturbances that were dampened.
Above all, this is a feature I want where I need it, all the time. I expect that the apps that need noise cancellation get it, but not that the noise cancellation is built into the microphone so that you can’t get sound without it.
Google’s philosophy with the Pixel mobiles is largely about automation with the help of AI. You should get what you want from the phone without having to ask for it. But if Google guesses wrong about what you want, and you can’t opt out of the automation, well then Google has instead made something far less useful than the universal gadget we’ve grown accustomed to the mobile phone being.
By the way, the Pixel 11 Pro copes with the battery consumption from Merlin just fine, ten minutes of recording took two percent of the charge, but the phone still has poor battery life for other reasons. I will return to that in my full test.