Active Edge Your Google Pixel 2 with Side Squeeze Feature

Bianca Patrick
3 min readSep 8, 2022

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Google may not get a satisfactory response from its smartphone sales stats, but manufacturing innovative products is its biggest strength. The Pixel smartphones are one of the rarest brands available on the market that can offer a unique user experience and get recognized by loyal consumers. The latest news about the four years old smartphone Google Pixel brings a special feature that was never seen in previous model versions. The Pixel 2 Active Edge feature has not had a major impact on the user’s buying behavior, and in this digital age, summoning Google Assistant will not assist in completing all major activities.

The Google Pixel’s exciting feature to engage with your smartphone has not become a trend in major branded models, but it is a new way of interacting with the world’s fastest-searching digital assistant. This is made possible by a pair of strain gauges on the inside of the phone, which detect the little bend in the casing of your phone when you press it. This is a shift that my human nervous system cannot detect; I observe no phone bending.

Pixel 2 Active Edge

The sides are barely saved from the power button and volume buttons. The Google Assistant will appear at the bottom of the screen and be ready to begin listening to you if you squeeze the phone’s exposed edges hard enough. There is no need to repeatedly press any physical or virtual button or tap the screen to wake up the phone. You squeeze and begin to speak. Even though smartphones are solid metal and plastic items, the Pixel can detect when I’m exerting more pressure than simply holding it.

Two strain gauges can detect the little bend in your phone’s case. Several users could not open Google Assistant and experimented with various techniques to ignore this feature. Some installed apps to indirectly open digital supporters, but lost smartphone memory. The memory cleaner and RAM performance enhancing tools were added to boost smartphone function, but the damage was done.

Whether you found Active Edge useful depends on how much you like using Google Assistant; squeeze always worked, which made it so. Active Edge continued to function even while you were in an app, obscuring navigation buttons or when your phone’s screen was entirely off. The feature truly existed in this pattern. The Edge Sense feature on HTC’s U11, released a few months before Google’s smartphone, was comparable to the Pixel 2’s but more flexible. It has appeared on Google’s smartphones since the two firms collaborated on the Pixel and Pixel 2 search engines, and the leading brand acquired HTC’s mobile division the same year.

Google made other attempts before Active Edge to provide a different way to manage your phone besides the touchscreen or physical buttons. Before the Pixel 2, Motorola offered a rotating phone feature that opened the camera. Virtual buttons that you press by interacting with the device have been added. The Active Edge button is far more reliable than the virtual power button and far more effective in many ways. The shortcut buttons will not go extinct soon, but Apple may change this concept entirely if new rivals cannot inspire their target audience.

Is Active Edge good or bad?

The physical shortcuts must be added, but one or two buttons must be designed for the latest smartphones to facilitate younger and older audiences. The Active Edge feature is highly unique, but for a big digital brand like Google, it is not necessary to include a second physical key that must be waterproof. Users may easily access functions that they, or in the case of the Pixel, think are significant with something as basic as a squeeze button.

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Bianca Patrick
Bianca Patrick

Written by Bianca Patrick

Bianca is a content creator & a passionate blogger. She is a professional tech blogger & an avid reader. She loves to explore topics related to tech.

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