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Beating the Galaxy S21 Ultra, Z Fold3, and Pixel 6
The results are in, and our readers here at Android Police have chosen their favorite phone of the year. Among the ten nominees you selected, the Google Pixel 6 Pro has come out on top, making it our Android Police Readers’ Choice 2021 Phone of the Year.
We like to think that our regular readers have more sophisticated tastes than most of the Android blog-reading hoi polloi, as some of the discussion quality clearly suggests. Whether you think 2021 was a good or a bad year for smartphones, our readers nominated a wider-than-expected swath of options, even including some mid-rangers. But your tastes are clear, and the Pixel 6 Pro is the winner.
Final results.
It’s an excellent phone, with premium specs at an affordable-for-a-flagship-in-2021 $900 starting price. It has an incredible camera, with the company’s physically huge new primary sensor reaching new heights in low light, plus Google’s first-ever folded lens/periscope telephoto. Add a 120Hz screen, all the modern connectivity options you need (and even the ones you probably don’t need yet, like Wi-Fi 6E and mmWave 5G), plus good build quality — though maybe not a very good fingerprint sensor.
But Google’s Tensor is ideally suited for the strenuous AI-enhanced workloads Google pushes its way with new Assistant functionality and things like Live Translate, among other Pixel 6-exclusive features. In fact, software on Google’s flavor of Android 12 is one of our favorites — barring the typical early release cycle Google bugs that should be mostly ironed out with a few more updates.
The Pixel 6 and 6 Pro take great photos — outside the telephoto, camera hardware is the same.
The cheaper Pixel 6 was our Editors Choice Most Wanted award winner for the year. And it’s worth pointing out that this is the first time since I started our Readers’ Choice awards in 2018 that we’ve had a single phone series sweep both sets of awards. That first year was an exception when both the editors and our readers chose the OnePlus 6T, but voting was a little different, and ever since then, we’ve been in disagreement. Today, we may still have chosen different models, but it’s clear that the Pixel 6 series has had a big impact on our readers and editors in 2021.
You have voted, and your voice has been heard: The Pixel 6 Pro is our Android Police Readers’ Choice Phone of the Year.
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