Google Pixel 6 just got a new feature and might soon get another
Adaptive Sound and face unlock
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Phones aren’t finished at launch, with companies often adding new features over time through software updates, and one such feature seems to have just landed on the Google Pixel 6 and Google Pixel 6 Pro.
According to Mishaal Rahman (a tech journalist), his Pixel 6 now has an Adaptive Sound feature. This is something that allows the phone to improve the sound quality from its internal speaker by using the microphone to assess the acoustics near you and then adjusting the equalizer to suit your environment.
It’s a feature that we’ve already seen on the Google Pixel 5 and Google Pixel 4a 5G, but it was absent from the Pixel 6 range at launch. According to Rahman it just appeared on the settings screen, so keep an eye out for it – if you don’t have it yet, you might do soon.
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Did anyone else with a Pixel 6 just get Adaptive Sound? It showed up in Settings for me this morning. I thought this feature was made as a bandaid for the Pixel 5's crappy speaker, so I didn't expect the Pixel 6 to get it 🤔 pic.twitter.com/QzllOGBy37November 9, 2021
That’s not the only new feature you might have soon though, as Twitter user @mile_freak07 found reference to a face unlock feature codenamed Tuscany in Pixel 6 code.
The mention of it is dated July 9, so with no more recent mentions found it’s possible that this feature has been abandoned, but @mile_freak07 reckons there might still be hope for it.
Analysis: face unlock could be a salve for the Pixel 6’s fingerprint scanning woes
While we wouldn’t count on a face unlock feature coming to the Pixel 6 range, it could certainly be beneficial to users who have struggled with the fingerprint scanner on these phones.
We found that the fingerprint scanner was both slow, and would often fail to read our digits, and we weren’t alone, with there being enough people reporting similar issues for Google to acknowledge that it can be slow.
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Apparently this is due to "enhanced security algorithms", and moisturising your finger can help, but that’s not an ideal solution.
Worse still, numerous users have reported – in claims spotted by AndroidPolice - that the fingerprint scanner breaks entirely if your Pixel’s battery runs flat, with only a factory reset fixing the problem.
Hopefully that issue will be solved in a software update, but we’re less optimistic that the slow and unreliable nature of the scanner will, so offering an alternative biometric option like face unlock could certainly be desirable.
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Via TalkAndroid and GSMArena
James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.