> Tensor G5 and the latest version of Gemini Nano work together to run Magic Cue privately and securely on your phone.
Running Gemini Nano on device is the most interesting thing here. Magic Cue sounds exactly like the Siri improvements that Apple failed to launch this past year (and have stayed mostly quiet about for this coming year, except saying "eventually"). I hope it works well, because on-device AI for simple lookups and such is actually one of the most interesting use cases for LLMs on mobile phones to me.
I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed. Or saying something like "how much was the dinner at McDoogle's last week?" and have it check digital wallet transactions. There are so many possibilities. I assume this kind of thing would just be implemented as tool calls with app intents. I hope we see this across the board in the next three years.
> I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed. Or saying something like "how much was the dinner at McDoogle's last week?" and have it check digital wallet transactions.
It's probably just me (or a few like me) but I don't really keep my life in digital format as much as others (and I'm a "geek" for my family/friends since i work in the software industry). If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar. I pay with debit/credit cards but I don't have any digital wallet. I don't take my phone with me most of the time (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).
The features described in the Pixel 10 left me with a sense of "I think I am missing something! But... oh well, whatever, I don't need any of that". Which is weird again, because I'm supposed to be the "geek".
I used to consider myself a "tech guy" but the world seems to have moved on without me. I look at announcements of new phones and computers and I'm not even remotely excited about any of it. They're not solving any problem that I have anymore. I have a 9 year phone, and nothing released since then has really been compelling enough for me to upgrade. The only reason I will probably get a new one at some point is because the OS manufacturer and 3rd party app developers have (at best) stopped supporting my device and (at worst) are actively blocking my using their software/websites purely because of the age of the otherwise perfectly working device.
I used to have this "I'm missing something" thought but I don't think that anymore. This isn't me failing to get on board with what they think I should care about--It's the device manufacturers who are missing/ignoring my needs in the market.
Unless you're mailing letters, it's almost certain that your life is in "digital format". It sounds like you just don't use a calendar.
But surely you have an email confirmation for your movie, baseball, or event ticket. And maybe you texted or otherwise messaged with your friends who were going? Took pictures on your phone with them? Carried your phone with you when you went.
I'm right there with you. I work in tech, but I don't want to fuss with tech when I'm off the clock. Like, it all annoys me and just feels like work.
When my router breaks I just buy a new one. When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered. Why is it so hard to pull a card out of your pocket? I have a rule "no new chargers" when buying stuff. If it comes with some proprietary charger I make a half-assed attempt to keep up with it but I just throw it in the trash after about 6 months and buy something with a cord.
Maybe I'm an old man, but maybe that means I know now that life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.
You don't add to your calendar but you probably got a confirmation email. Or you may have used an app that could expose this data to the operating system. OR, you called, and the phone app transcribed and summarized the call.
Same for the wallet... if you have your credit card / banking app installed it could expose this.
But yeah, none _needs_ any of that, for different degrees of fun and life optimization.
> If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar.
When I buy a ticket to an event and the e-mail about it arrives, Google automatically adds the event to my calendar. My wife and I have shared our calendars with each other, too, so we both see it no matter who buys the ticket.
I think you're doing technology right tbh. We don't really need all this new tech, and it's better for the environment to just skip it and keep using what we have.
> I pay with debit/credit cards but I don't have any digital wallet. I don't take my phone with me most of the time (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).
I hate having things in my pockets, so that's actually why I like digital wallets. Honestly I'd rather forgo my phone but it is easier to give up my wallet, which is only carried for the ID.
But I've also recently moved away from flagship phones and I really don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I also used to root devices and underclock them after having them for some years to help extend their lives. Similarly I didn't feel like I was missing out on much. But at the same time, whenever a new phone would drop I'd feel like there was this cool new feature yet when I actually had it in my hands none of those features were actually that big of a deal. Even if nice. So moving to a non-flagship is nice entirely due to it being smaller and fitting in my pocket better. And it's not all about the thickness...
> Which is weird again, because I'm supposed to be the "geek".
I don't think it is weird. I think it is just that innovation has slowed down but marketing hasn't.
I mean there's still lots of things to geek out about and lots of dreams and fantasies about the future and tech that just don't have anything to do with the current direction of innovation.
I think on-device models will be the breaking point for AI. Nobody wants to pay for a trillion dollar cloud bill. We've made consumers think that the only way you're paying for software is if you have to buy hardware that comes with it. If you want AI to truly blow up, make it run on potatoes. It doesnt have to do EVERYTHING, just specific needs.
That said, what is with Android phones and their back cameras? They look silly. I thought Apple adding 3 to theirs for the 12 was a bit silly, but at least they made it look nice. One of those models looks like a Battlestar Galactica villain...
It's preference. I think the cameras on the non-pro iphones are so ugly -- especially the diagonal design. The pro cameras look ok to me. Can't not see my old college stove when I look at it, but I don't think it's too bad.
I, too, am biased but prefer Pixel's camera layout. Visually, I like the symmetry of the camera bump on the back of the device. Functionally, the symmetrical bump means the device will not rock on a table and it's a nice place to rest your finger and support/handle the device. A design decision that's unique and has some (small) utility.
Tier list:
Good: Pixel line, any phone with no camera bump
Ok: iPhone Pro
Bad: Samsung's many iterations, iPhone 2 camera vertical layout
Horrible: iPhone 2 camera diagonal layout
> Nobody wants to pay for a trillion dollar cloud bill.
Buying dedicated hardware as a way to keep your AI bill down seems like a tough proposition for your average consumer. Unless you're using AI constantly, renting AI capacity when you need it is just going to be cheaper. The win with the on-device model is you don't have to go out to the network in the first place.
I mean, look at these examples. Is a big LLM really needed to hit most of what people want?
Seems like Android just needs to lean into the voice command hooks API. A local LLM can grease the natural language into the mechanical APIs installed on your device. That's a much simpler task than an omniscient robot with access to all of your data.
The Nano model is 3.2B parameters at 4bit quantization. This is quite small compared to what you get from hosted chatbots, and even compared to open-weights models runnable on desktops.
It's cool to have something like this available locally anyway, but don't expect it to have reasoning capabilities. At this size it's going to be naive and prone to hallucinations. It's going to be more like a natural language regex and a word association game.
The big win for those small local models to me isn't knowledge based (I'll leave that to the large hosted models), but more so a natural language interface that can then dispatch to tool calls and summarize results. I think this is where they have the opportunity to shine. You're totally right that these are going to be awful for knowledge.
Speculation: I guess the idea is they build an enormous inventory of tool-use capabilities, then this model mostly serves to translate between language and Android's internal equivalent of MCP.
I love the idea of on-device AI. But the implementation of Gemini on Android is fully toxic. In the assistant settings I'm able to select what app I want to use as the assistant. But if I even open the Gemini app, it sets that automatically to be the phone assistant app. It doesn't ask, there's no confirmation, it just changes that setting. After that many tasks will fail because Gemini can't launch google maps to navigate you etc etc. Super annoying.
This. I tried Gemini, twice, and each time my usual use of hand free tasks were no longer possible. This is what I don't understand, all these big tech companies think I want to have a conversation and ask questions to an AI in every part of my life but I do not. All I want is to tell my phone to put in a calendar invite, play a song on an specific app, navigate to somewhere, etc. My android phone triggers itself when listening to podcasts too, which is fun.
My impression is that most people here haven't tried similar small models and don't have first hand experience with them. They are, to be honest, terrible. They may be good for certain tasks, but are much weaker than something like GPT4. I don't feel excited about these small models that are not fast yet hallucinate all the time.
Weaker by what metric? Are you asking them to explain the fall of Rome to you?
The point of a small model isn't to be an interactive Wikipedia. It's there to call tools, get more data, aggregate the data and return a natural language result.
It does not "hallucinate", because it only uses what the tools provide.
Why would the police bother with that when they have forensic extraction tools, that itself possibly has AI built in? Why trust a quantized model on a phone that possibly could give you wrong answers?
call me insane, but i used to want a virtual assistant that run and listen to me 24/24.
Yeah, some paranoid would scream like hell, but think about what we could achieve.
It could listen to my conversation, take notes, and auto add a reminder in my calendar if needed.
Since it has a large amount of context, i could something "Hey do you know when John said he would come back from his trip?" and it would answer me "Yes, he said he would be back on Friday at 5 PM".
This is absolutely being worked on. Limitless.AI has a hardware recorder + mobile app for reviewing your todos plus syncing / processing, and an AI backend, and an MCP API for ... whatever else you want to do. (plus a sprinkling of privacy / "HIPPA compliance" etc.)
I'm a customer of theirs. And I have NOT researched the subject much further. However given the tone and concern of the discussions by the other customers in the limitless forums, and of the devs, I am confident what you're asking is here or coming.
I really wish Pixel phones went with a more capable Snapdragon Elite 2 or Dimensity 9500 along with UFS 4.1, instead of sticking to their cost-cutting Tensor strategy. From past Pixels, on-device features like Magic Editor have been painfully slow compared to the same tools running on other Android flagships.
Oh really? I switched to an iPhone end of last year (for non-AI reasons), so I may be missing out. Is this on on-device model, or does it still dispatch to hosted Gemini? But I'd imagine that Gemini would have a great integration with Calendar and Gmail.
It being by Google, I have a feeling Google and LEA will be able to use tools on your phone too. They could very conveniently use this for "we didn't analyze your data using AI, we instructed your local AI to analyze your data" so it isn't technically a violation of your rights.
Yup. Fortunately Graphene OS will likely soon run just as well as on their previous hardware. You can re-googlify it as much as you're comfortable with.
> I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed.
The question is whether you are ok with the model naming someone who isn‘t listed, or failing to name someone who is listed.
This seems like a good place to randomly drop my thoughts on switching from a Samsung s20+ to a Pixel 9 Pro. The hardware is excellent in the hand. The display is great, battery life excellent, the UI is snappy, does all the basic things I expect from a quality device. Over all, no huge regrets..... but...
The scrolling in every app is just "different" from the Samsung, and in a "not as good" way. I moved to Pixel with the (as I now realise) very out dated idea that a Pixel phone would allow me MORE customisation and configurability than the Samsung/Galaxy environment. Oh boy, how wrong I was. Turns out there's a whole stack of Samsung bundled apps or ones available through their Galaxy store for free that I'd gotten so used to I thought it was default Android stuff.
I miss:
- per app volume control
- nav bar customisation
- lock screen config
- many of the good lock apps
- shake for torch
- the samsung camera app
- control of what apps CAN run in the background (the pixel murders everything)
- subtle ways that Nova Launcher has problems
So yeah, next time I'm in the market for a phone I think I'm going back to Samsung.
As a former Pixel and current Samsung user, I can relate to almost everything on this list except for the Camera app. What is it that you prefer about the Samsung iteration? I found my preference to be for the Pixel version.
My app and photo quality preference are OnePlus > Pixel > > > ... > Samsung. shrug Really it could be a toss up between OnePlus and Google depending on generation. My partner's Pixel 7 takes nearly as nice photos as my OnePlus 12.
My Galaxy photos were... very watercolor paint. I could not stand them.
I've been running a Samsung S21FE since release and I would _never_ buy a Samsung phone again.
I don't need customization, I need stable features, and not having to fight with my OS for which clock and notes app I'm allowed to use. Most of the features require you to be deep in the Samsung ecosystem. Hell, Google Gemini can only use Samsung system apps as of the recent update.
There are tons of bugs in the phone, and I regularly report them. The latest one is that the auto brightness is mapped to the slider. Which vibrates when it tops off, like any other slider for some reason. However, Samsung's engineers have obviously mapped the sensor to move the slider instead of directly managing the state, resulting in the phone constantly buzzing in your hand when you're outside.
The phone constantly runs out of memory, especially when taking photos. Since the OneUI 7 update, the screen often takes 5 seconds to wake. It regularly flushes apps out of memory.
Funny, my S22 Ultra just died due to the infamous One UI 7 update bricking phones with a boot loop. Replaced it with a One Plus 13 and I'm very happy not to have the Samsung bloatware all over the phone. The Samsung backup didn't help me at all.
I feel compelled to stick with GrapheneOS even though I install Play Services and meta apps.
I do miss several Samsung features. Most of all, the ability to set the Always-On Display to only show when new notifications pop up. It is easier to see at a glance that I have a message vs. squinting at how many faint lines are displayed to see the messages icon.
DeX is a novel concept too, and with Samsung you can do USB-C --> HDMI out to use your phone to play on a TV. It is a choice Google makes that Pixel can't do that.
As someone who had to use Samsung for 2 years at work:
I don't care about most of those decorative things you list there, it just made me mad that the phone was cluttered with Samsungs Apps. This replacing of perfectly working things like Settings was almost as annoying as the constant push for me to get just another account...this time with Samsung.
No please no...I don't see why I should give away space I've paid for to Samsung so they can spam me with their crap I don't need.
This is such a minor complaint though. I have 1150 accounts saved in my password manager and then another 150 in my company phone/laptop. What's one more? Who even cares at this point.
Or some app I will use to adjust settings then never open again. It's like being annoyed by having dconf editor or gnome tweaks installed. Yeah, I install them, use them twice, and then forget about their existence for another two years.
There are real issues with Samsung meddling in Android for no good reason. Primarily, that their oneUI is maybe prettier but way less readable and somewhat less intuitive than stock. Secondly, that they pull random stuff unnecessarily like ext4 support on external drives. Things that just should work and they burned calories to make them worse. Some app or account just ain't it.
- Flip the back and recent apps button in three button navigation. It's such a weird decision - like only left handed people should be able to comfortably use three button nav. Literally hurt my thumbs to use the phone.
- The quick settings panel is just abysmal compared to Samsung with massive pill buttons that have virtually nothing in them.
Looks like they're still only available in "Huge" and "comically oversized". I guess I can keep buying Pixel 4s until new ones (req for battery) are no longer available.
It's interesting how this type of feedback always comes up for phones yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them. It seems part of it may be folks remaining in this group seem much more willing to stick with old devices anyways, helping drive less priority for small sizes on top of already being a smaller market segment. Perhaps there are some other big factors beyond those two things too.
Apple said the mini iPhones underperformed, but they were not some sort of commercial failure. They sold millions of units. Numbers most Android OEMs could only dream of for a single flagship model. Current day Apple is all about optimizing and determined that still wasn't enough, and I imagine the manufacturing for small, specialized display panels certainly took a chunk out of those margins, so Apple decided to pull the plug.
Myself and the people who said we wanted a smaller phone may be a vocal minority but we did buy the small phone when we were offered it. After I used the 12 mini for 2 years, I bought a 14 Pro since no mini was offered in the 14 generation, but I returned it a week later cause it was too big/heavy and bought a 13 mini. These days I'm using a 16 Pro since no mini is offered and the titanium did help a lot with the weight issue, but if they brought back mini phones I'd happily sacrifice the camera for a reasonably sized screen.
> yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them
I don't buy this. The iPhone 13 Mini all by itself sold 6 million units in a year. That's about half the rate of Google's entire Pixel lineup. The market is small, yeah, but it definitely exists. I think a company could quietly make a high quality, straightforward, small Android device with maybe every-other-year hardware updates, and run away with a whole corner of the market all to itself.
The problem is for many years now the smallest phone available has been getting larger and larger. This has lead small phone enthusiasts to cling to their old phones as long as they can stand it until they are forced to step to a larger model.
I'm exactly that person. Always running an older device and lamenting the lack of small devices. Unfortunately, the mainstream wants big devices, so we all get big devices.
I recently had to replace my Pixel 7 Pro and went with the Galaxy S25. My hands are much larger than average and it is amazing how unweildy I find the Pixel 7 Pro is in comparison to the S25 even though the size difference doesn't seem that big when compared side to side. Makes me wonder how people with normal sized hands deal with the massive phones.
Who's actually making 5.5" phones to prove that though apart from the iphone 13 mini? These chinese phones often tend to be 4" instead of 5.5" and often come with with massive downsides like awful cameras or being very thick
Probably. I don't expect the market to cater to me when I don't cater to it. The only reason I ditched my iPhone 5 in 2019 was the carrier entirely stopped service for it. I don't like my new 12 mini as much.
Ultra principled users rarely if ever buy new devices or have predictable purchasing patterns in almost any way. Trying to appease this market is mostly a fools game, as they have learned.
It’s a HN meme at this point. For as long as I can remember, almost every single phone announcement on this site inevitably gets a bunch of comments about how it’s too big and how a smaller version would sell like hotcakes. You would think that phone manufacturers would have figured this out by now, but what do they know.
I replaced my 4a (which is not particularly small) after Google nerfed the battery into oblivion, but every once in a while I get it out of its drawer and am always immediately struck by how much better the form factor is. Using a modern phone with a 6+ inch screen feels like trying to tie a knot with one hand.
I have this experience… until I turn it on and start to try and type stuff on the tiny keyboard or watch stuff on it again. Then I realise I’m glad I moved up a little
My 4a didn't have the battery issue due to GrapheneOS, however, it the screen died recently (twice), so I got a pixel 9 with GrapheneOS. But yeah, it is uncomfortable to use the phone with one hand - I miss the small sized 4a.
On the other hand, it would be fun to explore these on device SLMs on a more capable phone with extra ram/storage.
I miss it so much. I bought a replacement one after it got cracked, only to have the battery AND Sim get nerfed a month later. Putting a custom ROM seemed to work for a while, and then it just got too unstable with sim card turning off randomly and silently. So now it sits in a drawer and used as a kids camera and I am so jealous of them. My google pixel 8 is bigger, but somehow nowhere needs as performant for my needs (camera + voice calls is basically it).
Oh man, I'm still using my 4a and am quite afraid of what I'll do once it goes caput. There's essentially no real replacement. The S23/24 are kinda okay, but the custom ROM support is meh. Pixels are unbeatable in that regard... It's a shame
Really wish they would at least make the Fold a reasonable size when closed. It would scratch my smaller phone itch, and offer a larger screen when I actually do want one. Currently it’s “comically oversized” when folded, and literal tablet when open.
I'd hoped others would copy/iterate the Flip form factor. A friend has one and it does feel great. I just don't get along with the Samsung software suite.
Best phone I've ever owned and it's not close. Every phone since then has been a compromise, to the point that (in a sunk cost fallacy kind of way) I've just quit caring about phones and just buy whatever the cheapest available unlocked device is. I run them into the ground (way past the end-of-service date) because I know the next one is going to be worse.
The Nexus 4 camera was rubbish and the GPS was rubbish. It could barely ever get a decent lock meaning navigating with it was a awful. I was so glad to replace that phone.
I agree, but I got the Pixel 5 instead; the 5 is actually smaller while the screen size is larger due to the curved screen corners. It also has a fingerprint sensor, unlike the 4. That being said, I still miss the squeeze-activated flashlight on the 4.
There are no alternatives. S25 is 6.2, and Pixels put the Pro/best version in 6.3, while on Samsung you get a step up to 6.7 and 6.9. Much better specs on almost the same size.
It's not really comparable because the Nexus 7 has a 16:10 screen. Looking just at the size in inches without the aspect ratio is really only part of the picture. The Nexus 7 is like twice the width of a phone.
I still carry my Pixel 5 for this reason. 2 replacement batteries in now and I have a spare sitting on a shelf. That said the Pixel 9A is tempting as it's not much larger than my Pixel 5. I hate that the finger print readers have moved to the front though. The sensor on the back of my 5 is perfectly postioned and also acts like a little track-pad for opening the notification tray. It was a perfect design IMO.
Replying to my own comment as I can no longer edit. To clarify, I have a spare Pixel 5 sitting on the shelf. Was inexpensive to purchase a backup a few years ago off of a local classifieds site, still new in box.
Agreed on battery.
I started with a 6a and only ever had the fingerprint in the front. I thought it's well designed and works well (as long as I stick to office job activities.. as soon as you start doing handy works it has its issues.. same for Px7).
i would still use my px5 if it were not for 2 stupid problem: The promixity sensor does not work, thus the phone still think it's in pocket and won't wake the screen. Another problem is my power button has been missing.
I love my 13 mini but its battery is just too anemic. Slapping a MagSafe battery on it defeats the purpose of having a small phone. My 16 Pro lasts me all day, but I absolutely hate using it, as I don't do very much with my phone in the first place. I feel stuck.
I just want a 5.5" phone. I'm not even asking for one of these tiny 4" phones like some people, just slightly smaller so that it can be used one handed
The only way Google phones keep up with the battery lives of iPhones is to have larger batteries. iPhone gets the same battery time with a much smaller battery.
Unfortunately I think this means Google will keep having to sell huge phones for a while
The size is about what every manufacturer settled on, and what most people want, it is unfortunate that smaller phones are not an option but it doesn't sell.
What bugs me however is that thin body with a huge camera bulge. Do anybody actually like that? It looks ridiculous, and the bulge defeats the point of having a thin phone. If you can't make the camera thinner, make the phone thicker, there is plenty of things you can do with more space: bigger battery, better speaker, more powerful vibration, more robust, etc...
I dont really buy the issue with "there's no market" just look at the pc market: isnt there are market for convertibles, laptops, tablet+keyboard, different OS, all sorts of sizes... how different is the android phone ecosystem?
The people at Google seem to think much more like me than the people at Apple.
There are 3 primary decisions Google made that click with me, while Apple's choices are a mystery to me:
1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable. Because the backside is symmetrical. When I put an iPhone on a table, it wobbles.
2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unsorted photos are. When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders. This seems impossible on iPhones. Everything stays in the main folder forever. You can add photos to albums, but that does not remove them from the main folder. So there is no way to know which photos I have already sorted.
