Google Pixel vs Apple iPhone 7

Call Quality

Shock of shocks: with all this high-end hardware inside, calls on both phones sound stellar. It's a tough call, but if we had a gun to our head, the iPhone may deliver calls with a lower noise floor, helping to sound exceptionally clear – but that's by a small margin, with the Pixel still sounding great under most circumstances.

Battery Life

An incredibly close race may be decided by recharge times – now if we only had wireless

For phones with two very different battery sizes – 2,770mAh for the Pixel and 1,960mAh for the iPhone 7 – these handsets offer quite comparable battery life, each getting between seven-and-a-half and seven-and-three-quarters hours in our custom tests. That may be short of full-day usage depending on your demands, but it's not disappointing, either.

The Pixel has a slight lead in recharge times, coming back up to 100% capacity about 20 minutes faster than the iPhone – but the difference between two hours and two hours and change may not ultimately matter that much.

Neither phone supports wireless charging, which is a darn shame – at least it would help us decide a winner that much easier. But as it stands, these two are really well matched in the power department.

Conclusion

Google and Apple really don't make it easy for us to identify one clearly superior phone, and maybe that's a good thing – there's so much on the line with these two handsets that the companies behind them have taken little to change, and it really shows just how much care went into making each of these phones the well-executed handsets they are.

But while both are stellar handsets, a few specific things really stand out about each. The iPhone 7, for example, is just a masterpiece of phone design: slim, sleek, and feels nothing short of incredible in the hand. Google does a great job on the Pixel, too, although admittedly not quite at the same level yet.

Some strengths really do stand out for each: if you love the outdoors, maybe the iPhone 7's waterproofing and extra-bright screen are just what you need. And if you're still sore about Apple's decision to kill the headphone jack, Google's happy to connect the Pixel to your cans of choice.

A few years ago a Google phone might have had the benefit of a killer price, but the Pixel and iPhone 7 are pretty evenly matched, starting at the same $650. And how weird is it that Apple – the company notorious for its take-it-or-leave-it approach to phone options – is the company offering its handset in a wider range of colors (though that Pixel blue is still markedly off-beat)?

These smartphones each represent something special, bringing you a mobile experience expertly honed by the companies also behind their respective smartphone platforms. That means an attention to detail that you won't always find from some third-party phone-maker, and exceptionally tight integration with software and services. Neither choice will let you down, so what's it going to be? With so much falling to individual preferences, this decision's ultimately on you.