 Tom here from Lawrence Systems and we're going to talk about Project Fi and the Google Pixel 4. Well, I think it's called Google Fi now, but you know, I conflate those terms sometimes because what I signed up when it was still called Project Fi. If you want to learn more about me or my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. Feel like hires for a project or a hires button at the top. If you'd like to support Channel Otherways, there are affiliate links below for products and services we talk about on this channel. So I'm holding in my hand the fabric covered Pixel 4, which not everyone loved this phone. That's for sure. There's plenty of YouTube hate for it, I would say. And I'm going to say it's a very reasonable phone. I just took the fabric case off of it to kind of show the wonderful glossiness of this Pixel 4, which I'm not a fan of. Matt Black, there's a guy that talks about that, KBHD. He's very right on that. So I do agree with some of them in terms of, yeah, for what you pay for this phone, if you buy it at full retail price, it's going to be a little bit expensive. Compared to other smart phones out there that have other offerings. And I'm not here to really go into every little detail and debate about that. My experience, though, of an owner of this phone is I really enjoy it. And one of the things about the Google experience you get with Android is they give you a very clean experience under Pixel line of phones. It's the flagship from Google with all of the Google updates and features. And one of the things that matters a lot to me as someone who works in tech and security, and why I'm even talking about this, is security updates, patches and features. I don't want anything more than what I use on my phone. This is something that if you go through some of the other carriers, they load their extras on there. And this creates a lot of potential security problems. This was found through different research where all these other companies, some of these add-ons aren't as well vetted. They just want to get whatever it is they can do to upsell you. So they put these extras on the phone and to top that off, carriers and one of the more notable ones that's I think one of the most delayed when I was on their network, I don't know where they're at now was like Verizon would be an example of when there's an update for the operating system, they drag their feet and delay it. These are all problems that bother someone who works in security going, hey, I know there's a flaw in Verizon's like, hold on, we have to make sure we get all of our crap compatible with this update. We're not worried about security as much as worried about, you know, you not removing the extras that we installed on the phone. And that's obviously just really bothersome. Now why did I bring up Google Fi and the Pixel phone? Well, security really has to extend to both the carrier and the phone. And the carrier and the phone to me means using the Google Fi project. So it was called Project Fi. Now I keep calling it the Google Fi project. It's just a mental thing. But yes, it's now just called. You can get it at fi.google.com. And Google decided to get into the phone service business because I don't know. They want more information about you as one aspect. The other aspect is they've created a better service and no one else was doing it. They're not the cheapest service. So if you're just here price shopping, no, they're not going to be the cheapest service you can find. But they give me a lot more confidence than any of these other carriers have when it terms of people potentially hijacking your phone number. Because as much as I wish it was not true, too often your phone is the second factor of verification. They want to call and text you. So the attack method many of these bad actors will do is figure out who your carrier provider is. And the overly helpful customer service oriented people at these large carriers will frequently let you bypass any questions you put on there. Many celebrities have dealt with this directly where people have taken over their phones. And the nice thing about the way Google Fi works is you can't even talk to someone at Fi unless you have all your Google account information in order. By the way, the opposite is true. If you don't know your Google account, you lose your Gmail that you've tied the Google Fi to or you have it tied to your G Suite. They do offer both services. You're not getting back in either. So there is a risk of you could actually lose things if you're not organized and lose your password, lose all your lockdown on your Google account. But I'm fine with keeping all that information secure and by extension of that because the Google Fi people want to verify all of that before I can make any changes to the account. It's been really solid. Like I have a good confidence there. Now, little nuances that I've noticed as well. For example, if you have any Google to send you something, they are aware that you are probably, if you're using Google Fi, using Hangouts. One more security step I like that they take is, for example, if you wanted something sent to your phone that may be suspicious in terms of, hey, it looks like you want a reset sent. They don't send it to Hangouts. They send it very specifically to the phone. Why do I bring that up? Well, Fi has the ability to log in to your browser, logged into that same Google account, and I can make calls from my browser. I can text people from my browser. That's awesome. And you're probably thinking, well, here comes a security flaw. If people text you and reset things and you get it in the browser, that would be a problem. While texts come through for other services that are used that require like an SMS verification, Google realizes that they need to send a text to your phone to verify something because that's what you've chosen to have as your second factor. They'll send it directly to the phone and not to the web browser or any browser logged in. These are little things I've noticed that Google really seems to care a lot about security. Whether or not you feel they are a privacy-orienting company, which I know they're not, but how you feel about their privacy situation is very different than maybe you feel about their security situation. They may be like, gathering your data, they'll admit they really want to keep it. And that's something that does matter in the scheme of things when it comes to the way you manage your security around you. All these aspects have to be thought about. Now, the final things I'm going to talk about with the Pixel 4. The battery life on it, I find very adequate. This is Pixel 4 XL. I haven't had a problem with it. The camera is every bit as amazing as many of the people on YouTube have to admit that, yeah, the camera's really good on it. Google's