Friends+Design
- Excellent build quality, and well crafted design
- Feels relatively comfortable to hold for a device as large as this
- Fingerprint reader on the back is fast and accurate, and as a bonus you can use it to slide down notifications on the screen
- The front-facing camera is excellent, too - it has a wide enough lens to fit a lot of faces in each frame, and it softens skin tones enough to look appealing without appearing too airbrushed
- Although the phone has some basic dust and water resistance, it can't quite handle a dunking like the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, and Samsung's 2016 flagships
Display
- Beautiful, large display - ideal for watching videos, and reading
- Sunlight legibility of the display is average
Software
- The first device to feature Android 7.1 which brings in some very useful new features like launcher shortcuts (Google's take on Apple's 3D Touch)
- Coming directly from Google, regular Android updates are ensured - something that other Android flagships can't match
- The key differentiator though is the built-in Google Assistant - the search giant's new, thoroughly robust voice-and-search service - it's the most powerful and natural voice assistant yet (beating Apple's Siri and Microsoft' Cortana) and uses machine learning and Google's vast search database to answer all kinds of questions you throw its way - think of it as Google Now evolved
Performance
- Smooth, slick performance, even with graphics-intensive games, backed by top-of-the-line hardware (matching other Android flagships in benchmarks, though falling a little behind the iPhone 7 which is the fastest phone right now)
Camera
- Fantastic camera - rivaling the already great camera of the Apple iPhone 7 Plus - the camera is fast, images are in focus, colors look vibrant, and landscape scenes retain an impressive amount of detail and depth, even with objects that are far away
- Low light performance is especially good
- The camera can shoot 4K video, and though it doesn't have optical image stabilization, it uses a combination of the gyroscope and software to steady your videos which works pretty well
- The camera's lens blur feature to get artsy background blurs on portrait shots doesn't work as well as that on the iPhone 7 Plus
Audio
- Good call quality
- Nice, clear, balanced loudspeaker (though it's not stereo, which would have been great)
Battery
- Very good battery life - easily survives a solid work day with medium to heavy usage - is a little better than the Pixel
- Supports fast charging technology (though it's not as fast as some of the other flagships)
More
- It can also schedule reminders, look up facts and places to eat, set alarms, give directions, translate phrases and more
- For a flagship phone, the design is, on the whole, uninspiring (although this is subjective)