3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
I'm sure people who prefer iPhones have their own set of "this clicks with me on iPhones and puzzles me on Pixels" aspects?
Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
Same for me, although I currently use an iPhone (and the rest of the Apple ecosystem). I actually don't like iOS, and barely tolerate macOS but I love the hardware on mac right now.
For me, it's Apple's privacy stance (which I know could change at anytime, but that's where we are at right now). Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
As long as apps on Android can do crap like the web-to-app tracking via localhost and other shady data harvesting that Google continues to allow, I don't touch it no matter how much better it is and how much I prefer the workflows.
Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.
I guess it depends what you’re comparing it to but macOS is (for me) the best of a bad bunch of compromises. POSIX with app boundaries that are (mostly) respected, if not particularly granular. There’s nothing I really hate about the platform save for homebrew and being walled in to the ecosystem.
I actually love modern Linux with Gnome, and it has all the parts these days to be a great desktop operating system, but I find the freedom there undercuts a lot of the promises (Flatpaks are a good idea in theory that doesn’t work in practice as the sandboxes are overly liberal and overreach on most apps because no-one’s forced to justify why they need the permissions they do etc).
I spent so long on Windows that I really don’t miss it. The Window management was way better for so long, but the idioms drive me crazy (registry issues and programs still freely writing anywhere they like), and supporting everything forever has massive drawbacks to usability (although Winget sort of slightly helps with this but it’s not much better than homebrew).
Could anyone here waxing lyrically about Apple so called privacy stand explain to me what that actually is apart from a marketing point Apple keeps repeating?
Because from where I stand they do load everything into their cloud. They insist on having you pay for iCloud through obnoxious means. They have you go through their store for everything. They even have an ad platform.
What supposedly so good about it? Their track record seems awful to me.
The privacy stuff and the hardware quality are my main reasons as well. Oh, and Chrome OS isn't a real OS to me so I couldn't imagine using that as my daily driver as I would macOS.
Another reason I stick with Apple is style/design. Aside from the latest Alan Dye-led stuff, Apple's design has been top-notch, they make every other company look like they lack class and design-sense.
With that said, I did like Nokia's Windows Phones and the the period of Microsoft's design revolution where Surface devices had suede or whatever. That massive Surface table thing was dope too but man, Windows just keeps getting worse...somehow!
I'm looking forward to getting a Framework laptop at some point and installing Linux.
>Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
GrapheneOS may interest you.
>Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.
GrapheneOS specifically supports this for all installed apps.
Same stance, iOS isn’t the best but the least bad. Google is an anchor to Android, supposedly Android is open source and everyone can contribute but at the end no device can be sold without Google play services and Google decides what is accepted in the aosp project.
If aosp was actually open, like managed by all biggest phone seller in a consortium, i bet we would actually have feature that people want to get. Instead of a thousand « material you » redesign, that honestly looked ugly from the get go and isn’t much better years later.
Many people want to be able to invert the recent and back button, most in fact, yet Google stubbornly refuse to add that setting. That’s just an example, but this repeat a thousand time over the whole Android project.
I would love to have Android software on an Apple device. Their hardware is incredible!
Ultimately, I tolerate Android from a privacy standpoint because we're still able to fully modify our devices and use open-source app sources. The minute that goes away (and it feels like Google isn't as tolerant of it anymore), I go.
> Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
This is literally GrapheneOS or LineageOS+microg x) which ironically is fully available on Pixel phones and and a slowly vanishing number of others...
> I actually don't like iOS, and barely tolerate macOS but I love the hardware on mac right now.
I just got my first MacBook Pro this month and feel this exactly. I prefer Windows as an OS hands down. It works with all my peripherals and has better configuration options.
But the hardware makes up for it. My MacBook Pro is about twice as fast as my new x86 desktop from work. Its battery is nearly 15x longer than my Razer laptop and four times as fast.
I’ll take gaps in the software quality for all of the progress in hardware quality.
Linux performs quite well on M1/M2 Macs (I'd even argue they are the best laptops to run Linux), almost counter-intuitively to some people's expectations. The worst Macs to run Linux on are actually the last Intel models with T1/T2 stuff. It takes some time for folks to port to new M chips as they come out but once they do, due to the popularity and similar peripherals they work well.
I genuinely do not understand this claim and propaganda about Apple privacy.
1) it's known they scan all your content and pics on iCloud
2) the phone's always listening, always
3) once that I forgot my password to the MacBook, all one needed to do to access my data was to enter recovery mode and reset the password. Sure it logged me off from browser sessions, but all my files where there available to anybody
To me apple is overly invasive with their icloud accounts and things, and password resets taking weeks, yet I see no evidence it is any harder to get my data than on other devices, if anything, it's easier.
So what is the claim here? Some tracking less by advertisers? That's privacy? An ad less about computers and one slightly less correct about idk wine?
The fact is that anybody with physical access to my devices has an easier time logging through the apple ones than the windows/androids i own and that I care more than advertising
Apple imposes "Artificial Incompetence" on their users. It treats them like children, gives them no agency, and limits their freedom, all while praising them for their taste and superior sense of... something.
This current iteration of Apple lacks the geniuses and visionaries that might have possibly justified their behavior at some point in the past, so you have a soulless corporate churn reinforcing the biggest walled garden in the history of humanity, with no apparent purpose except self perpetuation.
Doing things weirdly and badly, and not allowing any other way, prevents skill transfer between operating systems and environments. It prevents easy transfer of software - it forces software to treat the weird and bad things as canonical.
Apple users, with their imposed muscle memory, not realizing how good things could and should be, insist on their high taste and discrimination, and point to things "just working" and other inanities as vehement cover for one of the darkest of dark patterns.
Interoperability, protocol, and freedom should be mandatory. Google is hardly better, but at least you can own the device you purchase.
If you cannot understand what made Apple successful then or today what makes you think you're not failing to grasp something? You head right on to making an argument when nakedly revealing that you can't comprehend the other side.
Not surprising, this site is made for the Woz's of the world (and that's fine!).
Those are some very minor complaints, all of which would not affect my buying choice, given the larger differences. That said, I’ll tell you that I don’t notice (1), for (2) I would never sit there organizing my photos, I have other (mostly less productive) things to do with my time, and (3) seems like something I specifically _dont_ want.
No, two of those are some pretty fundamental complaints about how GP wants to use their device. Just because you don't have those complaints doesn't make them any less fundamental.
Ultimately the disagreement is primarily on the fact that Apple goes very far out of their way to hide the concept of a file and filesystem from the user.
Absolutely. The camera bump is a complete non-issue, and probably easily solvable with a case if it's really the thing pushing you away from an entire smartphone platform.
I shudder at notion of feeling compelled to group every photo I take into exactly one folder. A directory tree makes very little sense for organizing everyday photos. If I for some reason had a natural temptation to do this, I'd be grateful to Apple for discouraging it in their Photos app.
> Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
I don't think so. The stuff you mentioned is objectively better as there's no reason for Apple not to let you do it. It's more of a "I've been in the Apple walled garden for so long and so are all my friends" or the so-called network effects. Examples: you can't "Facetime" and "Airdrop" on Android, your text confirmation marks are green instead of blue, you don't have access to the same apps as your friends (sometimes), you don't have integration with iPad. If you grew up in certain circles you may be bullied for not having an iPhone, too.
Also there is a prevailing sentiment that Android doesn't "just work" as much as iOS, which is true tbh but not for Pixels which are basically the Android equivalent of an iPhone, where the device is pretty much tailor-made for the OS.
There’s still an element of subjective preference, as much as many like to say otherwise. To me, Android animations and gestures have always felt less polished and natural and more rough “forever prototype” and mechanistic, for example.
In terms of “just working,” a big weak point of Android that stands out to me is just how clunky it is if you’re not neck-deep in the Google ecosystem and use more standardized service providers like FastMail. iOS stock apps work great with IMAP, CardDAV, CalDAV, etc but on Android you have to hunt down third party service agnostic apps for everything, few of which are designed to work with each other. To be fair though, Windows also suffers this issue.
For me, it's how can I get the slick and super convenient integrations between my phone, tablet, and laptop outside of Apple?
I am talking about Handoff, Continuity, iPhone mirroring (can use my iPhone and its apps while it remains locked somewhere), AirDrop, Continuity Camera, universal clipboard, iMessage, etc.
“There’s no reason for apple to not let you do it” - they have reasons. Whether you agree with them or not is fine but pretending they don’t have reasons is a little silly.
You also can’t put every option in for everything, because simplicity has value too.
I've been using Android for years but for reasons recently switched to an iPhone.
I gotta say Android is superior in a number of things like call and SMS spam.
Also typing on iOS is a frustrating experience. I type "Im" and the iOS keyboard won't offer "I'm" as a correction option. I've even tried using the Google Keyboard on iOS and the multilingual predictions are just not as good as on Android.
I would have preferred to get a Pixel but Google doesn't distribute their physical products where I live.
The keyboard is completely nonsensical. I really don't understand how iPhone keyboard is so bad. Even if you install the Google Keyboard, iPhone keyboard is still bad.
I can't fathom what is going on here, but I really dislike typing on an iPhone. It drives me bananas. Completely obvious suggestions are never made. Android--you can just faceroll on the keyboard a bit and it'll have everything perfect. I thought I was really good at fast text input on mobile devices until I switched to an iPhone and then realized that Google's ML and autocorrect integration is just way better in this area.
I prefer Pixel phones, for slightly different reasons.
One, it takes really good photos. Better than phones with supposedly better specs. This is big for me, I have a 3 year old, being able to snap photos that look great with no effort is huge.
Two, the Google integration is just really a gamechanger. My laptop is my "computing" device. So my phone is mostly for calling, navigating (I travel a lot), searching for businesses, that sort of thing. It's really effortless with Pixel devices, takes a tad more work with other brands.
All browsers are equal citizens. I use Vivaldi, it's nice it can be the default and work just as well with the phone as Chrome.
And finally, in all my dealings with big tech over my lifetime, Google has been the only one that I feel doesn't try to abuse users. With MS it's endless nagging and annoyances, plus their security sucks, with Apple they're very anti-consumer unless you do exactly what they want, all the time. Even Samsung annoyed me with bloatware and trying to make their apps default over and over. If I change something on a Pixel phone, it stays changed. I pay for some Google products so no ads for the most part. Their security is great. They prefer open formats and protocols and have done a ton for the open web. Just the best ecosystem I've bought into.
> 2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unsorted photos are. When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders. This seems impossible on iPhones. Everything stays in the main folder forever. You can add photos to albums, but that does not remove them from the main folder. So there is no way to know which photos I have already sorted.
This along with iOS dumping pictures from WhatsApp, etc. into your main pictures folder is such a huge deal breaker for me. If I am backing up my pictures to a hard drive, there is no easy way to select just the pictures taken on my phone. Seems like such an oversight but I suspect it's a way to drive people to sign up for iCloud storage.
iOS 26 fixes this with an option to only show photos not in an album.
Additionally, if you are backing up photos to a hard drive you will be much better off using an app like PhotoSync. It has a one time payment and transfers direct to whatever you want with far less errors and more control than Apple’s terrible buggy disaster that is transferring photos by wire.
I use an iphone and have for many years. I was a phone geek who would always use custom ROMs and have everything dialed in just so. I'm sure this has changed over the years but back in the day it seemed like there was always some weird issue with my Android phone. Admittedly, a lot of that could have been my fault for constantly messing with the device. Eventually I got busy and just needed my phone to do the simple stuff and get out of the way.
iOS has a number of really annoying behaviors and general flaws that are never going to be addressed. I don't recall having the same frustrations with Android, but maybe I did.
I'm constantly annoyed that my iPhone can't do simple stuff my Android phone could do 15 years ago. I am also aware that if it could do all those things, I probably wouldn't spend the time to get everything set up, dialed in, and maintained anyway.
The things that keep me on iPhone are unrelated to all of that, though.
1. I like the small form factor. I have a 13 Mini and there's no decent equivalent that I've found in any ecosystem (sadly, even Apple now).
2. I use Facetime with both sets of parents a fair bit. Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app, sounds like a lot of work and frustration.
3. Real or not, my perception is that privacy in the Apple ecosystem has historically been, and currently is, far better than Google. I don't like the idea of the device I'm constantly relying on to be the product of an ad company, it just feels gross.
4. Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.
> Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app
This seems like an argument for picking something third-party, perhaps Signal. It's probably not going away any time soon, and it supports both major mobile operating systems.
>Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.
Being able to unlock my password manager with the fingerprint, rather than putting in the vault password every time was great, but my iPhone got too old for the other apps I needed and now I'm stuck typing in a gibberish 30-char password every time I need to use it on my phone. When are we going to get under-the-screen fingerprint sensors?
I miss having a small phone. My iPhone 16 ironically seems small compared to lots of phones my friends have. But I wish they bring back the mini. I would buy it immediately.
> Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls
Everyone I know uses Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp these days. Both of which are cross platform, even web (so can use on a desktop browser).
Also, the current Google thing, Meet, doesn't need the person you're calling to have the app. You invite them, they get a link, it opens in their browser, mobile or desktop.
FaceID is terrible, not even reliable. It scans your face all the time, even when you are not unlocking it. Every 20-30 seconds or so, let's just scan your face.
I would love it if iPhones stayed with fingerprint unlock. Sometimes I put the phone on the desk and not pointing it to my face and I want to unlock it. I have to wait for the stupid FaceID timeout to be able to input my code.
I'm also holding tight on an iPhone 13 Mini (5.18 in x 2.53 in) and I'm honestly not thrilled that even that is a size up from the 5s (4.87 in x 2.31 in).
Pixel 10 is yet another step up, at 6.02 in x 2.83 in, and I just wish it didn't have to be that way.
The Vinegar extension on macOS/iOS lets you use the system video player on YouTube. (It has a few glitches but works fine and let's you use PiP and play videos with the screen locked.)
I prefer Android. Unlike iPhone, the Android notifications system actually makes sense, and I can use real Firefox on Android. But, I prefer phones sized to fit in a human hand even more, so I'm stuck on an iPhone 13 Mini. Please make a ~4.5" screen Pixel phone, Google :(
Yeah, the main news I want to hear is the release of smaller Pixel phone. Secondarily, I'd like the return of the 3.5mm port. I don't care about any of the stuff they actually announce.
I do currently use a Pixel, but I hate how big it is.
iPhone notifications are leagues behind. Everyone you see with an iPhone has like 80 notifications--mostly stemming from how and when they're dismissed.
I just switched from an iPhone 13 mini to a Pixel 9 Pro, and it's tough to admit but I can do so much more with my thumb on a big Android than a tiny iPhone. Mostly due to the back gesture always works (never need to tap the top left corner in some cases, and also being able to return to the 3 button navigation) and being able to pull down the notifications by sliding down on the main screen.
So true. I switched from a lineage of several pixels ending in 7 to an iPhone for various reasons. The only thing I really miss outside of niche apps after finding a better calendar is a sane notification system! iOs lock screen notifications provide so little useful information and sometimes get buried.
I’d prefer the photo organization behavior you describe, but I don’t want websites to ever be dipping into the local filesystem outside of heavily siloed areas reserved for web apps exclusively. I don’t want the browser to even be capable of it, because regardless of what permissions and security measures are put in place, someone is going to find a way around them.
The only exception I can see making for filesystem access is for PWAs explicitly installed by the user, and even then there should be restrictions in place like limiting access to scripts loaded from the installed PWA’s domain. The open web in a generalized browser like Chrome on the other hand is too untrustworthy.
As for camera bumps, they’re all equally awful and I’d rather they just disappear entirely, even if that means thicker devices.
> I don’t want the browser to even be capable of it, because regardless of what permissions and security measures are put in place, someone is going to find a way around them.
You surely trust the permissions and security measures your phone provides to apps so what makes browsers worse in this area? Especially if you're using iOS where you only have Apple's web browser available to use.
It's so strange that we don't have cameras which have write-only access to the image spool, galleries that have read-only access to the image spool, and a file manager app that can handle delete requests from other applications with the intent system.
Wobble or no wobble, I really want the camera tumours to disappear. Make the phones thicker or make the cameras more slender. Don't make these ugly protrusions. Those phones are 2cm thick anyway you're not fooling anyone with "thinness" when they still have those massive hunchbacks.
Optics say you’re not getting thinner cameras. Otherwise they’d do that, and all those foot-long lenses you see at sports events would just be phones.
Given thickness constraints at the lens,‘I don’t see any reason to make the rest of the phone that thick. Why? Extra battery and nearly double the weight of the phone? Empty space? Cord storage?
- iPhone wobble is real. Mostly mitigated by a proper case. Does the iPhone get a better camera in return? Usually in my experience.
- I don’t sort my photos. The semantic search has been sufficient, and I back everything up to my NAS via an iCloud docker shim.
- Chrome/chromium is adware garbage now. FireFox is the only browser I use. The FS API does sound great though. Enviable given how annoying it is to do work on an iPhone sometimes.
> - Chrome/chromium is adware garbage now. FireFox is the only browser I use
This is actually one of the stronger arguments in favour of Android's though, you can install (real) firefox and (fully functional) ublock origin, while Apple prevents you from doing so on their non-macos products.
> I back everything up to my NAS via an iCloud docker shim
As someone who refuses to pay extra for iCloud storage, can you tell me how to do this?
I haven't figured out a good (read: easy) way to backup photos from my iPhone to computer/external storage (I don't want to use iTunes software cause I don't need everything syncing both ways).
I can sort my photos in folders (or albums) in iOS, not sure what you mean? I can have personal and shared albums, unless you mean the fact you don’t have that in the filesystem, in which case I completely agree.
I’m a Firefox guy myself and web apps are not something I care about for privacy reasons, but I agree that not having the option is a bummer.
The camera bump never really bothered me on the iPhone or the Pixel Fold I had before this iPhone. I just don’t notice it, but then again, I also didn’t notice the crease in the fold.
I miss Tachiyomi though. Panels is nice, but I had to built a whole OPDS-proxy to a manga website to have something close to Tachiyomi. Oh, and the ability to turn off network access on a per-application basis that came with GrapheneOS (plus the security of GrapheneOS itself).
While I prefer Android and Pixels (using GrapheneOS), I have switched my family to the Apple ecosystem to have a middle ground between privacy and features, so I’m not coming from an “I love Apple and everything else sucks” background, mind you.
I think OP is describing using their main Photos album as an inbox of sorts, emptying it out by filing photos away. On iOS even when you add a photo to an album it still exists in the main album.
> "When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders."
Are you using the native application called "Files"? I tried to add photos to album via the GooglePhotos application but it will not create a new folder, right?
also this:
> "web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files."
Can you share which web apps are you using? Or do you create your own web apps to work on your local files?
Thanks in advance, I'm trying to improve the photo management on the pixel because I want to create a simple way to back them up on my NAS but I'm still struggling.
1. I’m always going to have a case on my phone, so I don’t care about the camera bump.
2. You’re correct here. I mostly don’t care, but I want to have different hidden folders, which iOS doesn’t natively have. Otherwise I don’t care much.
3. Safari’s locked-down-ness is precisely why I use it.
But TBH, at this point, there’s minimal differences between iOS and Android.
4: the fact that Android has unified gestures: back, home and tray. Whenever I used iOS, I felt like every single app had a different way of going back somewhere. On Android, this is not an issue at all.
Uh. I used Android for 15 years and I still keep guessing wrong what the back button will do. Feels like 75% of the time it does not lead me back to what I expect and all apps have different ideas what they think it should do. I agree though that not having a back button at all is also not good.
>3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
Working as intended. Apple wants their 30% cut by all possible means. Web apps would bypass their cut.
I have to admit, my experience with #1 was quite different.
1. Put pixel on a flat surface.
2. Half an hour later, discover that the the surface wasn't actually flat, as phone the phone crashes to the ground, having been slowly inching its way off the 'flat' surface by virtue of the magically friction free back case of the phone...
No joke, by far the slipperyest phone I have ever had, and the one I slapped a case on the fastest, but not fast enough to avoid many dents.
No! They still do that? Reading this thread had me thinking back to an early Nexus phone I had back in my Android days, maybe around 2012, and here’s this post! I had no idea that wasn’t some odd one-off problem.
You could place the phone back-down on a surface a marble wouldn’t roll on, and 20 minutes later it’d magically be on the floor. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. I can’t believe they’re still doing that (how, though?! And why?!!)
Number 1 being moving between two system is difficult. The biggest obstacle is WhatsApp. And Meta / Facebook / Zuck is making it hard for people to switch. While it is not yet a thing in US, WhatsApp has 2B user world wide. And their life lives on WhatsApp. Less of an issue if you are on Line, KaKaoTalk and WeChat.
Number 2 is choice of phones. Android is basically Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy and Chinese Brands. I don't even think Pixel has double digit market share and Google Pixel isn't available everywhere. Their distribution channel is still appalling 10 years later. Making it pretty much the choice of Samsung or Chinese Brands.
These two obstacles are there before user could even make a choice and compare.
At one point I really thought Microsoft could get back into the game of Mobile. But after many years of waiting it doesn't seems that is a direction they want to go to.
I think the iPhone 17 coming later next month won' wobble. So that is one problem solved.
In the long game it seems we can better count on "Apple can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”
An underrated question. The answer of course is twofold:
* Paternalism (Apple believes users are too stupid to be trusted to control their devices, and no amount of "I really know what I'm doing" confirmations could change that)
* Apple's biggest fear is being disintermediated by Google or Meta, the way WeChat did to phone manufacturers in China. An ability to side-load an app could allow a foothold for a powerful competitor who could wean you off of all their lock-in features in favor of an experience that would tie into a competing ecosystem.
