I initially
shared some thoughts on Twitter yesterday about this whole deal and still feel the same way for the most part. Basically, I’ve had the phone in my hand for a week and have used the sh*t out of it (7 hours SoT the other day!). While I certainly noticed the color shift to blue when the phone isn’t situated at the perfect viewing angle, I don’t know that I was offended at any time. I tend to like looking at my phones directly at all times, not at odd angles – call me a weirdo! Again, the blue tint shift is there and I don’t know that any Pixel 2 XL phone doesn’t have this issue, you just need to decide if it’s that big of a deal. To me, it’s not.
As for the less-than-punchy colors, I’m not seeing this as the ultimate dealbreaker either. And I say that because, again, I’ve been using the phone for more than a week and didn’t once say, “Man, the colors look terrible here and Google and LG should be ashamed and I don’t want this phone.” In fact, I thought to myself that the display looked fine and am only now seeing the huge difference since I’ve compared it to other phones while writing up this post. In other words, I don’t know that most people will care unless they are doing some deep dive display comparisons to their old phones or are a display freak. And it’s fine if you fall into that category, I just would think that most people will come away thinking this whole situation is fine.
If anything, I would hope that Google might give us back that sRGB toggle after this backlash. I have a good feeling about that fixing the color reproduction complaints. It won’t fix the blue tint, though.
Should you cancel your Pixel 2 XL pre-order? I don’t think so, no. At this point, you should receive that order, take the phone for a spin, and then decide if these problems are going to be dealbreakers. You can always return these things. In the end, you are still getting the best software experience and arguably the best camera in all of smartphones, stellar battery life, and 3 years worth of major software updates.