Every major phone launch has a “-gate”: a drama about some problem or worry with the hardware. With the Pixel 4, there are several: thebattery may be too small, theface unlock works with your eyes closed, and now theconditions at which the screen will refresh at 90 Hz and when it will ratchet down to 60 Hz are pretty confusing. Google calls the feature “Smooth Display,” but its reception has been anything but smooth in the past 24 Hours.
Google previously said it adjusts the refresh rate depending on what’s happening on the screen to improve battery life, butyesterday some Redditors figured outthat refresh rate also drops down to 60 Hz if the screen brightness is set below 75 percent. Further investigation from the Android community revealed that it may stay up at 90 Hz at lower brightness levels if theambient lighting in the room is bright enough.
It’s all very strange, so we asked Google for a statement and it has replied with a little more detail on when the screen changes its refresh rate and – most importantly – a promise of a software update. Here’s the full statement, emphasis mine:
We designed Smooth Display so that users could enjoy the benefits of 90 Hz for improved UI interactions and content consumption, while also preserving battery when higher refresh rates are not critical by lowering back down to 60 Hz.
In some conditions or situations, however, we set the refresh rate to 60 Hz. Some of these situations include: when the user turns on battery saver, certain content such as video (as it’s largely shot at 24 or 30 fps), and even various brightness or ambient conditions. We constantly assess whether these parameters lead to the best overall user experience.We have previously planned updates that we’ll roll out in the coming weeks that include enabling 90 hz in more brightness conditions.
So there you go: there are a lot of situations that will cause the screen’s refresh rate to drop down, certainly more than you might assume.
That makes two software updates Google has promised for the Pixel 4, the otherbeing an update that requires your eyes to be open for face unlock to work. That update is due “in the coming months,” while this screen refresh update is set for the “coming weeks.”
One of the reasons to buy a Pixel phone instead of another Android phone is the guaranteed software updates. Somehow I don’t think anybody was thinking about updates for face unlock and screen refresh rates when they made their preorders, but here we are. It’s great that Google is so quickly addressing complaints – but it would have been better if they didn’t have to in the first place.
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