I prefer iPhone for a miriad of little things. Can't name one particular thing, but it's just constant annoyance, when I have to use Android. I probably could write a list of 100 items, if I'd care to document it all.
That said, after Apple started drinking AI juice, I don't want to deal with it anymore. Another major annoyance with iPhones is that they ditched touch ID. Face ID just doesn't work with me at all, it's like 30% of success rate, absolutely terrible. My last phone was iPhone SE, but new models switched to this Face ID, and that's a real deal breaker for me. I even considered buying few iPhone SE phones, while they're still selling at the stores and keep them for later use, but that seems weird and they'll get obsolete with software updates anyway.
I switched to Arch on desktop and I'm going to switch to GrapheneOS on my Pixel (native Pixel Android is absolutely terrible experience, GrapheneOS is bad, but everything else is just worse).
The single thing that solidifys it for me is that every Android device I have ever used has suffered from noticeable micro stuttering.
Their current top of the line TV device drops an entire video frame every couple of seconds while watching 60fps content, cause very noticeable jerking.
With an iPhone, when you click on an input field, the on-screen keyboard pops up, and you can type right away.
On an android (latest samsung flagship), the keyboard shows up but is frozen for a second before you can type.
I feel this and I’m guessing iOS is a lot more closer to the hardware, while android runs on top of Java, so there is more to process. Maybe its just me.
This must be a glitch particular to Samsung phones. I use flagship Google Pixel phones and have NEVER witnessed such a lag. I tap on an input field with my left thumb, immediately the keyboard shows up, and I immediately smash any letter with my right thumb and it does register it. So, blame Samsung, not Android.
I am not too surprised though. Samsung has a reputation for bloating their Android stack with junk.
Yes, I’m used to this too. But lately on my 13 mini, there is a slight delay between the keyboard showing and it registering key presses. I would say it misses the first key press 60% of the time when the keyboard pops up…
> Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
I can also just plug my Pixel into my Linux machine (I think I needed some other program to do this on Mac, bit it's still easy enough; can't comment on windows) and drag and drop photos, videos, ebooks whatever onto the device.
This is huge for me as I work at a location with no BYOD WiFi and poor (very low bandwidth) connection speeds so I often download YT videos for offline listening later. Also worth mentioning VLC is really good on Android and merely OK on iOS.
Also very important when you're low on storage from photos, you can unload them with no hassle.
I can't do the same with my iPhone; even when I can mount it successfully, its always an arcane directory structure in DCIM sorted by date or something.
This is HUGE for me. I cannot understate how much utility I get from this alone.
1. If the phone is bare. If you have a case (or a magnetic wallet like mine) it is stable. Rumors are they are moving to a camera bar in the next release.
2. There is a filter 'not in an album' which would do what you want. The library view is the equivalent of "All Mail" in Gmail. In newer versions, this is a distinct view - they are moving albums, automatically generated collections and search to be a primary interface.
3. Both WebKit and Mozilla have said they consider the local access variant of that API to be harmful, since they do not have an adequately prominent way to surface and manage that you've given a web application permanent access to sensitive directories and files, potentially in the background via service workers. Both do support the origin private filesystem variant. Are there productivity apps direct filesystem access would be useful for other than IDEs?
> Rumors are they are moving to a camera bar in the next release.
If the renders out there are correct, it seems the camera modules will still stick out beyond the camera bar for some reason, so I'm not sure it won't wobble-- though it does look like the issue will be reduced
Gotta love it, open up the comment section about a new Pixel 10 phone, and have to scroll through a massive comment chain of what, 200? 300? comments that aren't related to or addressing the article in any way.
Which phone brand did you use where it was falling apart after a year? The rest of your comment sounds like you're saying you preferred the iPhone because it takes the option of customizability away from you entirely, instead of simply sticking to the level of customization on Android that worked for you.
> When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable
My experience with the Pixel 7 Pro is due to the very pronounced camera bump and the rounded edges, the phone would slide off tables with problematic frequency, to the point that mine just lives in its bike mount case full time now.
I have an iPhone 15 Pro. I am a semi regular Pixel user as well. I prefer the iPhone by a mile.
1. Mine sits flat too. It's in a rugged case.
2. You don't know how to use Photos properly. You create collections from the pool and name them. You can create folders as well. In fact it actually does that automatically now.
3. There's literally a files app and filesystem abstraction on iOS. I use it for moving stuff around all the time.
Add one gain:
1. All my photos are in real files in Photos.app on my desktop within seconds of me taking them. I do not have my files held ransom behind a web interface. Edits and folders are transparently replicated between both devices. When I back up my mac I have a copy of everything.
And a total loss:
Post processing on both devices for images is terrible so I use a dedicated camera.
A counterpoint: google intentionally broke the ability to backup photos in Google Photos.
Yes, takeout sort of exists, but it doesn't work. If you sort pictures into albums, you get duplicates of each photo for every album. So one copy in the automatic year album; one copy for each album you have put a photo into. My 80gb of photos triples in size, and oh, sometimes downloads fail on the zips they put them into. And since I use a mac, who has 600gb of free disk to download and extract the zips for my dedup script to run.
Additionally, they intentionally broke their api (well, just disabled it... but only for most users; it seems to still be available for Microsoft) to do incremental backup. tada!
I like Apple photos in this regard on the mac. If you have the storage, you can just set it to download full copies automatically, now all my photos are stored locally on my mac almost as soon as I take the photo on my phone.
All google needs to do is make a desktop app and allow automatic download.
I switched from Android to iOS a few years ago. I used to be deep into Android customization - custom ROMs, custom icon packs, etc. But today, I feel that iOS and Android offer pretty all the features that I could ever want.
My deciding factors when I switched:
- iOS UI animations are significantly better
- access to iMessage
- Apple got around to adding their version of "always on display"
- I turn the vast majority of notifications off, so Android's better notification management stopped mattering to me
- It felt like Google kept bending Android towards iOS anyway (camera app, moving away from the 3 button navigation)
I think for most people its just whatever you are used to. That said I can't stand iPhone. My wife also switched to Android after being jealous of some features on my phone.
I have an iPhone because at the time I bought it I liked the size (Mini 13) and it's fine. Before that I had some Android phone and it was fine too.
I've never understood the strong emotions people have attached to these things.
About the only thing I'm looking forward to when I upgrade my phone in a couple of years is getting a better camera. Phones were pretty exciting for a while, but now? It feels like a mature segment and not much is changing anymore.
> I think for most people its just whatever you are used to.
Or in the US, it's whatever your family and/or circle of friends use, RCS or not. iMessage lock in is real (along with Facetime, Airdrop, Apple Pay, etc.)
The biggest selling point of an iPhone for me is the easy connection with my Mac and the consistency between them. If it weren't for that I'd strongly consider a pixel
As a, mostly, happy Android user since the HTC Magic in 2010 or 2009, the one thing I really wish they could fix (but I suspect it would never be possible) is the extremely confusing thing with intents and apps opening as views in other apps. Like when my mail app opens a PDF it looks like I am now in the PDF app and after reading for a while I completely forget that I am actually still in the mail app, and then I go BACK and instead of ending up in my PDF library view as I expected I am suddenly in my mail app. Or when I look at the running apps list there can sometimes look like I have two PDF viewers or two browsers running since some other apps used intents to open views from those apps that now exist in parallel with the real apps.
Somehow that manages to surprise and confuse me almost every day. In desktop operating systems, and, I belive, in iOS, there is no need for such thing? Opening a PDF from a mail application usually just opens the PDF viewer as its own application, or it is embedded in some nice way that does not make the entire mail app suddenly look like a PDF viewer app instead.
Unfortunately they can probably never fix that because app lifecycle and intents are connected to everything and a good fix for this would probably break everything.
It's interesting that this feels awkward to you, because when apps don't function this way it feels broken and odd to me. When I tap a PDF attachment in an email I expect the back button to go back to the email I was just viewing, not the list of PDFs on my phone. If I wanted to view all the PDFs on my device, I would start at the PDF viewer and tap into PDFs from there.
I wonder what experience made this feel more awkward for you (and conversely, why it feels more natural for me). What a weird/complex world we live in!
I agree so much. I get why: "Designers" consider plastic to be low-class, metal is radio-opaque, so that leaves glass as the only option even though it has zero functional advantages over plastic (glass is heavier and more fragile).
Imagine if it was a panel of plastic, and that you could easily replace it if it got too scuffed up.
A mystery about Apple is that some of its software are ridiculously bad. iTunes sync was one of them. Another example is removing iCloud sync used to wipe out the content on the disconnected devices. Screen Time is pretty much unusable. It's really hard to batch update photos in iphone. Heck, it's even hard to batch move app icons on iphone screen.
What good is optimizing for the open web when the Pixels lack a sufficiently fast processor for bloated web pages. Haven't tried the 10 yet, but Pixel 9 is sufficiently slow that you can see tearing artifacts when you scroll. This is at least two or three years behind the modern Qualcomm in Samsungs let alone Apple.
I think photos on the pixel are messed up (long-time iphone user who switched for the pixel 9 folding pro), you have all these folders that by default don't get backed up, it took me ages to understand I had to go in settings and manually check all new apps that I install for photos to back them up (and display them in my gallery). It's never clear what's the "offline" vs "online" view of google photos (and why there are other google photos apps).
With a bit of fiddling I can finally backup my whatsapp photos, but oh boy why aren't the default saner?
For Chrome, it's inconsistancies after inconsistancies. First, I couldn't read PDFs from there, now I can but I can't edit the URL when I edit a PDF, also no built-in app to read PDF, it's crazy.
As someone who started on Android but switched to Apple many many many years ago, I still find things like this that are quibbles for me, but in general my preference for Apple is because of security/privacy, battery life management, performance, update longevity, and hardware quality.
That said, I think it's worth noting that #1 hardly bothers anyone because most people put their phone in a case, and that can quickly resolve this. #2 isn't a real problem, because you can absolutely sort your photos into folders, they're call albums though, and this is a first-class workflow in the Photos app since they switched from iPhoto to Photos about 6-7 years ago. For #3, I don't want my web browser having file system access via an API and I don't use Chrome.
> This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
The thing is that web apps are always a worse experience if you have native apps. Linux and Android (and now also Windows) depend on web apps because they don't have good quality native apps. For Apple devices you can always find a top quality native app to use, so web apps aren't any concern. The only people I have met who want to use apps in their browser on MacOS are Linux refugees who were attracted by the "specs" of Apple devices. It's a bit like buying an electric car and lamenting the lack of a gearbox. You don't need it anymore.
File System Access API has some serious issues. To quote Mozilla's position on the topic
> There's a subset of this API we're quite enthusiastic about (in particular providing a read/write API for files and directories as alternative storage endpoint), but it is wrapped together with aspects for which we do not think meaningful end user consent is possible to obtain (in particular cross-site access to the end user's local file system). Overall we consider this harmful therefore, but Mozilla could be supportive of parts, provided this were segmented better.
I think most users would probably be better off without this proposal.
It sounds like this would prevent users from backing up their own data, which is hard with localStorage and sessionStorage, and instead having to rely on the site owner.
I think a lot of developers think like you, but most users of phones don't.
I don't think most people care enough to put time into organizing their photos, but would rather the phone or backend AI just find the photo they want by searching for it.
I'm not sure if most users even have a strong conception of "file" or really understand what data is physically on their phone vs "the cloud".
(The symmetry thing though probably does bother a lot of people regardless of their level of technical expertise.)
Well I’m a very technical person, and sorting photos into folders seems like a colossal waste of time to me, when I can also just search for a thing on the image, the place or time when or where it was taken, a person or animal on it; I could add it to an album, star it, add tags to it; that should be more than enough sorting facilities, I think.
None of those things matter to me. What does matter to me is that to get stuff off my iPhone I have to do a weird sync process and/or use iCloud. Infact, a lot of my issues with the iPhone stem from refusing to use iCloud. Can’t use Apple Pay or FindMy.
For now I use Airdrop to move photos from my iPhone to the computer but it’s very error prone and fails 1/5 times and way more often if you try to do it with more than 30 images/videos. Is this situation better in the Pixel?
Regarding the second point, while I gladly agree the current iOS Photos app is a mess, doesn't it make sense to have photos in multiple albums? If I went on holiday to Brazil and made a nice photo of my son there, I'd like that photo to be in both the "Brazil holiday" and "Beautiful photos of my children" albums, not just in one folder.
They had that in iPhotos and dropped it in Photos. I missed it for about a month and then I got over it. I'd never sort my photos now, I can just search them or find them on the map.
If you want to sort photos by folder, no one stops you from using other apps. Google Photos itself is available.
Very, very few people want to spend time sorting all their photos, it's a fool's errand.
My first smartphone was a cheap Android and then I switched to iPhone about eight years ago and mostly haven't looked back.
That said, Apple's behaviour around locking out wearables from key system APIs does have me reconsidering. I found the inconsistent sync and notifications on my Fitbit to be a pretty big source of annoyance and if that continues on the new Pebble I would consider switching back to Android just for that.
I think the EU or the US (one of them) is trying to force Apple to give third parties access to the things Apple Watch has access to, so there might be relief coming for one of those continents (one assumes that the petulant child that is Apple's leadership will, after appealing to the maximum, region-gate any remedy, exactly as they did for third-party app stores in EU).
2/3 of your complaints seem to be down to Apple's insistence that filesystems are silly and should be hidden from users. Unless it's iCloud, then show the user 2 identical filesystems and scatter everything at random between the two. Really, it's a write-only filesystem. Apps will constantly save things there, but god help you if you ever want to find something.
> 3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
Safari has support File System Access API since 2022. Maybe you haven't kept up but Apple has done a 180° on PWAs in the past few years
For me, it is the ability to tether my laptop to an iPhone to use the data service on my iPhone. This alone made me give up on Windows laptops and Android phones. Sure, you can tether Windows laptops to Android phones. But, it is a slow and cumbersome process. I use this functionality frequently enough that it was worth it to switch platforms over it.
When I switched off Android >5 years ago, even then, it was as simple as turning on the hotspot and connecting to it. It was no more cumbersome than any other wifi network. This was with a Pixel device and Linux laptop, and I am sure it works on Windows too.
A more precise way to put it: Apple is focused on customer control, and will fight whoever tries to touch what they see as Apple's exclusive customers.
This has privacy benefits against tracking agents, reduces functionalities against third party services (Amazon, Spotify, Google, third party payment etc.), and forbids whole use cases (e.g. non Apple backup service).
As a customer one can be happy with the privacy windfall, but we've seen again and again that it's not Apple's focus per se.
Of course it's a matter of taste, personality, culture, etc.
That's why flame wars about anything don't make sense, whether it is about Operating Systems, browsers, gaming platforms, text editors, phones, cars, coffee, or whatever else you can come up with to arbitrarily argue about.
I like that I can run whatever software I want on it.
I do not like that it is overly locked down without rooting. But still way more open than iOS, regardless of what the mobile phone lawsuits from Epic decided.
I’d love to use the android phone, as they seem to have much better and actually useful AI integration, but they are not phones but “advertising company tracking devices with tacked-on end user functionality”. Similarly, Chrome is not User Agent, it’s Corporation Agent.
To your 3: On iOS Safari, I can use extensions. That includes adblockers (uBlock origin lite) and others like Vinegar (allows youtube videos to play in background while display is off). No ads boosts productivity more than the file API - what would I need that for?
As someone who used Android for years and only recently switched to iOS the lack of file system access is really the only dealbreaker. It's damn annoying. The hardware is reliable and solid but why do we get such a crippled operating system ?
I knew apple wasn't for me when I tried to sync and backup my stuff on something that wasn't iCloud. Its just plain unusable if you don't want to be fully entrenched in their cloud services.
FYI rumour has it the iPhones about to be released will have the same sort of full width camera module so the “wobble” won’t be an issue. Not that it ever was for me before, I have a case on it.
For #2, on iOS, you can move photos to shared albums and then safely delete them from library while retaining them in shared album. Shared albums use iCloud space, so it’s not ideal.
Assuming you mean the rest of the Apple ecosystem this is kind of like saying most countries speak French because all the road signs are in French. Someone who doesn't have an iPhone doesn't necessarily have twenty other Apple devices around.
I’m a former Android user (bought a Nexus One on release!) that switched to iOS many years ago and I don’t miss Android as much as I thought I might.
To me the biggest thing to reflect on is how depressing it is that we must all fit ourselves into one of two boxes. My kingdom for a flourishing mobile OS ecosystem where we can all find the exact combination that scratches our itches.
I've never used a phone case. I don't understand why they make these things so small and then everyone just slaps on an extra couple mm. What's the point? If we're making them bigger anyway, at least use that space for more battery.
> When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders.
This is exactly the sort of thing a lot of smartphone users (including Android users) won’t do.
The point of post-PC devices is to actually be post-PC. For many, futzing around with files isn’t the answer.
For instance I gave up doing this to my email years ago. It was very liberating. If I want something, I search. I can save searches I frequently perform.
iOS’s Photos app isn’t perfect but it allows me to find stuff just fine. I can search for places (“Seattle”), for things (“bicycle”) or even combinations (“plants Vancouver”). It’s pretty neat. And you can actually add stuff to folders (‘albums’) if you really want to.
> local files
iOS has them too. There are apps which allow you to access and manage local files — including the built in file manager. It’s not as laissez-faire as Android, though. Even the file manager has come a long way, and it’s improving further in iOS 26.
tl;dr — iOS isn’t for everyone, but it’s not like it’s not well-designed with a certain audience in mind.
If it was the Pixel 6, I can attest that the 6 (at least the 6 Pro XL) had issues with the fingerprint scanner. I had no issues with my 5 series (when the fingerprint scanner was on the back) but the 6 series always gave me trouble. I'd wager a guess the reason why was because it was the first generation with an under-display fingerprint scanner and they hadn't yet worked out the quirks.
I've since upgraded to a 9 series and it works flawlessly so I can assume they've figured it out some time since then.
These are all extremely minor issues. 2 and 3 are not even relevant to 99% of normal users. Very few people want to spend time manually organizing photos like that, and albums do essentially the same thing. The wobbling thing is a non-issue. It doesn't even wobble unless you're pounding down on the phone on a table.
I find it kinda scary that this is marketed as "zoom" and "recovering details", when the reality is that it quite literally makes stuff up and hopes you won't notice the difference. You and I know that it's completely fake, but we (or at least I) don't even know how much is faked, and probably 99% of people won't even know that it's fake at all.
How long until someone gets arrested because an AI invented a face that looks like theirs? Hopefully lawyers will be know to throw out evidence like that, but the social media hivemind will happily ruin someone's life based on AI hallucinations.
It becomes misleading to even keep calling it "Zoom".
More like "Interpolation" with a pinch of hallucination.
I can see this becoming a thing though, it is after all the mythical 'zoom & enhance' from csi...
I actually think it's a cool feature, but it shouldn't be called "zoom". "Zoom & Enhance" would make sense. The UI should also have a clear visual indicator of which modes are pure optical zoom, which (if any) are substantially just cropping the image, and which are using genAI.
At a minimum, you have demosaicing, dark frame subtraction, and some form of tone mapping just to produce anything you'd recognise as an photo. Then to produce a half-way acceptable image will involve denoising, sharpening, dewarping, chromatic aberration correction - and that just gets us up to what was normal at the turn of the millennium. Nowadays without automatic bracketing and stacking, digital image stabilisation, rolling shutter reduction, and much more, you're going to have pretty disappointing phone pics.
I suspect you're trying to draw a distinction with the older predictable techniques of turning sensor data into an image when compared to the modern impenetrable ones that can hallucinate. I know what you're getting at, but there's not really a clear point where one becomes the other. You can consider demosaicing and "super-res zoom" as both types of super-resolution technique intended to convert large amounts of raw sensor data into image that's closer to the ground truth. I've even seen some pretty crazy stuff introduced by an old fashioned Lanczos-resampling based demosaicing filter. Albeit, not Ryan Gosling[0].
Of course, if you don't like any of this, you can configure phones to produce RAW output, or even pick up a mirrorless, and take full control of the processing pipeline. I've been out of the photography world for a while so I'm probably out of date now, but I don't think DNGs can even store all of the raw data that is now used by Apple/Google in their image processing pipelines. Certainly, I never had much luck turning those RAW files into anything that looked good. Apple have ProRAW which I think is some sort of hybrid format but I don't really understand it.
By my understanding, demosaicing almost always just "blurs" the photo slightly, reducing high-frequency information. Tone mapping is unavoidable, invisible to most people, and usually doesn't change the semantic information within an image (the famous counterexample is of course The Dress). Phone cameras in recent years do additional processing to saturate, sharpen, HDR, etc., and I find those distasteful and will happily argue against them. But AI upscaling/enhancement is a step further, and to me feels like a very big step further. It's the first time that an automatic processing step has a very high risk of introducing new (and often incorrect) semantic information that is not available in the original image, the classic example being the samsung moon.
It's just crazy that demo they show, imagine the vehicle is actually a truck but you zoom in and it becomes a porsche...
conspiracy tangent, try to take a picture of something you're not supposed to and your phone won't let you ha, well money could be an example which I get the reason (it's printers but that idea)
Agreed, I was recently looking through photos from my Pixel 5 and realized that it had "helpfully" modified an image of a bunny, making the fur look wavy and adding a weird faded-out eye on the body. On top of that, it applies skin smoothing to every photo, even with the beauty filter disabled. It irked me enough that I'm looking for a new third-party camera app. Despite using exclusively Pixel/Nexus phones for the last 12 years, I might abandon them entirely once this phone dies.
