Google planned a new era with the Pixel 4 but quickly discarded the ideas for Motion Sense. In the meantime, Google had followed in Apple’s footsteps and also a little further afield. Motion Sense was the name of a Pixel 4 feature that ultimately turned out to be a lost year. On the one hand the gestures, on the other hand, the face unlock supported by hardware.
In the Pixel 4 there was a front camera on the one hand, but also numerous additional sensors:
The phone is operated by touch, so gestures seem like a pretty silly idea to do a few centimeters in front of the display. That was the case. Google only installed Motion Sense in the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, and then immediately removed it again.
On the one hand the sensors for gesture recognition, but also the sensors for face unlock. Since then, Apple has actually been the only manufacturer that still offers Face-Unlock with special hardware.
Motion Sense didn’t survive in smartphones
Google’s experiment failed and other important things were missed. The Pixel 4’s battery life in particular was disastrous compared to competing smartphones. Still, the Pixel 4 generation laid a foundation for the future that perhaps none of us had thought of at the time. Motion Sense lives on, today in smart speakers from Google.
And for these devices, gesture recognition makes a lot more sense. With generous gestures that control music or other things, that makes more sense for smart speakers than for smartphones. It’s just stupid that the Pixel 4 generation had torn a real hole in history because Google then bridged a year and only made a much more extensive attempt with the Pixel 6.
What remains of the Pixel 4 as a smartphone: The white model with a black frame (Panda) looked fantastic and felt extremely good in the hand.