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One week with the Google Pixel
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- colordrops 10y agoNot many negatives. Is it really that great of a phone, or is this really a sales pitch?
- r00fus 10y agoExactly, this is a single data point, seemingly without contrast.
- tossaway1 10y agoI've seen pretty good reviews across the board, even from Walt Mossberg, who I generally think of as an Apple fanboy.
- fweespeech 10y agoThe Google Nexus & Pixel line have been the best Android phones imo so its not that surprising. However, the invasiveness of the Pixel changes for "Deep Google Integration" in #3 is likely as much a pro as a con.
- colemickens 10y agoAlways 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 10y agoIt'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.
- nowayyeah 10y agoMore than "experience" is about feeling special about spending thousands of euros on a stupid piece of plastic and be among the "elite".
- iamdave 10y agoHow many people can you count in your circle factually bought an iPhone for that precise reason?
- colemickens 10y agoAnd 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 10y agoPerhaps writing in a less condescending way might attract fewer downvotes.
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- ebbv 10y agoHalf 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 10y agoFacebook SMS support is client side only. They do not get your texts in any way.
- ebbv 10y agoAre 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 10y agoTrust 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.
- stanleydrew 10y agoThey don't get your texts in the message routing sense, but they absolutely have access to the content and could be shipping it to their servers every 5 seconds or whatever. I don't think they are probably doing that, but there's not really any way to prevent them from doing that.
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- clumsysmurf 10y ago"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.
- nowayyeah 10y ago> and this has me worried. You are among the few (yes yes even here on HN). And google doesn't make money with you. So who cares?
- fweespeech 10y agoHe is not one of the few. People have pushed this "You are paranoid, no one is out to get you" narrative since the 90s. Everyone has something to hide, even if its just their sex life or beliefs that aren't politically favored that might affect your employment.
- Karunamon 10y ago<post class="devils-advocate"> And yet not one single instance of Google misusing their collected advertising info exists. All of the dumping on Google Services has, to the day I write this, proven to be absolute FUD without a single concrete thing to point at.
- marricks 10y agoWell that system is partly to thank for the rich info they are forced to give up for secret court orders from the US government, so I'd say there are some.
- kinkdr 10y ago“Past performance does not guarantee future results” I don't have a single bad thing to say about Google, but that doesn't mean that I am not afraid of their power and I don't dread the day that the current management will not be there to keep them in check. And sooner or later that day will come.
- usaphp 10y agoAfter 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
- plandis 10y agoI 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
- nattaylor 10y agoI'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 10y agoI 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 10y agoHonest question - Why would you say Android is worse at ecosystem lock-in than iOS?
- ebbv 10y agoI am not saying it is worse I am saying I am locked into Apple's ecosystem. :)
- leesalminen 10y agoNot the parent, but Android allows easy installation of arbitrary APKs downloaded from anywhere. Also, there are multiple app stores on Android, like Amazon.
- danvasquez29 10y agovoluntary 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 10y agoI 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.
- doubleshadow 10y agoI 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.
- Twenty44 10y agoI think your second point may have more to to do with the diversity of hardware that Android runs on than the developers simply putting less effort into it. Android runs on so many different devices. It is more difficult to develop and Android app that feels totally polished on every device
- criddell 10y agoI wish developers would explicitly say what devices they test on. There's no reason an app shouldn't be totally polished on at least one device.
- SiVal 10y agoI doubt that would help. Some developers do the tests but aren't very good at testing. Others wouldn't do the tests but would copy and paste a long list of "tested devices", and with two million apps, you would never be able to tell the former cases from the latter. Google could probably address this more effectively with some variant of: dev technologies making it easier to design for varied hardware profiles, test suites in the simulator that automate many types of testing across a set of standard profiles, specs for hardware makers showing them what the requirements of each standardized profile were, extensive test suites for hardware makers to make sure they conform to a standard profile, and a Google certification that a given device matches the such-and-such profile in all respects, so that if you test your code against the such-and-such profile in the simulator, and it works, it will work on the certified device.
- wodenokoto 10y agoHe 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 10y agoThey are probably cameras and phones assembled in the same factory.
- wodenokoto 10y agoAs far as I remember, they are both Sony cameras. I don't know if Google uses Foxconn.
- visarga 10y ago> 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 10y agoObviously, because they haven't created a fully conscious artificial intelligence, it's a complete failure.
- visarga 10y agoDon'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.
- IshKebab 10y agoTrue it can't answer logic questions yet. It's never going to pass the Turing test, but it's knowledge-base is actually pretty huge in my experience. Especially because it can more-or-less get facts from web sites. For example "are you more contagious at the start or end of a cold?" gives a useful answer. That's pretty damn impressive.
- travv0 10y ago"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 10y agoIf 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.
- travv0 10y agoFair enough. In regards to the first point, though, you'd already have to carry the cable which I find to be more cumbersome than the plug itself. I wish he would've elaborated a little more on battery life, as there's a big difference between a phone that barely makes it from morning to night and one that can't quite survive until the night of the second day since charge, both of which would need a daily charging.
- SiVal 10y ago"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 10y ago
- rmason 10y agoI 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:<).
- dmcginty 10y agoI'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 10y ago> 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 10y agoI have a 6s+. With light usage my phone will often last a full 3 days between charges.
- gergles 10y agoBadges on Samsung devices are a TouchWiz thing, they aren't part of "regular" Android. You won't have them on your Pixel.
- hausjam 10y agoPixel. 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.
- oxplot 10y agoThe 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.