Agreed, not a fan. The world has enough fakery in it already without people accidentally generating even more (I assume quite a lot of casual users will mistake this zoom for zoom in the traditional sense).
It's giving "Samsung fake moon". If generative AI is going to make up details why bother zooming in, you could just ask to make up a whole AI slop picture.
This does seem to actually, ya know, do the upscaling though instead of clumsily faking it. Like yeah it's AI with AI failure modes but upscaling models are quite good and have less 'weird artistic' liberties than imagegen models.
The other thing that was annoying me with a cheap phone I bought, it was applying this generic surface to your face so your face didn't have pores but it looked wrong.
Unfortunately these new phones don't fix the main issue with the Pixel: the hardware.
The performance is just unacceptable, it's already 50%+ slower than a snapdragon 8 elite flagship released in the same year.
This affects everything, pixels just don't last nor have great battery life for this reason.And the big issue is they aren't even much cheaper anymore.
I like GrapheneOS, but my pixel just randomly stopped working after being laggy and having the worst battery life on cellular (less than 2h SOT with a 5000mah battery)
It's hard justifying buying another pixel after such a horrible experience, were it not for GrapheneOS I would never consider buying a pixel in the first place.
Heck even the camera isn't that good anymore, most photos are just gray, and the hardware is also very lacking.
>The performance is just unacceptable, it's already 50%+ slower than a snapdragon 8 elite flagship released in the same year.
This is the one thing I don't understand. How many people actually need the top end SoCs that other flagships come with. Phones have been more than fast enough for a long time now. Other than playing some games with tough visuals mid range SoCs are still more than powerful enough.
Complaints about battery life and the modems are fair (though I never had complaints about my Pixel 7 Pro battery life until it failed).
I also found that the photos from my Pixel were by far the best I'd ever seen from a phone. Every phone I had prior was only used for quick snapshots, if I was expecting to want to take something decent I would make sure to pack my mirrorless, with the Pixel I could actually trust it to take an acceptable photo.
It matters when the phone is supposed to last more than two years.
Poor battery life is a symptom of a slow CPU, things that don't require full performance on a snapdragon 8 elite take double the time in a pixel while needing full turbo performance.
Don't get me started on the terrible modem efficiency.
These issues are there since the Pixel 6, and Google clearly just doesn't care.
I don't personally care about top performance at all (I've been a happy user of Fairphones for several years). But as phones start doing more and more AI tasks (from camera post-processing to computer vision tasks, and now LLMs) the added processing power does make a difference in how usable and snappy the phone feels. For most users it's not about being constantly fast (like for gaming or for long AI tasks), but for being able to handle peak load more smoothly.
My last two Pixel phones - 6a and 7a - were both "recalled" with battery issues. I got almost a complete refund for both, and got keep the phone (my 7a died a few months after the recall, 6a is still going strong).
I got a 9a to replace them just because I didn't want to have to deal with learning iPhone, but I'm fully expecting the 9a to fail with a similar issue so looking at buying an iPhone soon as a backup so I can get up to speed.
Both my 4a an 6a got the battery nerf update. I had no idea this impacted the 7a as well. I prefer Pixels for Android Development but my trust in Google is at an all time low.
>12. Restrictions apply. Some data is not transmitted through VPN.... See https://g.co/pixel/vpn for details.
Does anyone know what data doesn't go through the vpn?
On the positive side it lists a 24+ hour battery life!! This is huge for me!! ..but it has a footnote, as well
> 6. Battery life depends upon many factors and usage of certain features will decrease battery life. Actual battery life may be lower. Over time, Pixel software will manage battery performance to help maintain battery health as your battery ages. See https://g.co/pixel/battery-tests and https://g.co/pixel/batteryhealth for details.
I like my phone more, but battery life on hers is way better to the point I regret buying mine, it barely lasted a day out when on vacations, and I'm not a super heavy phone user, but look for restaurants, open maps, take pictures, ask Gemini stuff and I'd be at 50% by the time she was at 75.
> Does anyone know what data doesn't go through the vpn?
I can't speak to exactly what data doesn't go through their VPN but I know carrier apps tend to not play nice with VPNs, especially the Google Fi app (as it relies on its connection and what IP its on to coordinate switching between their various carrier contracts and that seems to break under a VPN).
And also seemingly Wi-fi calling has been problematic over VPN for as long as I can remember so that's usually a safe bet for exclusion.
I am considering switching to Google, I am getting annoyed by Apple more and more, but the critical feature for me is AI assistant.
I am the first to criticize the LLM hype and I do not expect much out of them - but the fact that I cannot get Siri to turn a single light in my room instead of all of them is just FUBAR from my perspective. Siri is such garbage at this point that the gap between it and ChatGPT app is unbelievable. I can't even get it to reliably call people in my contacts, meanwhile my 4 year old can talk to ChatGPT in Croatian. Google Gemini seems to be on par so their assistant should be at least semi competent.
I switched to the previous google phones (9) for the folding phone, even though I'm not too much of a fan of the android experience I cannot switch back to Apple right now because:
* the AI integration on google phones is just amazing
* the folding phone has insane screen estate on-demand anywhere any time, I wouldn't be able to go back to a single screen
> the AI integration on google phones is just amazing
Genuinely curious, what's your favorite aspect of AI on the Pixel? I'm on a 9 pro, coming from a Pixel 6 and a Pixel 3 before it. I don't think I'm ever using AI on this thing, so I'm interested in hearing where it turns up for you.
What do you like about the AI integration? I'm considering leaving iPhone just to have basically native chatGPT integration, assuming gemini works that way, and assuming it can read and write to my calendar and access other personal data.
The lack of a physical SIM tray is just one more way to lock users in Google's walled garden. eSIM support is not implemented in Android itself (AOSP), but part of the proprietary GMS package. This means Google-free Android forks like LineageOS will be unusable on the Pixel 10 series :-(
>The lack of a physical SIM tray is just one more way to lock users in Google's walled garden.
Seems to be US only? iPhone also has the same thing, so it's probably something that US carriers are pushing, not something from OEMs.
>eSIM support is not implemented in Android itself (AOSP), but part of the proprietary GMS package. This means Google-free Android forks like LineageOS will be unusable on the Pixel 10 series :-(
If this is real then it is very unfortunate as multiple countries use crypto SIM cards as national identity, a popular more ergonomic alternative to a separate identity card that need a USB reader and computer. They play themselves out of markets.
better than what they did with pixel[6-9] where they shipped a dual injection crap to save 0.00001c on production and if you traveled 5x and swapped local SIMs, the tray just crumbled and you had to buy another for $20 on ebay because they don't stock it or replace under warranty.
GrapheneOS found a way to provide eSIM support, but it depends on installing a patched version of Google's proprietary LPA app. I don't know how future-proof that is..
> Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL are all available for preorder today starting at $799, $999 and $1199.
Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
Also, what is up with that camera module? This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets. At least round the corners or add little ramps. I guess this is what happens when design folk are allowed to trump engineers.
> This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets.
I'm interested to hear more about this, because it's always interesting to understand how other people interact with things who have different use cases or usage models.
How tight are your jeans, and how do you fit anything else in your pocket if something ~1in thick doesn't fit comfortably (without having to force the pocket open in a way that would require a "ramp")?
Are you using your back pockets? I have never once understood the utility of those; I have no desire to sit on anything in my pockets.
A lot of people buy clothes for their looks with minimal weighting towards functionality (or rather that is the functionality). If you've got a body in reasonable nick then tight pants can look good.
The traditional solution to poor pockets is a purse or bag. Phones are interesting in that they can demand attention and that they are probably the most used item that people carry around with them. Thus people compromise their lines/comfort to actually use the faster accessibility of pockets. Probably explains the popularity of ridge wallets and key wallets too.
I don't wear tight jeans and I've come to loathe having to put my phone in my pants pocket. If you're walking around a lot, the feeling is just annoying, you can feel it pressing on your leg the whole time. When I sit down, the bunching feeling is even worse, so I immediately put the phone on the table.
This wasn't an issue when phones had 4.7"-5"-inch screens. Nowadays the phone goes into the cargo pocket if I'm wearing shorts, or back pocket if I'm walking.
Not that I'm trying to justify the prices, but I'm interested by the take that a phone should cost less than a computer. To me, the phone has an actual camera and is significantly smaller (and, if you are talking desktop, has a screen) so should cost more for the same sort of power. Of course, there are phones and computers at all different prices so it's hard to compare.
It's smaller, so it should cost less, not more. It's 2025, miniaturization isn't that expensive. It's less screen and less battery than a laptop, cooling the CPU can be done passively because it's so low-powered, it has less RAM and less flash and fewer ports and a simpler mechanical design, no keyboard or touchpad... it's a slab of glass with a plastic/aluminum case containing a PCB, battery, and camera.
>Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
As much as I loathe the consumerism of buying the latest phone every year, I realized that if the trade-in value is good enough, it's a pretty good strategy in terms of overall technology spend.
With iPhones, I upgraded every third generation. With Pixels, I went from 3 to 6 to 9, but given that I'm on Google Fi, I get a $450 discount on the phone, and I can get a base Pixel 10 Pro for $217, after trade-in. I got a surprisingly generous trade-in on my Pixel 6 when I bought the 9, and buying the Pixel 3 with Google Fi was pretty cheap too.
The last computer I bought was an M1 Max Macbook Pro w/ 36gb of RAM and a 1TB drive, for $2499, in 2023 (thank you B&H). Hopefully it'll be a long time before I'm paying that much for a phone.
At 126GB storage, which is basically unusable in 2025 and it's a phone you want to last to 2030. This storage bait needs to be made illegal, it literally costs almost nothing to manufacture and exists purely to punish and trick the consumer.
I feel the same way about paying more for a phone than for a computer, but is it rational? I'm not sure. Sure you get a smaller screen and a smaller battery, and the phone doesn't have a keyboard and a trackpad (assuming you were referring to a laptop), but does the militarisation make up that difference?
Disclaimer: I'm not really invested in thinking about it carefully. I don't like any of the huge phones available now, and so far I'm getting by with the small phone I have, and buying into the idea of the Framework laptop either means I won't have to replace the whole thing or that I'll just go back to buying refurbished enterprise laptops.
Edit: I see other people have already picked up on the computer/phone cost thought more productively than I did! :)
Pro tip: Buy the second-to-latest generation. Costs half as much and it was literally the best that even billionaires could have purchased just a year ago.
I always amortize the coat of the phone over the months of security updates remaining. Sometimes the last gen is a better deal, on a per month basis, sometimes the new one is only a couple bucks a month more. i dont mind a few more dollars per month.
/s: B-b-b-but if you buy the Pixel 10 Pro Fold you can pay $1799 and, assuming your bank account can only hold amounts $1699 and lower, the amount needed to purchase will overflow at some point in the purchasing process, making it SEEM like you only pay $100 for that new phone!?
Well, minor nit- cell providers offer it for 60% Google’s price to start[0], while locking it into a phone contract that subsidizes it. This is effectively bundling a loan for the hardware with your data plan. That price is more of a down payment on said loan.
[0] actually in the US at least they’ll frequently offer it for “free” with a new plan, that of course locks the phone to said plan.
Yeah, I bought a Pixel 10 Pro 256 GB yesterday. Should have been $1,099. But Google e-mailed me a $150 off coupon code, I got $450 off for being a Google Fi subscriber, plus $100 as a trade-in for my Pixel 6. My actual price for the 10 Pro was $399.
Have they fixed the ability to easily transfer your existing Android data to the new Android phone? I find that every time I upgrade, despite choosing the options to transfer apps/settings, that 90% of the apps I open just greet me with the login screen and I have to set everything up completely from scratch. I remember maybe a handful of apps, I think one was Uber, that were able to transfer everything including the login session. That was truly magic. That's how it should be for all apps. I understand banks might have special security requirements and I already know for Google Wallet, your cards need to be reactivated even if they transfer over, but most apps are not banks.
Blame the app developers, not google. They specifically added a backup/restore mode for device to device transfer, that bypasses backup blacklists[1]. However apps can still opt out by registering a backup agent, and returning no data.
Google actively avoided providing a local, secure, and seamless backup or even an interface for 3rd party backup services to make users more dependent on Google cloud services.
Of course many app developers decided the Google cloud is too insecure, being not end-to-end encrypted.
And Google enables them by not giving the users ways to override those stupid decisions. This wouldn't have happened on PCs, where you can mostly just copy over the application's user directory.
> For instance, when you're calling an airline, it can automatically find your flight details from your email and display it during your phone call.
Is this really the best example usecase they can think of? How often does an individual call an airline? I'm sure in aggregate they get a lot of calls, but I don't think I've ever had to.
It just seems really weird that this is the top example of on-device AI. The other examples mentioned, like "finding the right photos to share with a friend", seem more relatable.
It's a very simple example that people can see the value for right away. It also acts as a good placeholder for hotel, car rental agency, restaurant, etc. Any place you'd have a ticket/reservation for that you might need to call.
To me it's a solution looking for a problem. Just revisit Microsoft's marketing material for their Copilot products. Bizarre use cases one after another.
This looks to me like something resembling a 65 mustang.
If you look at some 65 mustangs they only had a driver side wing mirror as that was the law back then. The wider rear tire also makes a lot of sense, as it's a RWD car that needs wider rear tires to support the traction.
If the car in the photo is a 65 mustang, I think the AI did pretty good.
This is an old classic car/truck. Only one mirror was somewhat common back then. Also, wider rear tires are not unusual. Especially on anything with a bed, since you want additional loading capabilities in the back.
What looks off the most is the fact that the blinkers under the bender aren't even remotely close to looking similar. The rest of the car could pass as a restomod, but the fact that so many things are asymmetrical between the two sides just looks completely wrong. Blinkers, hood clips, mirror-no-mirror, etc.
That looks vaguely similar to a 60s Mustang (although also has a lot of details that are wrong) and old muscle cars like that often have wider rear tires for better traction
I think the rear looking bigger is an artifact of the zoom, where your brain expects it to look smaller, but it's actually the same size due to the extreme cropping
If you own a pixel phone remember to do regular emergency call tests. They have a bug that has stuck around for generations but for some reason they get a pass.
This sounds like a huge waste of time for the dispatch operators if everyone starts to do such tests regularly.
On a similar note, it would be great (especially for these tests) if carriers provided a non-emergency / echo number that gets treated the same way as an emergency call (works w/o SIM card, gets preferential treatment, ...)
When phones are no longer considered reliable to make emergency calls in certain places, what alternative is there?
Sure it sucks for the operator to get a call, "Sorry, just testing to make sure emergency calling works, thanks, bye" and it would also suck, probably even more, for an individual to not be able to make an emergency call. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, hopefully someone improves the system, lol.
And here i was thinking it was irresponsible to have a decorative phone in my house because someone might try to call 911 with it in need. but these guys are selling phones that randomly may or may not? and people are still like but but apple?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the AI is using video (i.e. multiple frames) to put together enough information for the zoom to be as accurate as possible. That said, I don't know if there's enough information to do 100X.
They already have this on the pixel 9s with their 20x super zoom. I haven't noticed any weird artifacts like this from my usage. It just appears as indistinguishable camera fuzz - hard to describe.
> It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
Unclear what "intelligently recover and refine" means here, and I'd like to make a request of people who might also be unclear yet influenced by this idea...
If you build features that sound like this into the image-capturing stage (from the user perspective), and your target users include serious photographers who care about authenticity, please be sure to make any kind of "generative"/inferencing of image details be optional.
And fall back to nth previous generation of sensor processing, autofocusing, and anti-shake technology -- where the compute still influences the images, but errs on the side of missing/fuzzy detail rather than fabrication.
Imagine the priorities of photojournalists as a category of user -- not only users who want appealing snapshots, selfies, or professional editorial fashion/lifestyle shoots.
There's still a place for consciously fabricating/enhancing/fixing in interactive post-processing, when you you choose to do it, and it's clear to you what is being done.
Looks like a minor improvement to the pixel 9 series. Honestly, that's fine, I'm pretty happy with my Pixel 9 Pro.
The built-in magsafe charging magnets are a nice addition, although a case with magnets in it works for me for now.
Of course, the #1 feature I'd like to see is expandable storage, which Google seems to be strangely against. #2 would be a headphones jack - Google has already reversed course on that one once, but another reversal seems unlikely.
Oh, and it's too late to edit, but I just noticed they removed the physical SIM and force you to use an eSIM now. That feels like a significant downgrade.
Yeah, I am on Pixel 9 pro too and quick trade in check shows that upgrade would cost net ~500$(256Gb). Arguably ~250$ if buying 10 would extend the gemini subscription for a year -- not sure about the verbiage of the terms here.
100x "composite" zoom is nice but not sure if it's worth it.
As much as I'd love if phones still had headphone jacks, the inertia sure seems to be going the other direction. I fully anticipate the power port will be the next to go and wireless charging will be the only way to charge (and I don't want that either).
I have the pixel 6. It's still fine. This looks like a very incremental update to me as have the previous few editions. Same with the OS. I can barely tell apart Android versions these days. And since most of the value is software based, there isn't much practical difference between different generations of Pixel phones.
My pixel 6 has the same 48 megapixel sensor in the camera as they still appear to be using. It seems camera sensors plateaued about 4-5 years ago. It's a great sensor; the raw images are pretty amazing given the form factor (tiny sensor and lens). And I expect it still is. People confuse the AI capabilities (removing subjects, adding missing detail, etc.) with simple operations to make the photo 'pop'. Boosting the contrast, saturating all the colors, applying some aggressive smoothing (noise) and sharpening, etc. Doing that manually on the raw files yields very similar results. It's good and convenient. But most of that is just the sensor being awesome and some tasteful defaults for these edits. Adding optical zoom is impressive. The digital/AI zoom is not something I'd use. They still seem to use different sensors for the different cameras; which is something Apple stopped doing with recent iphones. So, you have to choose between the right lens with lots of noise or the right sensor with the wrong focal range.
The AI stuff is interesting as a gimmick but not something I use a lot. It seems to be the main differentiator for Google these days but I just don't see that being worth hundreds of dollars. It's a bit of an artificial differentiator and a race to the bottom. The advantages tend to be a bit hand wavy and other phone manufacturers of course copy them.
I might go for the 10a when it comes out in six months or so. My Pixel 6 won't be getting major updates anymore and the battery is starting to deteriorate. The difference between a 500 euro phone and a > 1000 euro one are not worth it for me. And with the 9a at least it even had a slightly bigger battery.
> I can barely tell apart Android versions these days.
Is that bad really? I can tell iOS versions apart and I don’t like it. I believe design should converge on some ideal (even if an unreachable one) so at some point updates ought to get very “tweak”-ish.
My dream is to have a phone like this that supports thunderbolt host mode, runs grapheneos or similar and can drive a couple of displays via usb-c docking station. With the memory and CPU this phone could easily replace my work laptop (vscode and ssh for the most part). Sadly I haven't found any phone that would make this possible (Samsung Dex doesn't count because it's proprietary)
> My dream is to have a phone like this that supports thunderbolt host mode, runs grapheneos or similar and can drive a couple of displays via usb-c docking station
Sounds like you're thinking of the stock Pixel 10. Google worked with Samsung to bring the Dex experience to upstream Android, and their Linux VM work is almost fully baked in Android 15. Running VSCode and ssh can be done today with a Pixel phone plugged into a USB-C hub, keyboard, mouse and a monitor. I don't know why Google isn't promoting this capability yet,
I think they're waiting for the the big point release this fall.
When they rolled out 16 earlier this spring almost nothing changed from the user's perspective because it was just shipping a lot of the underlying supporting apis that aren't exposed via user accessible things at this point.
I guess that's better than nothing! Still, it wouldn't allow connection to a thunderbolt dock with 2 displays, network and peripherals I guess.
Ideally it would run stock Linux with Android apps via waydroid.. reliance on banking apps makes this fully converged experience using only open source a bit of a pipe dream :(
I want to know how the TSMC-manufactured Tensor processors compares to Samsung-manufactured Tensor processors and also how TSMC-manufactured Tensor processors compare to TSMC-manufactured Snapdragon processors. Samsung's Tensors (also Exynos) had the fame of getting superhot. I want to know if these problems persist in new Tensor chips.
12 years later and still no availability in Middle East or Africa. Only available in 30-something countries. Google can't figure out retail, while upstart Chinese companies hit the global market immediately.
If you buy it in a country that's not officially supported you don't get 5G, most unique features, and of course no warranty, support, or repairs.
Kind of moot anyway; 100x zoom is equivalent to a 2400mm lens (with no stabilization assist). If you can hand-aim that on target, you're an elite marksman.
The deceptive part is using AI to creatively fill in gaps in the picture, and saying "recover and refine intricate details" when the details are actually hallucinated, making that blue car look like a drawing of a toy.
You can't install any of the AI models on the Pixel 9 if you have the bootloader unlocked. Wouldn't be surprised that Gemini Nano or Pro Res Zoom didn't work, either.
> Exclusive to the Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, Pro Res Zoom captures astonishing detail at up to 100x zoom. It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
So it's not just a crop. It's a crop + hallucinate.
I really like their AI strategy. It’s much stronger than Apple’s, which seems to be nonexistent. The problem I have is I really like my Apple Watch Ultra. There is nothing like it in the android space and I can’t rely on Google. Actually caring about building a great product the way Apple does. Googles hardware products always seem to be some strategic wedge play to keep the ecosystem in check. They don’t seem to exist because they really care about building the very best watch, or phone, or whatever and at any point they might just cancel the effort.
