First introduced with the Pixel 2 phones, Google equipped its phones with sides that triggered the Google Assistant via a short, sharp squeeze. I’m not exactly sure how it worked — there was something about strain gauges — but it was an effective way of waking up Google’s smarter take on Siri without barking the occasionally clunky “ok Google” activation phrase. What might have felt like a superfluous feature became oddly useful and second nature. It also introduced a level of freshness and minor innovation into the Pixel phones, something I felt many phones were lacking at the time. Sadly, the squeezable sides of the Pixel phones only lasted a few generations, going the way of the dodo when the Google Pixel 5 arrived with the search giant taking a different approach to phone design — less is more — before settling on the Pixel aesthetics and AI focus debuted with the Pixel 6. germany-vs-denmark/?v=daily