on an excellent job between Night Sight, the photos, and to go beyond that, I also have the, because I know they didn't put a wide angle on this, but it's actually pretty wide. I go further and take some of the photos with the moment lens. I've had this since my Pixel 2, and I use it on my Pixel 4 here. So I'm really happy with the camera. I'm really happy with the fact that moment, if you're not familiar with them, I think I have a review of it. I'm probably going to do another review of the Pixel 4. It's just really impressive. Now, coverage is the last piece I'll talk about, and I found this really interesting. So my wife has my Pixel 2 now, and we're both on Google Fi. This worked amazing in very remote areas I was just at over the weekend up north. And that's kind of what made me think about this video a little bit more was, well, how well does it work as the question comes up? And I travel some, but I travel to major cities. So, yes, of course it works great. In every major city I've been in, there's international plans, but I don't really travel internationally, but they've got good coverage pretty much everywhere. But, well, how does it work in some remote areas? Well, Northern Michigan is not a very densely populated area, and I was excited that this worked. Not just worked. Worked really well. I had data, and my wife's like, what are you doing? I'm like, wow, I was replying to someone's message. She's like, I have no bars. Now, we're both on the same service, and I believe this is something that's a little bit harder to really subjectively test, but I can tell you that definitely made a difference is this phone, which obviously I didn't turn off, I think it's getting messages now, it had no problem getting full reception in rural Michigan versus I, my wife's phone was not, and we're on the same service. So, I've been really impressed. This is something I think they definitely must have stepped up as the radio technology inside of these. It's been very trouble-free. Now, pricing-wise, like I said in the beginning, a little bit overpriced for the features you get, but it works the best with Google Fi. There are other phones, such as Moto G7 is a less expensive one. That's 100% Fi-compatible. There's only a limited amount of phones in the store that work with Google Fi fully. There's other phones supported, and you can go through and figure out, they have like compatibility lists for which phones work, but of course, there may be gaps. There may be radio bands that aren't supported because you don't have the Google Fi phone versus when Google certifies in Google Fi, it's fully supported, top to bottom, no questions. And if you buy this one on Google Fi, they have a lot of offers for, when I got this one, it was more than half off through a December sale they had, and I just picked up a Moto G7 for my son, which works really well, and they have a half off deal on that. Little misleading, so to speak, on the half off, because you pay full price now, or pay half price, depending on how you want to look at it, you have to activate on Google Fi and they give you a credit on Google Fi. So yes, in the big picture, yes, you're going to get it for that price on there. It's just you're paying for it over time. So take that for what it's worth. And I'm not going to dive deep into pricing because the video is being recorded in January 2020. What I tell you the price is now, they may change it. They do offer unlimited plans. They do have, to me, very reasonably priced plans. But if you're someone who's using a whole lot of data, then Google Fi, if you're only looking at price, like I said, Google Fi may not be for you. But if you're looking for solid security and a phone that has solid, pure Android experience with good updates, the Pixel line is really good. They should soon have the, I believe, Pixel 4a, and they did this with the Pixel 3, they had the Pixel 3a. It's still the same phone minus a few bells and whistles that makes it a little bit less expensive. So that may be a really good opportunity when that one comes out. But overall, after using it since November of 2015, when I first started using Project Fi, became Google Fi, here I am here in January 2020, I still really enjoy it. I've had this absolutely, almost no problems at all. I've only talked to support once in almost four and a half years now. And it was because of an outage that T-Mobile had. And they had a really easy workaround. And the outage only affected some small area where I was in Michigan. And by messaging them online to figure out why the phone wasn't working, it was more of me testing them. They responded right away. As a matter of fact, they had given me a code that I could type in. They said it would last about 24 hours. It would just block because it connects to T-Mobile and Sprint's network, and I believe a couple others. It blocked trying to connect to T-Mobile's network because they were having a problem. I think this was like 2016 or 2017. I'm going back a while here. And then it was really fixed quite quickly. So it automatically cut back over to T-Mobile network. They said that after I typed the code and it worked for only so many hours to block the network and force me to be on one of the other networks. I never really think about which network the phone's on. It's not really been much of a concern. And by the way, even though there was some problem at the network level, me sitting in front of my computer, I could get all my calls still. I could send text messages if I needed to do so. So I wasn't ever out of communication, really. This is also nice, of course, when you're someone like myself and you may end up in basements of places and server rooms where cell phones just may not have access due to the location you are, sometimes in areas that just, well, not a lot of radio reception when you go inside of like a data center, but still being able to open up and have internet access through my laptop and be able to message people back and forth and text if need be or even make a phone call from the laptop. It can be difficult from a data center because of the noises and whatnot that'll be in there. But that's my thoughts on Google Fi. Like I said, really happy with it. I do have, if you want to, click it, not obligation, of course, an offer code down below that gets you some Fi credit and gets me some Fi credit as an offer. I'm always up front about the affiliate links. But I do recommend the service. I do enjoy it. I have been happy with it over the last few years. And so it's still something I recommend and something I plan to keep using. And the Pixel 4, too. Camera's amazing. Might be a separate review, but yeah. When I go on vacation, this is outstanding. Thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. 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