I appreciate this but can they please go beyond search and instead legitimately find me cheapest price and overall best time to fly? Or strategies to find cheaper fight using different plans or maybe integrated credit point I have, coupons?
I'd love to see AI saving me big money and doing all the hassle for me.
Unfortunately both Pixel 10 and Gemini is unavailable in Hong Kong. I have been trying move off Apple iPhone for a long time and Pixel is the phone I wanted to go for within the Android ecosystem. And I simply dont have that choice.
Wondering if anyone on HN could shine any light as to why.
I wonder how they'll screw it up this time. I have to deal with a pink line down my Pixel 8's screen, because while there is an extended warranty for that issue, you need to flash the stock firmware (wiping the device) to put it in "service mode" so uBreakIFix can do their thing.
That's the problem with pixel. Everytime I try to switch from iPhone, ever year's line up has some glaring GC issue. I've tried every year since the 2XL. Most recent is the 9 Pro XL (only the XL size) the camera bar falling off.
The pixels could be amazing phones if Google could fix their crappy QC and invest in some actual customer support.
People like Apple - you can go to a physical store and get support. You can get AppleCare+ and have accidental damage replacements, battery replacements, etc just take it to the store.
Google doesn't have that, they don't have a physical presence, and it's nearly impossible to get a human and if you do, they are really stingy about RMAs.
The hardware and features seem great, but I'm not gonna buy another pixel phone. I've had a pixel 8 for 2 years the stability of the software has gone down so much. I frequently have an unresponsive UI, requiring me to turn off my phone with the side buttons. I also have had many issues with the keyboard and it not responding when using chrome, requiring me to kill chrome and restart it.
It seems like Google only tests on their latest device when releasing android because people I know who always get the latest phones don't have these problems. It's a very poor customer experience. It's the phone experience of an old super car. It's fast and does lots of cool things, but it feels like the wheels are gonna come off at any minute.
Same here (on a Pixel 7). Apart from there being absolutely no reason to upgrade, really, even with the generous trade-in values offered by Google around the time of release. I kind of miss the time when a new smartphone release was exciting.
Phones are not the hot commodity they used to be anymore and that's a good thing IMHO. I just bought a Px7 after breaking my 6a that I had for 3 years. I did look at the Px10 specs but with the price/value it was an easy decision.
I'm now expecting the same 3y worth of battery I was getting out of my 6a (a day started getting tight at the end).
Bigger still seems to be the definition of better but I had a CAT S60 for a while, so it's still small compared to that brick.
Overall very happy with the Px series and I'm happy they keep making them. On the software side it runs Graphene OS just as well as the 6a. Setup was super easy with the Chromium WebUSB based installer. I expect the Px10 to be supported soon too.
If we can somehow put AI agent locally on a phone that could use tools (cough: APIs) I think it will be the wildest revolution after the invention of a smart phone. How about a truly smart phone!
Yay, it has native wireless charging via Qi2, AKA Pixelsnap. The rumors on the internet were that you needed a special case to use the wireless charging. But that is not true after all and those rumors were false.
You can just plop a Qi2 charger right on your phone and it will charge! Only bummer is that the 10 pro charges at 15w while the 10 pro XL charges at 25w. And I really prefer the smaller phones that fit in my pockets. Not some huge monster phone.
I recently discovered Pixel 7 (maybe older too, I dunno) is actually Qi compatible it just doesn't have the magnets to lock in place.
But if you have a case with those magnets in, it works great. And it turns out QuadLok cases (which I can generally recommend for cyclists) are compatible.
So now I just plonk my phone against the wall and it charges on an Apple MagSafe charger I mounted. This is actually really nice, turns out it's really convenient to have your phone in a fixed position, also not taking up any surface space!
Always thought wireless charging was a bit of a gimmick but with the magnets it's genuinely useful.
It's a shame the Pixels don't have IR sensors. One of the most underrated features that some Androids have - I was in a hotel in Poland this year and it had Aircon in the room (and was rather warm), but there was no remote. The IR sensor on my phone saved my butt as it could turn on the AC!
There's no end of times that the IR sensor has come in useful one way or another.
All I really want to know is CPU/other efficiency and battery life.. If I use G1-G5 with exactly the same app that G1 CPU was adequate for the theoretical efficiency for the CPU is maybe improving 20% a generation but that manifests as some worthwhile (battery time) result or is drowned out by stupid features like even higher screen refresh?
> Tensor G5 and the latest version of Gemini Nano work together to run Magic Cue privately and securely on your phone.
YES! Here we talk.
The fact we can now host a version of an AI model, and make sure everything is processed locally and is not sent to the cloud is the best feature of those phones.
I just hope that data do not leave the phone OR are encrypted to be stored in Google servers...
On the other hand I much prefer the full-width bump than a corner bump. It helps when holding your phone (a ledge for your fingers) and means that the phone doesn't rock around when used on a table.
I made a leather pouch with a belt loop for my Pixel 6. Great when travelling or hiking. The camera band sits above the edge of the front of the pouch with the 'lid' covering that when the pouch is closed with a tuck lock.
The full-width band is just perfect for grabbing the phone and lifting it out of the form-fitting pouch, and doubles as a sort of safety preventing it from slipping from your grip.
I'd be curious to know if they did any surveys/research on how many people use a case or not. If the vast majority do (my anecdata-based hunch), why not just thicken the phone to add battery and use a thinner case rather than just having the case space the back of the phone out to be flat?
My partner got a Pixel 9a and it's nice that they went completely flat on that one, though it's obviously almost a straight rip-off of the recent non-pro iPhones aesthetically (not a bad thing imo).
I hope there's an improved screen. I bought a 9 Pro XL with hopes of running GrapheneOS but the PWM on the Pixel was terrible. Instant headaches. I can more or less get by ok with recent iPhone screens but the Pixel screen didn't work at all for me.
Heard a rumor that Google was going to take eye strain seriously for this version. Hope that's true.
I'm delighted to see that they don't make you get the biggest phone in order to get the best cameras. I've been using Pixels since the Pixel 3 and always feel like I'm making compromises in the camera department in order to get a phone that will actually fit in my hand/pocket.
I understand this might not be the best place to ask, but I have to: I'd like to try and switch from iPhone to Pixel (maybe different Android phone?) but there is one app that I can't find anything close to: Drafts.
Maybe I'm missing something? Any ideas?
I don't really need all functions of Drafts but the whole experience of adding notes with this app is something I haven't experienced with anything else.
PS: naive question: is there a way to "integrate" Pixel with macOS? At least to have common clipboard.
For that sort of integration I would use KDE Connect[1]. It works great between my phone and laptop. I can send the clipboard, files, notifications, media controls, etc between the devices.
It has a MacOS version but it currently only has nightly builds (potentially a downside).
After trying out 6000/7000mah phones, I'm never ever using any phone with a smaller battery. Especially not the 3580mah or whatever pixel phones. I like pixel otherwise, but it's just impossible to revert back to a smaller battery once you've experienced the truly multi-day -- even for a unhealthy screen user like me -- battery life.
Hi pixel users, can we configure the phone to get more privacy ? Primarily looking for disabling complete location tracking, photos processing, app interactions and local ai interactions
This codec needs hardware support to be practical (ie recording live video rather than just transcoding). So far, I think that's only available on certain Samsung models.
I wonder will this make some of the older Pixels (say 7-9) cheaper on eBay. I have been toying with the idea of replacing my Samsung S10 for ages now, and the battery life is really starting to degrade so I might pull the trigger soon.
After they stopped releasing the device tree, there's really not a lot that will hold ROM developers to Pixels. I'll definitely wait to see what happens on that front before buying my next phone.
I love Android, besides a few accessibility issues, especially when typing to Gemini and TalkBack not speaking the reply, but I don't like how sluggish TalkBack is on Pixel phones. I had the 8 and hated that.
my pixel 2 is still rocking too, what an amazing device! (although it now I only use it for flappy bird..)
Highly disappointed that Google stopped updates a long time ago.
Only one question. Can you disable the stupid date on the home screen. No I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a phone and then load another launcher on it. Just hire someone competent at programming to make this an option.
Because even if your phone only breaks every 5 years on average do you want to get a new 5 year old phone because your last one died right before the refresh cycle? Having regular releases means that when you do get the phone you have a relatively up-to-date device with latest hardware improvements. You don't need to upgrade yearly because they release a new phone yearly.
You probably don't, as your current phone ought to last for years. But hardware manufacturers, like software developers, benefit from faster release cycles.
Also: "Voice Translate allows you to break down language barriers during phone calls. Through Tensor G5, our on-device AI translates your call in real time in what sounds like each speaker’s voice"
They advertise on-device AI functionality quite a lot.
its still there on my pixel 9 in the stock/default launcher, but you can still use an alternative launcher if you like. many of those do not have the bar or let you toggle it off.
> I know custom launchers exist, but I'd really rather not go that route.
If you switched to a different phone, it is using a different launcher. If your only complaint is the launcher, it doesn't make sense to change the whole phone.
I'm not an Android user, so pardon me if this is a stupid thing to say, but it's weird to me that these phones apparently have some new UI unique to them. I thought Android was just Android. Won't other Android phones get this update?
Android is not just Android. The device vendors have to customize it to fit their devices by including drivers for example. Device vendors have the option to change the look pretty heavily, Samsung TouchWiz was infamous, Chinese vendors also offer very customized versions, including making it look like iOS.
What you are seeing is material design 3 "expressive" which will be rolled out in the next minor Android version and Google apps
I still have a Samsung Galaxy S8. It runs fine. I don't really need more from a phone. Maybe I am missing something but I really cannot see myself getting a new phone.
Yet again, Google announces another lineup of phones where a vast majority of the announcement is about software features that could be implemented on existing devices, highlighting the wastefulness of the yearly release cycle.
Shouldn't be impossible. Samsung already offers Space Zoom which has a good UX and a LOT of image stabilization so your hands shaking isn't magnified by 100x.
As far as AI upscaling though, agreed. At least make a setting so we can do our own A/B tests.
Ever since magic eraser we've been slip-sliding down the slippery slope that ends with all our picture memories being half-AI-generated with the same "look" based on whatever flavor generated them at the time.
I was surprised to see "more helpful support than ever" listed as a top line feature. Google actually offering good support to their customers?! I was impressed until I got to "Magic Cue isn’t just a single app or feature, it’s proactive support". Ah, so it sounds like the helpful support is just more AI slop.
> Exclusive to the Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, Pro Res Zoom captures astonishing detail at up to 100x zoom. It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
bro in your demo the car is a half el-camino half mustang
Yes, I don't know why they bother showing the phone turned off anymore. They all look the same.
The materials might be different, and that's where a lot of companies go wrong. The Pixel 10 uses polished glass, which is too slippery. It slides off uneven surfaces and is harder to hold.
The only downside is that all of these new features will be supported for about 3 weeks, and then rapidly turn into another Google abandoned strip mall.
Fooled me once, shame on you, fooled me (hundreds of times), shame on me
Bet the people who launched these are already interviewing for their next gig.
> Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL are all available for preorder today starting at $799, $999 and $1199.
No Pixel 10a was announced, and frankly Google's track record with hardware is a bit discouraging for someone thinking about spending a grand on a phone.
The -a models are typically released in the spring, the Pixel 9a was only just released in April of this year, so I wouldn't expect to see a Pixel 10a until March or April of 2026.
I got my entire family Pixel 4XLs when they were new. Every single one had the battery replaced once under warranty, and then they denied more batteries (it was actually the fragile connector). So I started replacing them myself. I even slightly modified the connector mount so it would stop failing. The third batteries ended up lasting years because of my modification.
Finally, all 3 died around 2023 from motherboard problems apparently. Otherwise great phones. Sad that some weird hardware problems killed them all for most people.
Try Pixels with GrapheneOS. Most of that software is still "from Google" technically, but it's reworked in some important ways, especially on a service level. For example, by default it has no Google apps or services, you can install Play store sandboxed, etc.
The "magic cue" sounds like Windows CoPilot but isn't getting the same backlash for some reason. Why would I want AI tightly woven into everything I'm doing on my phone?
They said Magic Cue is done entirely on device and as far as I can tell does not involve saving screenshots of your activities to the device like Windows Recall* did- rather it can look at things like your email and other data that is on the device to determine what to suggest
* Windows Copilot is different from Recall, which is the one that saved screenshots of what you were doing periodically
I would guess because the windows recall stores screenshots of everything you do forever while this just watches and pops up without storing information that could later be used against you. Of course, it could be secretly recording but if you are concerned about that you need to install grapheneOS or something.
Not that I like this feature or think there aren't privacy concerns.
That's likely your unreliable AP dropping offline and coming back frequently. Pixel thinks this is an attacker and stops joining it until it can hear the SSID consistently.
> Tensor G5 and the latest version of Gemini Nano work together to run Magic Cue privately and securely on your phone.
Running Gemini Nano on device is the most interesting thing here. Magic Cue sounds exactly like the Siri improvements that Apple failed to launch this past year (and have stayed mostly quiet about for this coming year, except saying "eventually"). I hope it works well, because on-device AI for simple lookups and such is actually one of the most interesting use cases for LLMs on mobile phones to me.
I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed. Or saying something like "how much was the dinner at McDoogle's last week?" and have it check digital wallet transactions. There are so many possibilities. I assume this kind of thing would just be implemented as tool calls with app intents. I hope we see this across the board in the next three years.
> I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed. Or saying something like "how much was the dinner at McDoogle's last week?" and have it check digital wallet transactions.
It's probably just me (or a few like me) but I don't really keep my life in digital format as much as others (and I'm a "geek" for my family/friends since i work in the software industry). If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar. I pay with debit/credit cards but I don't have any digital wallet. I don't take my phone with me most of the time (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).
The features described in the Pixel 10 left me with a sense of "I think I am missing something! But... oh well, whatever, I don't need any of that". Which is weird again, because I'm supposed to be the "geek".
> If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar.
If I don't have it in my calendar, it doesn't happen. I would fail to actually go to the event otherwise.
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I used to consider myself a "tech guy" but the world seems to have moved on without me. I look at announcements of new phones and computers and I'm not even remotely excited about any of it. They're not solving any problem that I have anymore. I have a 9 year phone, and nothing released since then has really been compelling enough for me to upgrade. The only reason I will probably get a new one at some point is because the OS manufacturer and 3rd party app developers have (at best) stopped supporting my device and (at worst) are actively blocking my using their software/websites purely because of the age of the otherwise perfectly working device.
I used to have this "I'm missing something" thought but I don't think that anymore. This isn't me failing to get on board with what they think I should care about--It's the device manufacturers who are missing/ignoring my needs in the market.
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Unless you're mailing letters, it's almost certain that your life is in "digital format". It sounds like you just don't use a calendar.
But surely you have an email confirmation for your movie, baseball, or event ticket. And maybe you texted or otherwise messaged with your friends who were going? Took pictures on your phone with them? Carried your phone with you when you went.
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I'm right there with you. I work in tech, but I don't want to fuss with tech when I'm off the clock. Like, it all annoys me and just feels like work.
When my router breaks I just buy a new one. When my laptop gives me the first sign of trouble I just buy a new one.
I see people fussing with unlocking their phones to pay for lunch and I am totally bewildered. Why is it so hard to pull a card out of your pocket? I have a rule "no new chargers" when buying stuff. If it comes with some proprietary charger I make a half-assed attempt to keep up with it but I just throw it in the trash after about 6 months and buy something with a cord.
Maybe I'm an old man, but maybe that means I know now that life is too short to spend my Saturday morning messing with HomeAssistant.
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You don't add to your calendar but you probably got a confirmation email. Or you may have used an app that could expose this data to the operating system. OR, you called, and the phone app transcribed and summarized the call.
Same for the wallet... if you have your credit card / banking app installed it could expose this.
But yeah, none _needs_ any of that, for different degrees of fun and life optimization.
> If I'm going to the cinema or baseball or any other event... I don't have it in any calendar.
When I buy a ticket to an event and the e-mail about it arrives, Google automatically adds the event to my calendar. My wife and I have shared our calendars with each other, too, so we both see it no matter who buys the ticket.
I dont think I have left my house without my phone in 5+ years.
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I think you're doing technology right tbh. We don't really need all this new tech, and it's better for the environment to just skip it and keep using what we have.
If you have an email receipt, and you store email on your phone, it's probably accessable. I don't think you're missing out on anything though.
Re: geek, AI has a lot of mainstream hype at the moment. I don't think there's anything inherently geeky about buying into the hype.
> (my phone is big and having it hanging in my pockets is not nice).
Not to critique how you love but a little bum bag could fix this.
I hate having things in my pockets, so that's actually why I like digital wallets. Honestly I'd rather forgo my phone but it is easier to give up my wallet, which is only carried for the ID.
But I've also recently moved away from flagship phones and I really don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I also used to root devices and underclock them after having them for some years to help extend their lives. Similarly I didn't feel like I was missing out on much. But at the same time, whenever a new phone would drop I'd feel like there was this cool new feature yet when I actually had it in my hands none of those features were actually that big of a deal. Even if nice. So moving to a non-flagship is nice entirely due to it being smaller and fitting in my pocket better. And it's not all about the thickness...
I don't think it is weird. I think it is just that innovation has slowed down but marketing hasn't.
I mean there's still lots of things to geek out about and lots of dreams and fantasies about the future and tech that just don't have anything to do with the current direction of innovation.
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How do you get your tickets? Do you just buy in person at the theater or ballpark?
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You are not a target customer for smartphones.
I think on-device models will be the breaking point for AI. Nobody wants to pay for a trillion dollar cloud bill. We've made consumers think that the only way you're paying for software is if you have to buy hardware that comes with it. If you want AI to truly blow up, make it run on potatoes. It doesnt have to do EVERYTHING, just specific needs.
That said, what is with Android phones and their back cameras? They look silly. I thought Apple adding 3 to theirs for the 12 was a bit silly, but at least they made it look nice. One of those models looks like a Battlestar Galactica villain...
It's preference. I think the cameras on the non-pro iphones are so ugly -- especially the diagonal design. The pro cameras look ok to me. Can't not see my old college stove when I look at it, but I don't think it's too bad.
I, too, am biased but prefer Pixel's camera layout. Visually, I like the symmetry of the camera bump on the back of the device. Functionally, the symmetrical bump means the device will not rock on a table and it's a nice place to rest your finger and support/handle the device. A design decision that's unique and has some (small) utility.
Tier list:
Good: Pixel line, any phone with no camera bump Ok: iPhone Pro Bad: Samsung's many iterations, iPhone 2 camera vertical layout Horrible: iPhone 2 camera diagonal layout
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>That said, what is with Android phones and their back cameras? They look silly.
Isn't it a market thing though? Doesn't Apple have a phone with horrendous, trypophobia-inducing camera nests?
They have the same camera bump design on the Pixel 9 phones.
I quite like it, it's a natural rest for my phone to sit at an angle (and protect the camera glass), and is great for holding it with a single hand.
I (and many other people) think the cameras look great and are a nice change from the repetitive boring Apple designs.
> Nobody wants to pay for a trillion dollar cloud bill.
Buying dedicated hardware as a way to keep your AI bill down seems like a tough proposition for your average consumer. Unless you're using AI constantly, renting AI capacity when you need it is just going to be cheaper. The win with the on-device model is you don't have to go out to the network in the first place.
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Just rumours but Apple is supposedly embracing a similar design for iPhone 17. https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/iphone-17/
I mean, look at these examples. Is a big LLM really needed to hit most of what people want?
Seems like Android just needs to lean into the voice command hooks API. A local LLM can grease the natural language into the mechanical APIs installed on your device. That's a much simpler task than an omniscient robot with access to all of your data.
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The Nano model is 3.2B parameters at 4bit quantization. This is quite small compared to what you get from hosted chatbots, and even compared to open-weights models runnable on desktops.
It's cool to have something like this available locally anyway, but don't expect it to have reasoning capabilities. At this size it's going to be naive and prone to hallucinations. It's going to be more like a natural language regex and a word association game.
The big win for those small local models to me isn't knowledge based (I'll leave that to the large hosted models), but more so a natural language interface that can then dispatch to tool calls and summarize results. I think this is where they have the opportunity to shine. You're totally right that these are going to be awful for knowledge.
The point in these models isn't to have all the knowledge in the world available.
It's to understand enough of language to figure out which tools to call.
"What's my agenda for today" -> get more context
cal = getCalendar() getWeather(user.location()) getTraffic(user.location(), cal[0].location)
etc.
Then grab the return values from those and output:
"You've got a 9am meeting in Foobar, the traffic is normal and it looks like it's going to rain after the meeting."
Not rocket science and not something you'd want to feed to a VC-powered energy-hogging LLM when you can literally run it in your pocket.
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Speculation: I guess the idea is they build an enormous inventory of tool-use capabilities, then this model mostly serves to translate between language and Android's internal equivalent of MCP.
I've had Gemma 3n in edge gallery on my phone for months. It's neat that it works at all but it's not very useful.
I love the idea of on-device AI. But the implementation of Gemini on Android is fully toxic. In the assistant settings I'm able to select what app I want to use as the assistant. But if I even open the Gemini app, it sets that automatically to be the phone assistant app. It doesn't ask, there's no confirmation, it just changes that setting. After that many tasks will fail because Gemini can't launch google maps to navigate you etc etc. Super annoying.
