The New Google Pixel Update in December Brings New Features and Improvements

The home screen on Pixels is getting more customizable. Image: Google

Google’s latest Pixel feature drop, the company brings a slew of new software tricks to its smartphone with some brand new functionality like Adaptive Sound, which improves the sound quality of your phone speaker based on your surroundings. The December drop ringing many of the latest software features from the Pixel 5, 4A 5G, and 4A to older devices. Google says the Pixel 3 and newer will be included for this update. The news features like Hold for Me, where the Google Assistant waits for a real person to hop on the customer support line instead of making you do it and others like Extreme Battery Saver mode and screen sharing on Duo calls will soon hit older devices.

Several Pixel phones receiving this feature drop will be getting a new feature to preserve the battery’s long-term health including Adaptive Charging. Google says Adaptive Charging helps preserve battery health over time by dynamically controlling how quickly a Pixel device charges when plugged in overnight. This is coming to Pixels 4 and newer devices.

Thee Pixel 5 and 4A 5G will now default to using 4G for simple tasks like web browsing and texting, but they will flip on the 5G connection for streaming movies or watching large files. Google also says the GPS accuracy on the Pixel 5 and 4A 5G is improved after this update.

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Adaptive Sound trick which seems like an attempt to improve the Pixel 5’s mediocre speaker output it uses the microphone to assess the acoustics near you, then adjusts the sound equalizer settings in certain apps. So the phone will tune audio differently in your bathroom compared to the bedroom.

Google notes that all microphone data recorded for speaker optimization is deleted shortly after being recorded and the company says this feature always runs locally on your device and doesn’t send any audio to the cloud. Adaptive Sound is only coming to the Pixel 5 and 4A 5G.

The home screen on Pixel phones is getting more customizable with this update. You’ll be able to choose new icons, grid views, and app shapes. Smaller stuff like the option to export the Pixel’s Now Playing automatic music recognition to a YouTube Music playlist will roll out as part of the December feature drop .