- Analysis by KJ David
Google's second Pixel smartphone may sport a revamped chassis (It has a longer body -- 5.7 versus 5.66 inches, while retaining the original's screen space), but several of its specs are hardly improvements over its mother model. Having said that, the Pixel 2 still has enough pros in its arsenal to merit a flagship status.
One of its biggest selling points is offering an eSIM capability 
, which basically lets you use the device without having to pop in an actual SIM card -- it still has a nano SIM card slot, though. This makes the Pixel 2 the first smartphone (High-end tablets have been using eSIMs for a while) to offer such technology. Speaking of firsts, this Google-Daydream-enabled VR smartphone is Google's first model equipped with Active Edge , literally letting you launch phone functions by squeezing the phone. It's also the first to run on the Android 8.0 Oreo platform.
For its hardware, the Pixel 2 uses a high-ranking Snapdragon 835 dual-cluster eight-core engine clocked at 2.35GHz + 1.9GHz bundled with 4GB of LPDDR4x RAM and an Adreno 540 GPU . On par with its performance parts is its virtually unlimited photo/video storage space through Google Photos , making its 128GB/64GB on-board storage, which, by the way, is not accompanied by a memory card slot 
, sound more than adequate.
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Regrettably, this Pixel edition does not quite do its name justice, settling for only 12.2 megapixels on its rear camera and a meager 8 megapixels on its selfie cam , despite a bunch of its high-class contemporaries boasting up-to-20-megapixel shooters. Google, however, tries to make up for its lack in raw pixel count with high-tier camera features, such as 4K-2160p video capture as well as a combination of laser and dual pixel phase-detection autofocus .
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In terms of display, its hard to be impressed with the Google Pixel 2's FHD-1080p 5-inch interface with "just" a 441DPI screen fineness (we expect more than that for VR machines), especially with all the QHD-1440p screens floating around, but it does feature an Always On architecture and a 2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protective cover . As for its power supply, even though it disappoints us with only a 2700mAh battery capacity (A lot of tantamount models shoot for as high as 4000mAh), its 7-hour promised usage time under just 15 minutes of charging sounds like a standout -- at least compared to what some of its rivals offer.
Rounding out its pros and cons is an LTE Cat 15 network adapter enabling up-to-800Mbps data rates and an IP67-certified waterproof metal unibody . It is offered in painstakingly-though-out colors, namely Just Black, Clearly White, and Kinda Blue.
In the end, despite cutting some corners in terms of technical pros and cons, the Pixel 2 is propped up to be a viable option for the tech-savvy Android user.
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