This. I tried Gemini, twice, and each time my usual use of hand free tasks were no longer possible. This is what I don't understand, all these big tech companies think I want to have a conversation and ask questions to an AI in every part of my life but I do not. All I want is to tell my phone to put in a calendar invite, play a song on an specific app, navigate to somewhere, etc. My android phone triggers itself when listening to podcasts too, which is fun.
> I love the idea of an on-device model
My impression is that most people here haven't tried similar small models and don't have first hand experience with them. They are, to be honest, terrible. They may be good for certain tasks, but are much weaker than something like GPT4. I don't feel excited about these small models that are not fast yet hallucinate all the time.
Weaker by what metric? Are you asking them to explain the fall of Rome to you?
The point of a small model isn't to be an interactive Wikipedia. It's there to call tools, get more data, aggregate the data and return a natural language result.
It does not "hallucinate", because it only uses what the tools provide.
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Or for the police, "list any legally questionable content on the phone or behavior by the owner."
The model might even make something up, giving police "reasonable suspicion". Not that it seems it's needed anymore in the US
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Why would the police bother with that when they have forensic extraction tools, that itself possibly has AI built in? Why trust a quantized model on a phone that possibly could give you wrong answers?
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call me insane, but i used to want a virtual assistant that run and listen to me 24/24. Yeah, some paranoid would scream like hell, but think about what we could achieve.
It could listen to my conversation, take notes, and auto add a reminder in my calendar if needed.
Since it has a large amount of context, i could something "Hey do you know when John said he would come back from his trip?" and it would answer me "Yes, he said he would be back on Friday at 5 PM".
This is absolutely being worked on. Limitless.AI has a hardware recorder + mobile app for reviewing your todos plus syncing / processing, and an AI backend, and an MCP API for ... whatever else you want to do. (plus a sprinkling of privacy / "HIPPA compliance" etc.)
I'm a customer of theirs. And I have NOT researched the subject much further. However given the tone and concern of the discussions by the other customers in the limitless forums, and of the devs, I am confident what you're asking is here or coming.
I really wish Pixel phones went with a more capable Snapdragon Elite 2 or Dimensity 9500 along with UFS 4.1, instead of sticking to their cost-cutting Tensor strategy. From past Pixels, on-device features like Magic Editor have been painfully slow compared to the same tools running on other Android flagships.
You can already ask Gemini those questions on your phone.
This is more popping up magically before you needed to ask.
Both are great (when they work).
Oh really? I switched to an iPhone end of last year (for non-AI reasons), so I may be missing out. Is this on on-device model, or does it still dispatch to hosted Gemini? But I'd imagine that Gemini would have a great integration with Calendar and Gmail.
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It being by Google, I have a feeling Google and LEA will be able to use tools on your phone too. They could very conveniently use this for "we didn't analyze your data using AI, we instructed your local AI to analyze your data" so it isn't technically a violation of your rights.
Yup. Fortunately Graphene OS will likely soon run just as well as on their previous hardware. You can re-googlify it as much as you're comfortable with.
> I love the idea of an on-device model that I can say something like "who's going to the baseball game this weekend" and it'll intelligently check my calendar and see who's listed.
The question is whether you are ok with the model naming someone who isn‘t listed, or failing to name someone who is listed.
I hate the idea you love, so much intrusion in my life.
But if it is all handled locally on my device, the idea is that there is no intrusion
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why ? someone else has an idea, what is to hate that another person has an idea ?
how does their idea intrude into your life ?
This seems like a good place to randomly drop my thoughts on switching from a Samsung s20+ to a Pixel 9 Pro. The hardware is excellent in the hand. The display is great, battery life excellent, the UI is snappy, does all the basic things I expect from a quality device. Over all, no huge regrets..... but...
The scrolling in every app is just "different" from the Samsung, and in a "not as good" way. I moved to Pixel with the (as I now realise) very out dated idea that a Pixel phone would allow me MORE customisation and configurability than the Samsung/Galaxy environment. Oh boy, how wrong I was. Turns out there's a whole stack of Samsung bundled apps or ones available through their Galaxy store for free that I'd gotten so used to I thought it was default Android stuff.
I miss:
So yeah, next time I'm in the market for a phone I think I'm going back to Samsung.
I want Google to be better...
As a former Pixel and current Samsung user, I can relate to almost everything on this list except for the Camera app. What is it that you prefer about the Samsung iteration? I found my preference to be for the Pixel version.
As a Pixel / Galaxy / OnePlus user...
My app and photo quality preference are OnePlus > Pixel > > > ... > Samsung. shrug Really it could be a toss up between OnePlus and Google depending on generation. My partner's Pixel 7 takes nearly as nice photos as my OnePlus 12.
My Galaxy photos were... very watercolor paint. I could not stand them.
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I've been running a Samsung S21FE since release and I would _never_ buy a Samsung phone again.
I don't need customization, I need stable features, and not having to fight with my OS for which clock and notes app I'm allowed to use. Most of the features require you to be deep in the Samsung ecosystem. Hell, Google Gemini can only use Samsung system apps as of the recent update.
There are tons of bugs in the phone, and I regularly report them. The latest one is that the auto brightness is mapped to the slider. Which vibrates when it tops off, like any other slider for some reason. However, Samsung's engineers have obviously mapped the sensor to move the slider instead of directly managing the state, resulting in the phone constantly buzzing in your hand when you're outside.
The phone constantly runs out of memory, especially when taking photos. Since the OneUI 7 update, the screen often takes 5 seconds to wake. It regularly flushes apps out of memory.
I was looking at maybe upgrading to the S25 series but the cameras have horrible focus issues: https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/galaxy-s25-series/galaxy...
Funny, my S22 Ultra just died due to the infamous One UI 7 update bricking phones with a boot loop. Replaced it with a One Plus 13 and I'm very happy not to have the Samsung bloatware all over the phone. The Samsung backup didn't help me at all.
None of that stuff adds value, just locks you in.
I feel compelled to stick with GrapheneOS even though I install Play Services and meta apps.
I do miss several Samsung features. Most of all, the ability to set the Always-On Display to only show when new notifications pop up. It is easier to see at a glance that I have a message vs. squinting at how many faint lines are displayed to see the messages icon.
DeX is a novel concept too, and with Samsung you can do USB-C --> HDMI out to use your phone to play on a TV. It is a choice Google makes that Pixel can't do that.
>with Samsung you can do USB-C --> HDMI out to use your phone to play on a TV. It is a choice Google makes that Pixel can't do that.
I have done exactly that with my Pixel 8 Pro. Worked great.
This is now supported from Pixel 8 and above.
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As someone who had to use Samsung for 2 years at work:
I don't care about most of those decorative things you list there, it just made me mad that the phone was cluttered with Samsungs Apps. This replacing of perfectly working things like Settings was almost as annoying as the constant push for me to get just another account...this time with Samsung.
No please no...I don't see why I should give away space I've paid for to Samsung so they can spam me with their crap I don't need.
Never going back.
> push for me to get just another account
This is such a minor complaint though. I have 1150 accounts saved in my password manager and then another 150 in my company phone/laptop. What's one more? Who even cares at this point.
Or some app I will use to adjust settings then never open again. It's like being annoyed by having dconf editor or gnome tweaks installed. Yeah, I install them, use them twice, and then forget about their existence for another two years.
There are real issues with Samsung meddling in Android for no good reason. Primarily, that their oneUI is maybe prettier but way less readable and somewhat less intuitive than stock. Secondly, that they pull random stuff unnecessarily like ext4 support on external drives. Things that just should work and they burned calories to make them worse. Some app or account just ain't it.
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Samsung camera app is buggy. Slow motion videos stutter. Its a common problem they wont solve.
Re. what apps can run in the background - have you checked out the "allow background battery usage"? This has worked so far for me.
>So yeah, next time I'm in the market for a phone I think I'm going back to Samsung.
Do yourself a favour and read Samsung's privacy policy first.
What about it? Asking as an iOS user.
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I'll add
- Flip the back and recent apps button in three button navigation. It's such a weird decision - like only left handed people should be able to comfortably use three button nav. Literally hurt my thumbs to use the phone.
- The quick settings panel is just abysmal compared to Samsung with massive pill buttons that have virtually nothing in them.
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Looks like they're still only available in "Huge" and "comically oversized". I guess I can keep buying Pixel 4s until new ones (req for battery) are no longer available.
It's interesting how this type of feedback always comes up for phones yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them. It seems part of it may be folks remaining in this group seem much more willing to stick with old devices anyways, helping drive less priority for small sizes on top of already being a smaller market segment. Perhaps there are some other big factors beyond those two things too.
Apple said the mini iPhones underperformed, but they were not some sort of commercial failure. They sold millions of units. Numbers most Android OEMs could only dream of for a single flagship model. Current day Apple is all about optimizing and determined that still wasn't enough, and I imagine the manufacturing for small, specialized display panels certainly took a chunk out of those margins, so Apple decided to pull the plug.
Myself and the people who said we wanted a smaller phone may be a vocal minority but we did buy the small phone when we were offered it. After I used the 12 mini for 2 years, I bought a 14 Pro since no mini was offered in the 14 generation, but I returned it a week later cause it was too big/heavy and bought a 13 mini. These days I'm using a 16 Pro since no mini is offered and the titanium did help a lot with the weight issue, but if they brought back mini phones I'd happily sacrifice the camera for a reasonably sized screen.
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> yet smaller phones have an extremely hard time actually selling enough units to justify making more of them
I don't buy this. The iPhone 13 Mini all by itself sold 6 million units in a year. That's about half the rate of Google's entire Pixel lineup. The market is small, yeah, but it definitely exists. I think a company could quietly make a high quality, straightforward, small Android device with maybe every-other-year hardware updates, and run away with a whole corner of the market all to itself.
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The problem is for many years now the smallest phone available has been getting larger and larger. This has lead small phone enthusiasts to cling to their old phones as long as they can stand it until they are forced to step to a larger model.
Bigger phones encourage more user engagement and more screen space to show ads.
Smaller phones are used by people who use it less.
I have only anecdotal data, pretty sure google has the analytics to find that out.
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I'm exactly that person. Always running an older device and lamenting the lack of small devices. Unfortunately, the mainstream wants big devices, so we all get big devices.
I recently had to replace my Pixel 7 Pro and went with the Galaxy S25. My hands are much larger than average and it is amazing how unweildy I find the Pixel 7 Pro is in comparison to the S25 even though the size difference doesn't seem that big when compared side to side. Makes me wonder how people with normal sized hands deal with the massive phones.
Who's actually making 5.5" phones to prove that though apart from the iphone 13 mini? These chinese phones often tend to be 4" instead of 5.5" and often come with with massive downsides like awful cameras or being very thick
Nobody is saying they aren't the least popular, but there are certainly many who would still buy them.
They probably figure if they stop making them then most people will reluctantly move to a bigger model.
Probably. I don't expect the market to cater to me when I don't cater to it. The only reason I ditched my iPhone 5 in 2019 was the carrier entirely stopped service for it. I don't like my new 12 mini as much.
I don't see what I feel is the obligatory "I want a small Android phone!" post here yet: https://smallandroidphone.com/
Ultra principled users rarely if ever buy new devices or have predictable purchasing patterns in almost any way. Trying to appease this market is mostly a fools game, as they have learned.
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It’s a HN meme at this point. For as long as I can remember, almost every single phone announcement on this site inevitably gets a bunch of comments about how it’s too big and how a smaller version would sell like hotcakes. You would think that phone manufacturers would have figured this out by now, but what do they know.
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I replaced my 4a (which is not particularly small) after Google nerfed the battery into oblivion, but every once in a while I get it out of its drawer and am always immediately struck by how much better the form factor is. Using a modern phone with a 6+ inch screen feels like trying to tie a knot with one hand.
I have this experience… until I turn it on and start to try and type stuff on the tiny keyboard or watch stuff on it again. Then I realise I’m glad I moved up a little
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My 4a didn't have the battery issue due to GrapheneOS, however, it the screen died recently (twice), so I got a pixel 9 with GrapheneOS. But yeah, it is uncomfortable to use the phone with one hand - I miss the small sized 4a.
On the other hand, it would be fun to explore these on device SLMs on a more capable phone with extra ram/storage.
twins!
I miss it so much. I bought a replacement one after it got cracked, only to have the battery AND Sim get nerfed a month later. Putting a custom ROM seemed to work for a while, and then it just got too unstable with sim card turning off randomly and silently. So now it sits in a drawer and used as a kids camera and I am so jealous of them. My google pixel 8 is bigger, but somehow nowhere needs as performant for my needs (camera + voice calls is basically it).
I heard about this but for some reason my 4a was never affected. Still works great and I still use it daily.
Oh man, I'm still using my 4a and am quite afraid of what I'll do once it goes caput. There's essentially no real replacement. The S23/24 are kinda okay, but the custom ROM support is meh. Pixels are unbeatable in that regard... It's a shame
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Really wish they would at least make the Fold a reasonable size when closed. It would scratch my smaller phone itch, and offer a larger screen when I actually do want one. Currently it’s “comically oversized” when folded, and literal tablet when open.
I just went from a Z Fold 5 to a Z Fold 7 and I hate it for this exact reason.
Z Fold 6 and earlier were slim, one handed use phones when folded, small tablet when opened.
Now it's just a regular phone, and a medium tablet when I open it.
First phone I've ever regretted upgrading to.
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I'd hoped others would copy/iterate the Flip form factor. A friend has one and it does feel great. I just don't get along with the Samsung software suite.
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Did you get a chance to try the original Pixel Fold? Definitely not small like an iPhone 13 mini, but smaller than contemporary devices by a good bit!
Me crying for a newer Nexus 4, the best device in terms of quality/price ever made by Google
That phone had the worst camera I've ever used. I loved having it because it was XDA custom ROM-friendly, but good lord, that camera....
Best phone I've ever owned and it's not close. Every phone since then has been a compromise, to the point that (in a sunk cost fallacy kind of way) I've just quit caring about phones and just buy whatever the cheapest available unlocked device is. I run them into the ground (way past the end-of-service date) because I know the next one is going to be worse.
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The Nexus 4 camera was rubbish and the GPS was rubbish. It could barely ever get a decent lock meaning navigating with it was a awful. I was so glad to replace that phone.
I loved my nexus 4! It's a pity that I at one point could not use it anymore because the updates made it unusable slow.
I agree, but I got the Pixel 5 instead; the 5 is actually smaller while the screen size is larger due to the curved screen corners. It also has a fingerprint sensor, unlike the 4. That being said, I still miss the squeeze-activated flashlight on the 4.
There are no alternatives. S25 is 6.2, and Pixels put the Pro/best version in 6.3, while on Samsung you get a step up to 6.7 and 6.9. Much better specs on almost the same size.
s25 is super manageable, it's the most comfy phone I've had since ever.
I keep thinking of how the Nexus 7 has a 7.02" screen. And how modern phones tend to be 6.1 - 6.9". But never quite 7!
It's not really comparable because the Nexus 7 has a 16:10 screen. Looking just at the size in inches without the aspect ratio is really only part of the picture. The Nexus 7 is like twice the width of a phone.
Dont worry theyll all be pushing 8 now that the barrier has been broken.
It's sad what they did to the Pixel 4a's battery, because that phone was otherwise comfort perfection
Still using mine on the stock rom. Mine was luckily not effected by the battery problems. Such a good phone.
I still carry my Pixel 5 for this reason. 2 replacement batteries in now and I have a spare sitting on a shelf. That said the Pixel 9A is tempting as it's not much larger than my Pixel 5. I hate that the finger print readers have moved to the front though. The sensor on the back of my 5 is perfectly postioned and also acts like a little track-pad for opening the notification tray. It was a perfect design IMO.
> a spare sitting on a shelf
Does that work for batteries? I feel like unused batteries tend to become unusable batteries.
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Replying to my own comment as I can no longer edit. To clarify, I have a spare Pixel 5 sitting on the shelf. Was inexpensive to purchase a backup a few years ago off of a local classifieds site, still new in box.
Agreed on battery. I started with a 6a and only ever had the fingerprint in the front. I thought it's well designed and works well (as long as I stick to office job activities.. as soon as you start doing handy works it has its issues.. same for Px7).
You just blew my mind on the pixel 3 with the alternative way to open the pulldown menu.
I agree that I prefer the fingerprint sensor on the back. Very convenient and natural for the pocket grab and unlock maneuver.
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i would still use my px5 if it were not for 2 stupid problem: The promixity sensor does not work, thus the phone still think it's in pocket and won't wake the screen. Another problem is my power button has been missing.
Just bought a used iPhone 13 Mini last week to replace my 12 Mini. This has to last me...apparently until the heat death of the universe.
I love my 13 mini but its battery is just too anemic. Slapping a MagSafe battery on it defeats the purpose of having a small phone. My 16 Pro lasts me all day, but I absolutely hate using it, as I don't do very much with my phone in the first place. I feel stuck.
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Pixel 5 is about as big, but yes, that's as far as it goes.
Unfortunately that goes for virtually any phone on the market... Sad.
I just want a 5.5" phone. I'm not even asking for one of these tiny 4" phones like some people, just slightly smaller so that it can be used one handed
I'm afraid you might be right.
Former user of 3a, I upgraded to 6 but it was way too big and heavy, and had a weird mass balance.
I'm now on 8 and it has perfect size and weight IMO (using it with a recommended Spigen case).
Looks like 10 is +17g heavier than 8 and 1-2 mm bigger. Not as big as 6 but almost as heavy.
https://m.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=13979&idPhone2=...
The only way Google phones keep up with the battery lives of iPhones is to have larger batteries. iPhone gets the same battery time with a much smaller battery.
Unfortunately I think this means Google will keep having to sell huge phones for a while
Samsung S25 is just 3 mm bigger than Pixel 4a. Is that too much of a difference?
I got a Motorola Razr 2025 Ultra. You can use it closed. Open it is narrower but taller than a Pixel. It fits in my pocket easily.
The size is about what every manufacturer settled on, and what most people want, it is unfortunate that smaller phones are not an option but it doesn't sell.
What bugs me however is that thin body with a huge camera bulge. Do anybody actually like that? It looks ridiculous, and the bulge defeats the point of having a thin phone. If you can't make the camera thinner, make the phone thicker, there is plenty of things you can do with more space: bigger battery, better speaker, more powerful vibration, more robust, etc...
I dont really buy the issue with "there's no market" just look at the pc market: isnt there are market for convertibles, laptops, tablet+keyboard, different OS, all sorts of sizes... how different is the android phone ecosystem?
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I get, I guess it is the "comically oversized"phone and I consider it to small. So...
I really liked my Pixel4 but in 2025 the hardware and software are getting too out of date.
Still does everything that I want it to and the photos are still excellent. I don't think I'm missing much.
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Until I purchased a Pixel 8a, I thought the same thing.
I discovered that all the newer pant models that I purchased have bigger pockets, so that's not a problem anymore.
I just hope that all the newer body models I purchase have bigger hands.
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"Just buy bigger pants" is the 2025 version of "you're holding it wrong"?
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That doesn't solve the weight problem.
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The people at Google seem to think much more like me than the people at Apple.
There are 3 primary decisions Google made that click with me, while Apple's choices are a mystery to me:
1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable. Because the backside is symmetrical. When I put an iPhone on a table, it wobbles.
2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unsorted photos are. When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders. This seems impossible on iPhones. Everything stays in the main folder forever. You can add photos to albums, but that does not remove them from the main folder. So there is no way to know which photos I have already sorted.
3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
I'm sure people who prefer iPhones have their own set of "this clicks with me on iPhones and puzzles me on Pixels" aspects?
Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
Same for me, although I currently use an iPhone (and the rest of the Apple ecosystem). I actually don't like iOS, and barely tolerate macOS but I love the hardware on mac right now.
For me, it's Apple's privacy stance (which I know could change at anytime, but that's where we are at right now). Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
As long as apps on Android can do crap like the web-to-app tracking via localhost and other shady data harvesting that Google continues to allow, I don't touch it no matter how much better it is and how much I prefer the workflows.
Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.
> barely tolerate macOS
I guess it depends what you’re comparing it to but macOS is (for me) the best of a bad bunch of compromises. POSIX with app boundaries that are (mostly) respected, if not particularly granular. There’s nothing I really hate about the platform save for homebrew and being walled in to the ecosystem.
I actually love modern Linux with Gnome, and it has all the parts these days to be a great desktop operating system, but I find the freedom there undercuts a lot of the promises (Flatpaks are a good idea in theory that doesn’t work in practice as the sandboxes are overly liberal and overreach on most apps because no-one’s forced to justify why they need the permissions they do etc).
I spent so long on Windows that I really don’t miss it. The Window management was way better for so long, but the idioms drive me crazy (registry issues and programs still freely writing anywhere they like), and supporting everything forever has massive drawbacks to usability (although Winget sort of slightly helps with this but it’s not much better than homebrew).
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>Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google
https://grapheneos.org/
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Could anyone here waxing lyrically about Apple so called privacy stand explain to me what that actually is apart from a marketing point Apple keeps repeating?
Because from where I stand they do load everything into their cloud. They insist on having you pay for iCloud through obnoxious means. They have you go through their store for everything. They even have an ad platform.
What supposedly so good about it? Their track record seems awful to me.
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The privacy stuff and the hardware quality are my main reasons as well. Oh, and Chrome OS isn't a real OS to me so I couldn't imagine using that as my daily driver as I would macOS.
Another reason I stick with Apple is style/design. Aside from the latest Alan Dye-led stuff, Apple's design has been top-notch, they make every other company look like they lack class and design-sense.
