
One week with the Google Pixel - tortilla
https://medium.com/@elliotjaystocks/one-week-with-the-google-pixel-f43e6647906f#.2l4udx8oo
======
clumsysmurf
"3\. Deep Google integration - This shouldn’t be surprising in any way, but
having Google built into pretty much everything you do on the phone is
seriously useful."

This is my main sticking point with Android lately. I would much rather have a
stock Android OS + device from Google, and then add the few Google services I
want. Instead Google is getting more and more baked into everything, and
understanding how my data is being used is becoming more difficult - and this
has me worried.

~~~
josephg
I moved from Android to iOS last year for this exact reason. Using android
over a few versions felt like a slow slippery slope of access prompts giving
permission for google to use ever more personal data about me and my phone.
The final straw for me was learning that google uploads and stores audio
recordings of everything I've ever said into google now[1].

A year ago when I got my iphone I deleted all of the historical voice data
that google stored. Just now, In the process of finding the google activity
link below, I've learned that all my deleted voice clips have magically
undeleted themselves.

I've been very happy with iOS - there's some little UI gripes, but for me the
biggest feature is Tim Cook standing up to the US government on behalf of
privacy. I'm convinced that as an organisation Google just doesn't understand
what privacy is or why its important to people. With all the new deep app
intelligence features in android, I shudder to think about simply how much
data google might be storing about its users. I'm very happy to be out.

[1]
[https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?product=29](https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?product=29)

~~~
theswaagar
If I'm not mistaken doesn't Apple also record and upload everything you've
ever said to Siri?

~~~
simonh
Apple keeps the data for up to two years, but from 6 months its associated
with a random ID code so it's not personally identifiable. At least that's how
it used to be done. They have been talking about using more advanced
statistical anonymization techniques recently but I don't know if they are
used for Siri.

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doubleshadow
I switched from an iPhone 6+ to the Google Pixel. I've had two problems, but
overall love the phone.

1.) The phone is extremely slippery. I don't agree with the author on this
one. My old iPhone was way easier to grip, and the iPhone 7 is even better. I
bought a case which fixed this issue.

2.) I think this is pretty important. Android apps are second class citizens.
A lot of applications don't work properly with Android and you can tell that
there just isn't much developer time spent on it. I hope as the Pixel and
Google phones become more popular at the high end, more developer time is
focused on these applications. Most applications work fine, but sometimes it
can be frustrating when an application you expect to work has major bugs.

~~~
mdellavo
Can you be more specific with your second point? I haven't run across this at
all.

~~~
sowbug
The Tesla app for Android has numerous bugs that wouldn't have shipped if
Tesla leadership carried Android devices.

* The app must be closed in a certain way (back button or swiping away, rather than home button or switching to another app) or else it'll permanently lose network connectivity after a few minutes. I think this is because they keep the socket object in their main activity, and they don't deal with cases where an idle connection gets evicted from a NAT table or similar. But that's just speculation.

* If you launch the app in certain connectivity states, it will not just put up a no-connection alert, but it will flush your stored password. This could leave you in a pickle if you use a strong passphrase that you keep in a password manager, and you were relying on the app to unlock your car.

* The app doesn't support fingerprints. This isn't a bug, but it's something that enough apps support nowadays that it feels strange they're so far behind.

In addition, I'm told the iOS app has more features than the Android version,
but I've never seen it myself.

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wodenokoto
He doesn't have an iPhone 7+, yet he claims that the camera on the pixel are
"consistently better".

I don't have any, but the side by side tests I've seen of real world pictures
it is a complete wash between the two.

I find it silly to say that Apple didn't present a compelling enough camera,
but Google did, when they are as similar as they are.

~~~
visarga
They are probably cameras and phones assembled in the same factory.

~~~
wodenokoto
As far as I remember, they are both Sony cameras. I don't know if Google uses
Foxconn.

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colordrops
Not many negatives. Is it really that great of a phone, or is this really a
sales pitch?