With that said, I did like Nokia's Windows Phones and the the period of Microsoft's design revolution where Surface devices had suede or whatever. That massive Surface table thing was dope too but man, Windows just keeps getting worse...somehow!
I'm looking forward to getting a Framework laptop at some point and installing Linux.
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>Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
GrapheneOS may interest you.
>Also, on either platform, why is it still not possible to toggle off network access in app permissions. Its a glaring and deliberate omission.
GrapheneOS specifically supports this for all installed apps.
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Same stance, iOS isn’t the best but the least bad. Google is an anchor to Android, supposedly Android is open source and everyone can contribute but at the end no device can be sold without Google play services and Google decides what is accepted in the aosp project.
If aosp was actually open, like managed by all biggest phone seller in a consortium, i bet we would actually have feature that people want to get. Instead of a thousand « material you » redesign, that honestly looked ugly from the get go and isn’t much better years later.
Many people want to be able to invert the recent and back button, most in fact, yet Google stubbornly refuse to add that setting. That’s just an example, but this repeat a thousand time over the whole Android project.
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I would love to have Android software on an Apple device. Their hardware is incredible!
Ultimately, I tolerate Android from a privacy standpoint because we're still able to fully modify our devices and use open-source app sources. The minute that goes away (and it feels like Google isn't as tolerant of it anymore), I go.
> Give me a Pixel & all the Google stuff but without Google, and with advanced data protection and Apple's tracking protection and transparency and I'm in.
This is literally GrapheneOS or LineageOS+microg x) which ironically is fully available on Pixel phones and and a slowly vanishing number of others...
> I actually don't like iOS, and barely tolerate macOS but I love the hardware on mac right now.
I just got my first MacBook Pro this month and feel this exactly. I prefer Windows as an OS hands down. It works with all my peripherals and has better configuration options.
But the hardware makes up for it. My MacBook Pro is about twice as fast as my new x86 desktop from work. Its battery is nearly 15x longer than my Razer laptop and four times as fast.
I’ll take gaps in the software quality for all of the progress in hardware quality.
Linux performs quite well on M1/M2 Macs (I'd even argue they are the best laptops to run Linux), almost counter-intuitively to some people's expectations. The worst Macs to run Linux on are actually the last Intel models with T1/T2 stuff. It takes some time for folks to port to new M chips as they come out but once they do, due to the popularity and similar peripherals they work well.
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I genuinely do not understand this claim and propaganda about Apple privacy.
1) it's known they scan all your content and pics on iCloud
2) the phone's always listening, always
3) once that I forgot my password to the MacBook, all one needed to do to access my data was to enter recovery mode and reset the password. Sure it logged me off from browser sessions, but all my files where there available to anybody
To me apple is overly invasive with their icloud accounts and things, and password resets taking weeks, yet I see no evidence it is any harder to get my data than on other devices, if anything, it's easier.
So what is the claim here? Some tracking less by advertisers? That's privacy? An ad less about computers and one slightly less correct about idk wine?
The fact is that anybody with physical access to my devices has an easier time logging through the apple ones than the windows/androids i own and that I care more than advertising
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Apple imposes "Artificial Incompetence" on their users. It treats them like children, gives them no agency, and limits their freedom, all while praising them for their taste and superior sense of... something.
This current iteration of Apple lacks the geniuses and visionaries that might have possibly justified their behavior at some point in the past, so you have a soulless corporate churn reinforcing the biggest walled garden in the history of humanity, with no apparent purpose except self perpetuation.
Doing things weirdly and badly, and not allowing any other way, prevents skill transfer between operating systems and environments. It prevents easy transfer of software - it forces software to treat the weird and bad things as canonical.
Apple users, with their imposed muscle memory, not realizing how good things could and should be, insist on their high taste and discrimination, and point to things "just working" and other inanities as vehement cover for one of the darkest of dark patterns.
Interoperability, protocol, and freedom should be mandatory. Google is hardly better, but at least you can own the device you purchase.
If you cannot understand what made Apple successful then or today what makes you think you're not failing to grasp something? You head right on to making an argument when nakedly revealing that you can't comprehend the other side.
Not surprising, this site is made for the Woz's of the world (and that's fine!).
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Those are some very minor complaints, all of which would not affect my buying choice, given the larger differences. That said, I’ll tell you that I don’t notice (1), for (2) I would never sit there organizing my photos, I have other (mostly less productive) things to do with my time, and (3) seems like something I specifically _dont_ want.
No, two of those are some pretty fundamental complaints about how GP wants to use their device. Just because you don't have those complaints doesn't make them any less fundamental.
Ultimately the disagreement is primarily on the fact that Apple goes very far out of their way to hide the concept of a file and filesystem from the user.
The wobbling one is minor, in all fairness.
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Absolutely. The camera bump is a complete non-issue, and probably easily solvable with a case if it's really the thing pushing you away from an entire smartphone platform.
I shudder at notion of feeling compelled to group every photo I take into exactly one folder. A directory tree makes very little sense for organizing everyday photos. If I for some reason had a natural temptation to do this, I'd be grateful to Apple for discouraging it in their Photos app.
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3) reminds me of the web USB thing, totally do not want
> Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
I don't think so. The stuff you mentioned is objectively better as there's no reason for Apple not to let you do it. It's more of a "I've been in the Apple walled garden for so long and so are all my friends" or the so-called network effects. Examples: you can't "Facetime" and "Airdrop" on Android, your text confirmation marks are green instead of blue, you don't have access to the same apps as your friends (sometimes), you don't have integration with iPad. If you grew up in certain circles you may be bullied for not having an iPhone, too.
Also there is a prevailing sentiment that Android doesn't "just work" as much as iOS, which is true tbh but not for Pixels which are basically the Android equivalent of an iPhone, where the device is pretty much tailor-made for the OS.
There’s still an element of subjective preference, as much as many like to say otherwise. To me, Android animations and gestures have always felt less polished and natural and more rough “forever prototype” and mechanistic, for example.
In terms of “just working,” a big weak point of Android that stands out to me is just how clunky it is if you’re not neck-deep in the Google ecosystem and use more standardized service providers like FastMail. iOS stock apps work great with IMAP, CardDAV, CalDAV, etc but on Android you have to hunt down third party service agnostic apps for everything, few of which are designed to work with each other. To be fair though, Windows also suffers this issue.
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For me, it's how can I get the slick and super convenient integrations between my phone, tablet, and laptop outside of Apple?
I am talking about Handoff, Continuity, iPhone mirroring (can use my iPhone and its apps while it remains locked somewhere), AirDrop, Continuity Camera, universal clipboard, iMessage, etc.
I worked at Samsung and even there a third of the team had iPhones.
Logical analysis, like using folders and file APIs, is "left-brained".
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“There’s no reason for apple to not let you do it” - they have reasons. Whether you agree with them or not is fine but pretending they don’t have reasons is a little silly.
You also can’t put every option in for everything, because simplicity has value too.
I've been using Android for years but for reasons recently switched to an iPhone.
I gotta say Android is superior in a number of things like call and SMS spam.
Also typing on iOS is a frustrating experience. I type "Im" and the iOS keyboard won't offer "I'm" as a correction option. I've even tried using the Google Keyboard on iOS and the multilingual predictions are just not as good as on Android.
I would have preferred to get a Pixel but Google doesn't distribute their physical products where I live.
The keyboard is completely nonsensical. I really don't understand how iPhone keyboard is so bad. Even if you install the Google Keyboard, iPhone keyboard is still bad.
I can't fathom what is going on here, but I really dislike typing on an iPhone. It drives me bananas. Completely obvious suggestions are never made. Android--you can just faceroll on the keyboard a bit and it'll have everything perfect. I thought I was really good at fast text input on mobile devices until I switched to an iPhone and then realized that Google's ML and autocorrect integration is just way better in this area.
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I just tried this on my iPhone, and as soon as I press the space bar after typing Im, it adds the apostrophe automatically FWIW.
Being dumb is cute on iOS.
I prefer Pixel phones, for slightly different reasons.
One, it takes really good photos. Better than phones with supposedly better specs. This is big for me, I have a 3 year old, being able to snap photos that look great with no effort is huge.
Two, the Google integration is just really a gamechanger. My laptop is my "computing" device. So my phone is mostly for calling, navigating (I travel a lot), searching for businesses, that sort of thing. It's really effortless with Pixel devices, takes a tad more work with other brands.
All browsers are equal citizens. I use Vivaldi, it's nice it can be the default and work just as well with the phone as Chrome.
And finally, in all my dealings with big tech over my lifetime, Google has been the only one that I feel doesn't try to abuse users. With MS it's endless nagging and annoyances, plus their security sucks, with Apple they're very anti-consumer unless you do exactly what they want, all the time. Even Samsung annoyed me with bloatware and trying to make their apps default over and over. If I change something on a Pixel phone, it stays changed. I pay for some Google products so no ads for the most part. Their security is great. They prefer open formats and protocols and have done a ton for the open web. Just the best ecosystem I've bought into.
> 2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unsorted photos are. When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders. This seems impossible on iPhones. Everything stays in the main folder forever. You can add photos to albums, but that does not remove them from the main folder. So there is no way to know which photos I have already sorted.
This along with iOS dumping pictures from WhatsApp, etc. into your main pictures folder is such a huge deal breaker for me. If I am backing up my pictures to a hard drive, there is no easy way to select just the pictures taken on my phone. Seems like such an oversight but I suspect it's a way to drive people to sign up for iCloud storage.
> This along with iOS dumping pictures from WhatsApp, etc. into your main pictures folder is such a huge deal breaker for me.
This is WhatsApp's fault. "Settings > Chats > Save To Photos OFF" should fix it
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iOS 26 fixes this with an option to only show photos not in an album.
Additionally, if you are backing up photos to a hard drive you will be much better off using an app like PhotoSync. It has a one time payment and transfers direct to whatever you want with far less errors and more control than Apple’s terrible buggy disaster that is transferring photos by wire.
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I can’t believe there isn’t a fix for this. I thought I was the only person with these problems. How have they persisted for so long?
The inability to sync albums as folders onto my Mac is my #1 complaint about iPhones. It's probably to sell iCloud.
Isn't that something WhatsApp is specifically doing tho? I haven't seen this behavior.
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I use an iphone and have for many years. I was a phone geek who would always use custom ROMs and have everything dialed in just so. I'm sure this has changed over the years but back in the day it seemed like there was always some weird issue with my Android phone. Admittedly, a lot of that could have been my fault for constantly messing with the device. Eventually I got busy and just needed my phone to do the simple stuff and get out of the way.
iOS has a number of really annoying behaviors and general flaws that are never going to be addressed. I don't recall having the same frustrations with Android, but maybe I did.
I'm constantly annoyed that my iPhone can't do simple stuff my Android phone could do 15 years ago. I am also aware that if it could do all those things, I probably wouldn't spend the time to get everything set up, dialed in, and maintained anyway.
The things that keep me on iPhone are unrelated to all of that, though.
1. I like the small form factor. I have a 13 Mini and there's no decent equivalent that I've found in any ecosystem (sadly, even Apple now).
2. I use Facetime with both sets of parents a fair bit. Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app, sounds like a lot of work and frustration.
3. Real or not, my perception is that privacy in the Apple ecosystem has historically been, and currently is, far better than Google. I don't like the idea of the device I'm constantly relying on to be the product of an ad company, it just feels gross.
4. Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.
> Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls, and then retraining every time Google kills it off for another almost identical app
This seems like an argument for picking something third-party, perhaps Signal. It's probably not going away any time soon, and it supports both major mobile operating systems.
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Pixel has had face unlock since at least Pixel 7
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>Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.
Being able to unlock my password manager with the fingerprint, rather than putting in the vault password every time was great, but my iPhone got too old for the other apps I needed and now I'm stuck typing in a gibberish 30-char password every time I need to use it on my phone. When are we going to get under-the-screen fingerprint sensors?
I miss having a small phone. My iPhone 16 ironically seems small compared to lots of phones my friends have. But I wish they bring back the mini. I would buy it immediately.
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> Trying to train them to use whatever app Google currently uses for video calls
Everyone I know uses Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp these days. Both of which are cross platform, even web (so can use on a desktop browser).
Also, the current Google thing, Meet, doesn't need the person you're calling to have the app. You invite them, they get a link, it opens in their browser, mobile or desktop.
How’s your 13 mini holding up? I have a recently refurbished one (6 months old) and I can’t make it to 2pm without recharging.
Additional my mail search and photo search broke with Apple Intelligence/iOS18 integration.
Debating jumping ship to a epaper phone or holding out for the rumored iPhone Air.
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> 4. Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient. I don't know for sure, but suspect going back to a fingerprint would really bug me.
On this last point, Pixel's face unlock has been secure enough to use for banking/NFC transactions since Pixel 8.
> Proper unlock with FaceID is so damn convenient
Except when you’re trying to pay with NFC and have to awkwardly tilt your phone to match your face.
FaceID is terrible, not even reliable. It scans your face all the time, even when you are not unlocking it. Every 20-30 seconds or so, let's just scan your face.
I would love it if iPhones stayed with fingerprint unlock. Sometimes I put the phone on the desk and not pointing it to my face and I want to unlock it. I have to wait for the stupid FaceID timeout to be able to input my code.
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I'm also holding tight on an iPhone 13 Mini (5.18 in x 2.53 in) and I'm honestly not thrilled that even that is a size up from the 5s (4.87 in x 2.31 in).
Pixel 10 is yet another step up, at 6.02 in x 2.83 in, and I just wish it didn't have to be that way.
> 3: On Android I can use Chrome.
On Android I can use Firefox (with uBlock Origin, and the ability to play Youtube videos in the background or with the screen locked).
There, I corrected it for you.
The Vinegar extension on macOS/iOS lets you use the system video player on YouTube. (It has a few glitches but works fine and let's you use PiP and play videos with the screen locked.)
I’m a reluctant iPhone user (nobody seems to be making music on Android and we make plugins) and I use Brave on it and have those features.
I prefer Android. Unlike iPhone, the Android notifications system actually makes sense, and I can use real Firefox on Android. But, I prefer phones sized to fit in a human hand even more, so I'm stuck on an iPhone 13 Mini. Please make a ~4.5" screen Pixel phone, Google :(
Yeah, the main news I want to hear is the release of smaller Pixel phone. Secondarily, I'd like the return of the 3.5mm port. I don't care about any of the stuff they actually announce.
I do currently use a Pixel, but I hate how big it is.
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iPhone notifications are leagues behind. Everyone you see with an iPhone has like 80 notifications--mostly stemming from how and when they're dismissed.
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I just switched from an iPhone 13 mini to a Pixel 9 Pro, and it's tough to admit but I can do so much more with my thumb on a big Android than a tiny iPhone. Mostly due to the back gesture always works (never need to tap the top left corner in some cases, and also being able to return to the 3 button navigation) and being able to pull down the notifications by sliding down on the main screen.
So true. I switched from a lineage of several pixels ending in 7 to an iPhone for various reasons. The only thing I really miss outside of niche apps after finding a better calendar is a sane notification system! iOs lock screen notifications provide so little useful information and sometimes get buried.
13 Mini, best phone ever made :(
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I’d prefer the photo organization behavior you describe, but I don’t want websites to ever be dipping into the local filesystem outside of heavily siloed areas reserved for web apps exclusively. I don’t want the browser to even be capable of it, because regardless of what permissions and security measures are put in place, someone is going to find a way around them.
The only exception I can see making for filesystem access is for PWAs explicitly installed by the user, and even then there should be restrictions in place like limiting access to scripts loaded from the installed PWA’s domain. The open web in a generalized browser like Chrome on the other hand is too untrustworthy.
As for camera bumps, they’re all equally awful and I’d rather they just disappear entirely, even if that means thicker devices.
> I don’t want the browser to even be capable of it, because regardless of what permissions and security measures are put in place, someone is going to find a way around them.
You surely trust the permissions and security measures your phone provides to apps so what makes browsers worse in this area? Especially if you're using iOS where you only have Apple's web browser available to use.
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It's so strange that we don't have cameras which have write-only access to the image spool, galleries that have read-only access to the image spool, and a file manager app that can handle delete requests from other applications with the intent system.
I switched to Android when Google gave me an HTC EVO at that year's Google I/O.
The deciding factors were:
- The large, high-res screen was way prettier.
- It had access to the whole internet, including Flash.
- The kickstand was handy. (minor, but still a nudge)
Android also had 3rd party keyboards with swipe-typing years before Apple did. I think Android has always been the preferred platform for tinkerers.
I miss HTC. They made some of the best phones, and they were always easy to put custom ROMs on.
Wobble or no wobble, I really want the camera tumours to disappear. Make the phones thicker or make the cameras more slender. Don't make these ugly protrusions. Those phones are 2cm thick anyway you're not fooling anyone with "thinness" when they still have those massive hunchbacks.
Optics say you’re not getting thinner cameras. Otherwise they’d do that, and all those foot-long lenses you see at sports events would just be phones.
Given thickness constraints at the lens,‘I don’t see any reason to make the rest of the phone that thick. Why? Extra battery and nearly double the weight of the phone? Empty space? Cord storage?
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Google sells you such a phone. It's called Pixel 9a.
As someone who prefers iphones…
- iPhone wobble is real. Mostly mitigated by a proper case. Does the iPhone get a better camera in return? Usually in my experience.
- I don’t sort my photos. The semantic search has been sufficient, and I back everything up to my NAS via an iCloud docker shim.
- Chrome/chromium is adware garbage now. FireFox is the only browser I use. The FS API does sound great though. Enviable given how annoying it is to do work on an iPhone sometimes.
> - Chrome/chromium is adware garbage now. FireFox is the only browser I use
This is actually one of the stronger arguments in favour of Android's though, you can install (real) firefox and (fully functional) ublock origin, while Apple prevents you from doing so on their non-macos products.
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Pixel phones have won blind camera tests last few years without Apple coming close though.
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> I back everything up to my NAS via an iCloud docker shim
As someone who refuses to pay extra for iCloud storage, can you tell me how to do this? I haven't figured out a good (read: easy) way to backup photos from my iPhone to computer/external storage (I don't want to use iTunes software cause I don't need everything syncing both ways).
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I was under the impression that every browser running on iOS was just backed by WebKit - so it's basically just a firefox skin.
Try Brave on iOS. Adblock that works, and for free.
I can sort my photos in folders (or albums) in iOS, not sure what you mean? I can have personal and shared albums, unless you mean the fact you don’t have that in the filesystem, in which case I completely agree.
I’m a Firefox guy myself and web apps are not something I care about for privacy reasons, but I agree that not having the option is a bummer.
The camera bump never really bothered me on the iPhone or the Pixel Fold I had before this iPhone. I just don’t notice it, but then again, I also didn’t notice the crease in the fold.
I miss Tachiyomi though. Panels is nice, but I had to built a whole OPDS-proxy to a manga website to have something close to Tachiyomi. Oh, and the ability to turn off network access on a per-application basis that came with GrapheneOS (plus the security of GrapheneOS itself).
While I prefer Android and Pixels (using GrapheneOS), I have switched my family to the Apple ecosystem to have a middle ground between privacy and features, so I’m not coming from an “I love Apple and everything else sucks” background, mind you.
I think OP is describing using their main Photos album as an inbox of sorts, emptying it out by filing photos away. On iOS even when you add a photo to an album it still exists in the main album.
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can you elaborate a bit on this please?
> "When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders."
Are you using the native application called "Files"? I tried to add photos to album via the GooglePhotos application but it will not create a new folder, right?
also this: > "web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files."
Can you share which web apps are you using? Or do you create your own web apps to work on your local files?
Thanks in advance, I'm trying to improve the photo management on the pixel because I want to create a simple way to back them up on my NAS but I'm still struggling.
I use an iPhone.
1. I’m always going to have a case on my phone, so I don’t care about the camera bump.
2. You’re correct here. I mostly don’t care, but I want to have different hidden folders, which iOS doesn’t natively have. Otherwise I don’t care much.
3. Safari’s locked-down-ness is precisely why I use it.
But TBH, at this point, there’s minimal differences between iOS and Android.
I can understand point #1
- 99% of people put a case on their phone
- the more thickness you have for the camera (sensor+lens), the better you can make the optical design. (bigger sensor, more range of focus, etc)
- the camera - especially wide angle lens - must be even with surface of case, not below it (otherwise the case occludes the edges of the photo)
Pixel phones also have a camera bump, but it's a band symmetrically placed on the back on the phone. Which is why it's stable.
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4: the fact that Android has unified gestures: back, home and tray. Whenever I used iOS, I felt like every single app had a different way of going back somewhere. On Android, this is not an issue at all.
Uh. I used Android for 15 years and I still keep guessing wrong what the back button will do. Feels like 75% of the time it does not lead me back to what I expect and all apps have different ideas what they think it should do. I agree though that not having a back button at all is also not good.
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>3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
Working as intended. Apple wants their 30% cut by all possible means. Web apps would bypass their cut.
I have to admit, my experience with #1 was quite different.
1. Put pixel on a flat surface. 2. Half an hour later, discover that the the surface wasn't actually flat, as phone the phone crashes to the ground, having been slowly inching its way off the 'flat' surface by virtue of the magically friction free back case of the phone...
No joke, by far the slipperyest phone I have ever had, and the one I slapped a case on the fastest, but not fast enough to avoid many dents.
No! They still do that? Reading this thread had me thinking back to an early Nexus phone I had back in my Android days, maybe around 2012, and here’s this post! I had no idea that wasn’t some odd one-off problem.
You could place the phone back-down on a surface a marble wouldn’t roll on, and 20 minutes later it’d magically be on the floor. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. I can’t believe they’re still doing that (how, though?! And why?!!)