~~~
r00fus
Exactly, this is a single data point, seemingly without contrast.

~~~
tossaway1
I've seen pretty good reviews across the board, even from Walt Mossberg, who I
generally think of as an Apple fanboy.

------
rmason
I am giddy about my Pixel XL. I've sold a few of my friends on getting one. I
was in the Sprint store cancelling my service as I moved over to Fi and once
the guys saw it they all had to play with it.

Only problem that I've had was getting the fingerprint sensor working. You're
finger down for around 45 seconds and it vibrates to tell you that its got it.
That wasn't working for me and the Google engineers blamed it on software that
I'd installed. But it failed before I'd installed any software.

I found an alternative way to do it ironically while waiting for a callback
from the engineer. Hold your finger down for 15 seconds, lift it up but keep
it hovering over the sensor. Then it will show you it's 20% done and prompt
you to put your finger down again. It takes five iterations to get a finger
done. You can do more than one finger and I've added four.

The one thing that I don't like is the dialing directory. You can't get it to
be alphabetical and instead of a standard list you end up with these big boxes
on the screen. Looks great in the photos with a half dozen contacts but fails
with hundreds. The UI is extremely awkward and I don't know how it passed user
testing. Does anyone have a favorite alternative for me to try?

Two pluses - battery life is fantastic and I've actually gotten almost two
days from one charge. I am usually negative on all assistants but Google's is
fantastic and I actually find myself using it for all sorts of things. I let
my 100 year old dad try it. He smirked and said Google what is the weather in
Paris, France tomorrow. It gave him the weather report and there was this
gorgeous look of complete shock on his face:<).

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travv0
"The Pixel needs charging once a day, which is a little bit of a
disappointment, but it charges really quickly."

I'm not sure I understand this negative. I'd think any problems caused by this
would be easily remedied by just charging your phone while you're sleeping,
when you can't use it anyway.

Or is he saying that it needs to be charged once a day, even if you charge it
overnight?

~~~
xyzzy123
If you don't always sleep in the same place it means lugging a charger.

It means you can't go to bed drunk and neccessarily expect your alarm to go
off in the morning.

It really just means that any time your life gets out of routine, your phone
is probably going to die.

~~~
SiVal
"Out of routine" is routine for frequent flyers. You never know when you'll
end up spending the night in an airport transit lounge or you can't get into
your hotel at the end of a flight around the world, or whatever. Or when
driving or hiking through a somewhat remote area and something goes wrong....

When things go wrong, you need to make calls, put out fires, keep trying to
reach remote towers using full radio power for extended periods.

When things go wrong is when you MOST need your phone, so you need a battery
that can continue to serve you a lot longer than it normally needs to on an
ordinary day unless you can somehow be certain that for you every day will be
an ordinary day.

~~~
tedunangst
Do frequent flyers not bring chargers in their carry on?

~~~
gcr
Tell me. Where in LAX or SFO or LGA can I find an electric outlet?

Some airports make them impossible to find, highly coveted, surrounded by the
territorial and ferroucious Horde, oodles of macbook MagSafe and ipad
Lightning cables eminating from the wall like thin withering tentacles of some
white goop monster emanating from the power grid.

Other airports lock the power sockets away behind "Employee Only" signs and
caution tape, with menacing security guards patrolling the area should you
even think about stealing those precious MWh from the institution.

Still other airports have rows upon rows of power outlets in plain sight, but
every single one of them is dead, disconnected, dying like your phone battery.

------
ebbv
Half the positives on this list I find to be kinda crazy to be positives. For
example having Facebook Messenger handle your SMS messages. Really? You want
to voluntarily give all that info to a company as user hostile as Facebook?

Less drastically I question the need to hide apps away in an app drawer. If
you don't use the app then just delete it. Am I alone in feeling that way?

I'm glad he's happy and the Pixel seems like a great phone but this list just
felt half crazy to me.

~~~
voxic11
Facebook SMS support is client side only. They do not get your texts in any
way.

~~~
ebbv
Are you absolutely sure about that? I'd like to believe you but I can't take
it on faith. I completely expect Facebook is giving itself some level of info
about your SMS messages unless there is some reason they can't.

~~~
voxic11
Trust is the only reason. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are
examining the traffic of Facebook apps and someone would make a sink about it
if there was evidence they were lieing about their privacy policy. That seems
like an adequate assurance for most people but certainly not all.

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plandis
I had the chance to play around with the Pixel and it is really cool.

Honestly I'd probably pick one up if not for the poor, IMO, speaker quality.
If you like to talk to your phone Google definitely has the best voice
assistant

------
oxplot
The saturated colors gave me a headache in the first hour of using the phone.
Luckily, there is an option to turn on sRGB color profile buried in the
developer tools menu (activated by tapping the build version in about phone
menu multiple times). After turning the option on, I don't want to look at any
other screen.

I'm not sure why this isn't on by default given that the sRGB option on pixel
apparently has the most accurate color representation of any phone (can't
remember where I read it) today.

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dmcginty
I've been using Samsung phones for several years (currently still using a
Galaxy S6), and my Pixel is supposed to come around the end of the month. Did
they really get rid of app badges? That has been a thing for a while, unless
I'm not understanding what "badges" are. Also, is the battery life on an
iPhone good enough that you don't have to charge it every day. I can't
remember owning a smartphone that could go longer than 24+ hours on one
charge.

~~~
s_kilk
> is the battery life on an iPhone good enough that you don't have to charge
> it every day

Yup. I have an iPhone 6, and routinely go two days between charges. I can
charge it overnight, use it all day, skip a night, all day again, and still
have about ~20% charge still left by the time I plug it in the next night
before bed.

~~~
josephg
I have a 6s+. With light usage my phone will often last a full 3 days between
charges.

------
nattaylor
I've been wondering if I was missing out on the iPhone's 3D touch feature, for
interacting with photos, messages, etc. The author didn't mention missing it,
so I guess I'm not.

~~~
ebbv
I haven't found it very useful. Certainly not a reason to choose iPhone over
Android. I have other reasons (like privacy concerns and ecosystem lock in).

~~~
pionar
Honest question - Why would you say Android is worse at ecosystem lock-in than
iOS?

~~~
danvasquez29
voluntary Ecosystem lock-in is actually the reason I moved back to iOS. I use
an iPad pro, and I don't believe there's a better tablet out there. I use
Macbook Pros both at work and at home. Having all of those devices perfectly
in sync is amazing for my productivity.

~~~
visarga
I tried too, but I can't find a use for tablets. As long as there is my laptop
around, I never reach for the tablet.

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visarga
> For instance, ask it to search for an actor and then ask, “what films has he
> starred in?” It knows you’re still talking about the same person.
> Impressive.

Yeah, but then you ask it: "What is heavier, a cat or an elephant?" and it
fails, because it is lacking in common sense. It only has a small-ish factoid
knowledge base and lacks all the general common sense things we take for
granted.

~~~
empath75
Obviously, because they haven't created a fully conscious artificial
intelligence, it's a complete failure.

~~~
visarga
Don't take it so hard. I am the greatest fan of conversational AI chatbots. I
am just a little too impatient, especially that I have seen a chatbot that can
do those types of common sense challenges.

------
hausjam
Pixel. iPhone. Two sides of the same lousy coin. They both do the same thing.
And they are doing it increasingly poorly. But consumers keep lapping it up
blindly. Do we really need hardware and software updates every year? They just
about get the bugs out of iOS 9 and lollipop, and hey, it's been a year. Let's
start all over again with new bugs.

------
usaphp
After trying pixel phone the most annoying thing for me is a fingerprint
censor location, its so annoying to pick it up or use two hands to unlock it
even when using the power on button which is on a side

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colemickens
Always fun to see Apple users step out of the RDF and gush over features that
Android has had for _years_ (not all of them, but a good chunk of them have
been present in Android for a long time now).

Edit: And yes, the UI/UX has changed remarkably little between Lollipop and
Nougat, despite the popular memes amongst non-Android users... like the ones
already repeated here.

~~~
askafriend
It's never been about the features. We have this conversation every single
time.

Users care about the experience, and features are only a portion of the
experience. That's what Apple really truly gets and other companies miss time
and time again.

~~~
colemickens
And the UI/UX is hardly at all different than what has been shipping for the
last 3 major Android versions.

Again, none of this is new for people who are actually using a recent version
of Android in the last 2-3 years, but go figure I get downvoted for pointing
it out.

Just as your comment proves, it's a sad, tired and completely out-dated meme
that Android doesn't have good UX. And then these blog posts come along and I
roll my eyes because my old phone that is 2 major revs behind Nougat looks and
behaves virtually identical to Nougat.

Ironically, there _are_ good features in the last few major revs, but they're
more about granular permissions and other functionality that isn't touched on
by this article at all.

~~~
empath75
Perhaps writing in a less condescending way might attract fewer downvotes.

~~~
colemickens
It's hard to tell someone they're mindlessly repeating years-out-of-date,
inaccurate memey tropes without coming across as condescending.