It is a combination of many things.
Number 1 being moving between two system is difficult. The biggest obstacle is WhatsApp. And Meta / Facebook / Zuck is making it hard for people to switch. While it is not yet a thing in US, WhatsApp has 2B user world wide. And their life lives on WhatsApp. Less of an issue if you are on Line, KaKaoTalk and WeChat.
Number 2 is choice of phones. Android is basically Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy and Chinese Brands. I don't even think Pixel has double digit market share and Google Pixel isn't available everywhere. Their distribution channel is still appalling 10 years later. Making it pretty much the choice of Samsung or Chinese Brands.
These two obstacles are there before user could even make a choice and compare.
At one point I really thought Microsoft could get back into the game of Mobile. But after many years of waiting it doesn't seems that is a direction they want to go to.
I think the iPhone 17 coming later next month won' wobble. So that is one problem solved.
In the long game it seems we can better count on "Apple can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”
I can download an APK and install it on android. Why can't I use my iphone like I use my macbook?
An underrated question. The answer of course is twofold:
* Paternalism (Apple believes users are too stupid to be trusted to control their devices, and no amount of "I really know what I'm doing" confirmations could change that)
* Apple's biggest fear is being disintermediated by Google or Meta, the way WeChat did to phone manufacturers in China. An ability to side-load an app could allow a foothold for a powerful competitor who could wean you off of all their lock-in features in favor of an experience that would tie into a competing ecosystem.
Apple would like your macbook to be more like your iphone: applications only via their store, thank you very much.
But it isn't worth the bother; the macbook market is much smaller than the iphone market.
I prefer iPhone for a miriad of little things. Can't name one particular thing, but it's just constant annoyance, when I have to use Android. I probably could write a list of 100 items, if I'd care to document it all.
That said, after Apple started drinking AI juice, I don't want to deal with it anymore. Another major annoyance with iPhones is that they ditched touch ID. Face ID just doesn't work with me at all, it's like 30% of success rate, absolutely terrible. My last phone was iPhone SE, but new models switched to this Face ID, and that's a real deal breaker for me. I even considered buying few iPhone SE phones, while they're still selling at the stores and keep them for later use, but that seems weird and they'll get obsolete with software updates anyway.
I switched to Arch on desktop and I'm going to switch to GrapheneOS on my Pixel (native Pixel Android is absolutely terrible experience, GrapheneOS is bad, but everything else is just worse).
The single thing that solidifys it for me is that every Android device I have ever used has suffered from noticeable micro stuttering.
Their current top of the line TV device drops an entire video frame every couple of seconds while watching 60fps content, cause very noticeable jerking.
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With an iPhone, when you click on an input field, the on-screen keyboard pops up, and you can type right away.
On an android (latest samsung flagship), the keyboard shows up but is frozen for a second before you can type.
I feel this and I’m guessing iOS is a lot more closer to the hardware, while android runs on top of Java, so there is more to process. Maybe its just me.
This must be a glitch particular to Samsung phones. I use flagship Google Pixel phones and have NEVER witnessed such a lag. I tap on an input field with my left thumb, immediately the keyboard shows up, and I immediately smash any letter with my right thumb and it does register it. So, blame Samsung, not Android.
I am not too surprised though. Samsung has a reputation for bloating their Android stack with junk.
Yes, I’m used to this too. But lately on my 13 mini, there is a slight delay between the keyboard showing and it registering key presses. I would say it misses the first key press 60% of the time when the keyboard pops up…
It’s very annoying
Sorry, can you explain a little more? I'm interested where it doesn't pop up or I'm misunderstanding
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> Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
I can also just plug my Pixel into my Linux machine (I think I needed some other program to do this on Mac, bit it's still easy enough; can't comment on windows) and drag and drop photos, videos, ebooks whatever onto the device.
This is huge for me as I work at a location with no BYOD WiFi and poor (very low bandwidth) connection speeds so I often download YT videos for offline listening later. Also worth mentioning VLC is really good on Android and merely OK on iOS.
Also very important when you're low on storage from photos, you can unload them with no hassle.
I can't do the same with my iPhone; even when I can mount it successfully, its always an arcane directory structure in DCIM sorted by date or something.
This is HUGE for me. I cannot understate how much utility I get from this alone.
1. If the phone is bare. If you have a case (or a magnetic wallet like mine) it is stable. Rumors are they are moving to a camera bar in the next release.
2. There is a filter 'not in an album' which would do what you want. The library view is the equivalent of "All Mail" in Gmail. In newer versions, this is a distinct view - they are moving albums, automatically generated collections and search to be a primary interface.
3. Both WebKit and Mozilla have said they consider the local access variant of that API to be harmful, since they do not have an adequately prominent way to surface and manage that you've given a web application permanent access to sensitive directories and files, potentially in the background via service workers. Both do support the origin private filesystem variant. Are there productivity apps direct filesystem access would be useful for other than IDEs?
> Rumors are they are moving to a camera bar in the next release.
If the renders out there are correct, it seems the camera modules will still stick out beyond the camera bar for some reason, so I'm not sure it won't wobble-- though it does look like the issue will be reduced
This comment is flamewar bait that doesn't even acknowledge the post.
Not every phone related post needs to become one.
Gotta love it, open up the comment section about a new Pixel 10 phone, and have to scroll through a massive comment chain of what, 200? 300? comments that aren't related to or addressing the article in any way.
I used Android for many years. I got to the point where I didn’t care about or want to customize my phone anymore.
I was tired of my Android phone feeling like it was falling apart after a year.
I have enough things to think about, troubleshoot, and tinker with…I don’t need my phone to add to that list.
Which phone brand did you use where it was falling apart after a year? The rest of your comment sounds like you're saying you preferred the iPhone because it takes the option of customizability away from you entirely, instead of simply sticking to the level of customization on Android that worked for you.
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> When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable
My experience with the Pixel 7 Pro is due to the very pronounced camera bump and the rounded edges, the phone would slide off tables with problematic frequency, to the point that mine just lives in its bike mount case full time now.
What
you might need to level your table then
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I have an iPhone 15 Pro. I am a semi regular Pixel user as well. I prefer the iPhone by a mile.
1. Mine sits flat too. It's in a rugged case.
2. You don't know how to use Photos properly. You create collections from the pool and name them. You can create folders as well. In fact it actually does that automatically now.
3. There's literally a files app and filesystem abstraction on iOS. I use it for moving stuff around all the time.
Add one gain:
1. All my photos are in real files in Photos.app on my desktop within seconds of me taking them. I do not have my files held ransom behind a web interface. Edits and folders are transparently replicated between both devices. When I back up my mac I have a copy of everything.
And a total loss:
Post processing on both devices for images is terrible so I use a dedicated camera.
A counterpoint: google intentionally broke the ability to backup photos in Google Photos.
Yes, takeout sort of exists, but it doesn't work. If you sort pictures into albums, you get duplicates of each photo for every album. So one copy in the automatic year album; one copy for each album you have put a photo into. My 80gb of photos triples in size, and oh, sometimes downloads fail on the zips they put them into. And since I use a mac, who has 600gb of free disk to download and extract the zips for my dedup script to run.
Additionally, they intentionally broke their api (well, just disabled it... but only for most users; it seems to still be available for Microsoft) to do incremental backup. tada!
It's the most Apple thing.
I like Apple photos in this regard on the mac. If you have the storage, you can just set it to download full copies automatically, now all my photos are stored locally on my mac almost as soon as I take the photo on my phone.
All google needs to do is make a desktop app and allow automatic download.
What do you think Photos should do instead?
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I switched from Android to iOS a few years ago. I used to be deep into Android customization - custom ROMs, custom icon packs, etc. But today, I feel that iOS and Android offer pretty all the features that I could ever want. My deciding factors when I switched:
- iOS UI animations are significantly better
- access to iMessage
- Apple got around to adding their version of "always on display"
- I turn the vast majority of notifications off, so Android's better notification management stopped mattering to me
- It felt like Google kept bending Android towards iOS anyway (camera app, moving away from the 3 button navigation)
> iOS UI animations are significantly better
And if you don't like them: tough luck. They're mandatory.
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> I feel that iOS and Android offer pretty all the features that I could ever want.
Except privacy.
I think for most people its just whatever you are used to. That said I can't stand iPhone. My wife also switched to Android after being jealous of some features on my phone.
I have an iPhone because at the time I bought it I liked the size (Mini 13) and it's fine. Before that I had some Android phone and it was fine too.
I've never understood the strong emotions people have attached to these things.
About the only thing I'm looking forward to when I upgrade my phone in a couple of years is getting a better camera. Phones were pretty exciting for a while, but now? It feels like a mature segment and not much is changing anymore.
> I think for most people its just whatever you are used to.
Or in the US, it's whatever your family and/or circle of friends use, RCS or not. iMessage lock in is real (along with Facetime, Airdrop, Apple Pay, etc.)
The biggest selling point of an iPhone for me is the easy connection with my Mac and the consistency between them. If it weren't for that I'd strongly consider a pixel
As a, mostly, happy Android user since the HTC Magic in 2010 or 2009, the one thing I really wish they could fix (but I suspect it would never be possible) is the extremely confusing thing with intents and apps opening as views in other apps. Like when my mail app opens a PDF it looks like I am now in the PDF app and after reading for a while I completely forget that I am actually still in the mail app, and then I go BACK and instead of ending up in my PDF library view as I expected I am suddenly in my mail app. Or when I look at the running apps list there can sometimes look like I have two PDF viewers or two browsers running since some other apps used intents to open views from those apps that now exist in parallel with the real apps.
Somehow that manages to surprise and confuse me almost every day. In desktop operating systems, and, I belive, in iOS, there is no need for such thing? Opening a PDF from a mail application usually just opens the PDF viewer as its own application, or it is embedded in some nice way that does not make the entire mail app suddenly look like a PDF viewer app instead.
Unfortunately they can probably never fix that because app lifecycle and intents are connected to everything and a good fix for this would probably break everything.
It's interesting that this feels awkward to you, because when apps don't function this way it feels broken and odd to me. When I tap a PDF attachment in an email I expect the back button to go back to the email I was just viewing, not the list of PDFs on my phone. If I wanted to view all the PDFs on my device, I would start at the PDF viewer and tap into PDFs from there.
I wonder what experience made this feel more awkward for you (and conversely, why it feels more natural for me). What a weird/complex world we live in!
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My pixel 8 does not stay where I put it. Without a case, it will slide right off of any slightly tilted surface.
It should be illegal to put glass on the back of a phone.
I agree so much. I get why: "Designers" consider plastic to be low-class, metal is radio-opaque, so that leaves glass as the only option even though it has zero functional advantages over plastic (glass is heavier and more fragile).
Imagine if it was a panel of plastic, and that you could easily replace it if it got too scuffed up.
A mystery about Apple is that some of its software are ridiculously bad. iTunes sync was one of them. Another example is removing iCloud sync used to wipe out the content on the disconnected devices. Screen Time is pretty much unusable. It's really hard to batch update photos in iphone. Heck, it's even hard to batch move app icons on iphone screen.
What good is optimizing for the open web when the Pixels lack a sufficiently fast processor for bloated web pages. Haven't tried the 10 yet, but Pixel 9 is sufficiently slow that you can see tearing artifacts when you scroll. This is at least two or three years behind the modern Qualcomm in Samsungs let alone Apple.
I think photos on the pixel are messed up (long-time iphone user who switched for the pixel 9 folding pro), you have all these folders that by default don't get backed up, it took me ages to understand I had to go in settings and manually check all new apps that I install for photos to back them up (and display them in my gallery). It's never clear what's the "offline" vs "online" view of google photos (and why there are other google photos apps).
With a bit of fiddling I can finally backup my whatsapp photos, but oh boy why aren't the default saner?
For Chrome, it's inconsistancies after inconsistancies. First, I couldn't read PDFs from there, now I can but I can't edit the URL when I edit a PDF, also no built-in app to read PDF, it's crazy.
As someone who started on Android but switched to Apple many many many years ago, I still find things like this that are quibbles for me, but in general my preference for Apple is because of security/privacy, battery life management, performance, update longevity, and hardware quality.
That said, I think it's worth noting that #1 hardly bothers anyone because most people put their phone in a case, and that can quickly resolve this. #2 isn't a real problem, because you can absolutely sort your photos into folders, they're call albums though, and this is a first-class workflow in the Photos app since they switched from iPhoto to Photos about 6-7 years ago. For #3, I don't want my web browser having file system access via an API and I don't use Chrome.
> This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
The thing is that web apps are always a worse experience if you have native apps. Linux and Android (and now also Windows) depend on web apps because they don't have good quality native apps. For Apple devices you can always find a top quality native app to use, so web apps aren't any concern. The only people I have met who want to use apps in their browser on MacOS are Linux refugees who were attracted by the "specs" of Apple devices. It's a bit like buying an electric car and lamenting the lack of a gearbox. You don't need it anymore.
> Linux and Android (and now also Windows) depend on web apps because they don't have good quality native apps.
I fail to see any iOS without an equivalent native application on Android when the Android application is not actually significantly better.
iOS really is a minority os here and it shows.
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File System Access API has some serious issues. To quote Mozilla's position on the topic
> There's a subset of this API we're quite enthusiastic about (in particular providing a read/write API for files and directories as alternative storage endpoint), but it is wrapped together with aspects for which we do not think meaningful end user consent is possible to obtain (in particular cross-site access to the end user's local file system). Overall we consider this harmful therefore, but Mozilla could be supportive of parts, provided this were segmented better.
I think most users would probably be better off without this proposal.
It sounds like this would prevent users from backing up their own data, which is hard with localStorage and sessionStorage, and instead having to rely on the site owner.
However this doesn't go into any detail, so maybe they have some convenient way of being able to access these files in mind, but we'll never know. It reminds me of another shallow dismissal by Mozilla: https://github.com/mdn/content/pull/36294 https://webreflection.medium.com/mdn-doesnt-trust-you-should...
2: you can organize photos into folders but nobody does
3: I actively don’t want this nor would I want anybody I care about to have to deal with this.
But props to you for having an argument for Android aside from the usual “I have more control”
I think a lot of developers think like you, but most users of phones don't.
I don't think most people care enough to put time into organizing their photos, but would rather the phone or backend AI just find the photo they want by searching for it.
I'm not sure if most users even have a strong conception of "file" or really understand what data is physically on their phone vs "the cloud".
(The symmetry thing though probably does bother a lot of people regardless of their level of technical expertise.)
Well I’m a very technical person, and sorting photos into folders seems like a colossal waste of time to me, when I can also just search for a thing on the image, the place or time when or where it was taken, a person or animal on it; I could add it to an album, star it, add tags to it; that should be more than enough sorting facilities, I think.
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None of those things matter to me. What does matter to me is that to get stuff off my iPhone I have to do a weird sync process and/or use iCloud. Infact, a lot of my issues with the iPhone stem from refusing to use iCloud. Can’t use Apple Pay or FindMy.
For now I use Airdrop to move photos from my iPhone to the computer but it’s very error prone and fails 1/5 times and way more often if you try to do it with more than 30 images/videos. Is this situation better in the Pixel?
Regarding the second point, while I gladly agree the current iOS Photos app is a mess, doesn't it make sense to have photos in multiple albums? If I went on holiday to Brazil and made a nice photo of my son there, I'd like that photo to be in both the "Brazil holiday" and "Beautiful photos of my children" albums, not just in one folder.
> sort them in folders.
They had that in iPhotos and dropped it in Photos. I missed it for about a month and then I got over it. I'd never sort my photos now, I can just search them or find them on the map.
If you want to sort photos by folder, no one stops you from using other apps. Google Photos itself is available.
Very, very few people want to spend time sorting all their photos, it's a fool's errand.
My first smartphone was a cheap Android and then I switched to iPhone about eight years ago and mostly haven't looked back.
That said, Apple's behaviour around locking out wearables from key system APIs does have me reconsidering. I found the inconsistent sync and notifications on my Fitbit to be a pretty big source of annoyance and if that continues on the new Pebble I would consider switching back to Android just for that.
I think the EU or the US (one of them) is trying to force Apple to give third parties access to the things Apple Watch has access to, so there might be relief coming for one of those continents (one assumes that the petulant child that is Apple's leadership will, after appealing to the maximum, region-gate any remedy, exactly as they did for third-party app stores in EU).
> 1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable.
That was the first thing I noticed. I assume the extra protuberance is to enable the insane zoom level but it goes full width for stability.
I have G85 Motorola - great phone (and primarily a phone/modem/camera) for the price, but it wobbles slightly.
Yes, I prefer Android, but have a M4 Air that goes everywhere with me to do actual work.
2/3 of your complaints seem to be down to Apple's insistence that filesystems are silly and should be hidden from users. Unless it's iCloud, then show the user 2 identical filesystems and scatter everything at random between the two. Really, it's a write-only filesystem. Apps will constantly save things there, but god help you if you ever want to find something.
> 3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.
Safari has support File System Access API since 2022. Maybe you haven't kept up but Apple has done a 180° on PWAs in the past few years
For me, it is the ability to tether my laptop to an iPhone to use the data service on my iPhone. This alone made me give up on Windows laptops and Android phones. Sure, you can tether Windows laptops to Android phones. But, it is a slow and cumbersome process. I use this functionality frequently enough that it was worth it to switch platforms over it.
When I switched off Android >5 years ago, even then, it was as simple as turning on the hotspot and connecting to it. It was no more cumbersome than any other wifi network. This was with a Pixel device and Linux laptop, and I am sure it works on Windows too.
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I use an iPhone because Apple is more focused on privacy, and I don’t really need that many features on my phone.
> Apple is more focused on privacy
A more precise way to put it: Apple is focused on customer control, and will fight whoever tries to touch what they see as Apple's exclusive customers.
This has privacy benefits against tracking agents, reduces functionalities against third party services (Amazon, Spotify, Google, third party payment etc.), and forbids whole use cases (e.g. non Apple backup service).
As a customer one can be happy with the privacy windfall, but we've seen again and again that it's not Apple's focus per se.
Of course it's a matter of taste, personality, culture, etc.
That's why flame wars about anything don't make sense, whether it is about Operating Systems, browsers, gaming platforms, text editors, phones, cars, coffee, or whatever else you can come up with to arbitrarily argue about.
I like that I can run whatever software I want on it.
I do not like that it is overly locked down without rooting. But still way more open than iOS, regardless of what the mobile phone lawsuits from Epic decided.
I’d love to use the android phone, as they seem to have much better and actually useful AI integration, but they are not phones but “advertising company tracking devices with tacked-on end user functionality”. Similarly, Chrome is not User Agent, it’s Corporation Agent.
To your 3: On iOS Safari, I can use extensions. That includes adblockers (uBlock origin lite) and others like Vinegar (allows youtube videos to play in background while display is off). No ads boosts productivity more than the file API - what would I need that for?
I prefer an iPhone but only because it has generally given me the best experience where I am not having to fiddle with anything.
Maybe android has changed but I made the swap, maybe a decade ago, because android had very weak boundaries on apps running in the background.
As someone who used Android for years and only recently switched to iOS the lack of file system access is really the only dealbreaker. It's damn annoying. The hardware is reliable and solid but why do we get such a crippled operating system ?
The older I get the more I value screen real state. And that foldable phone is really calling me.
Aside from that the fact that I can sideload apps. Run a VM. Work. All this with 16Gb of Ram.
And the list goes on and on.
Honestly having an iPhone these days feels more a punishment than something else.
I knew apple wasn't for me when I tried to sync and backup my stuff on something that wasn't iCloud. Its just plain unusable if you don't want to be fully entrenched in their cloud services.
I’m an iphone user and I’ve always used Dropbox and google photos as my general backup mediums.
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FYI rumour has it the iPhones about to be released will have the same sort of full width camera module so the “wobble” won’t be an issue. Not that it ever was for me before, I have a case on it.
For #2, on iOS, you can move photos to shared albums and then safely delete them from library while retaining them in shared album. Shared albums use iCloud space, so it’s not ideal.
What web apps do you use that use the File System Access API?
Nope, i wish Apple would do this the way Android does. Most people here prefer Apple, not because of the crap iOS but because of the hardware.
Decision 3 is a no brainer.
Apple want you to use the apps they've curated , not web apps, not apps or games from 3rd party stores etc.
I think most HNers prefer iPhones because they seemlessly integrate with the rest of the ecosystem.
Assuming you mean the rest of the Apple ecosystem this is kind of like saying most countries speak French because all the road signs are in French. Someone who doesn't have an iPhone doesn't necessarily have twenty other Apple devices around.
I’m a former Android user (bought a Nexus One on release!) that switched to iOS many years ago and I don’t miss Android as much as I thought I might.
To me the biggest thing to reflect on is how depressing it is that we must all fit ourselves into one of two boxes. My kingdom for a flourishing mobile OS ecosystem where we can all find the exact combination that scratches our itches.
Well, we have 3 main boxes and 1 got mostly rejected (windows).
One is a worse version of OSX and the other is basically what would have happened if Linux was initially created by a huge corp.
My dream is for a top-notch Ubuntu for mobile. I'm still waiting for Desktop to catch up, so won't hold my breath.
I do t think I’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t use a phone case, all of which fix #1
I've never used a phone case. I don't understand why they make these things so small and then everyone just slaps on an extra couple mm. What's the point? If we're making them bigger anyway, at least use that space for more battery.
Anyway, the wobble is real, and sucks.
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> When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders.
This is exactly the sort of thing a lot of smartphone users (including Android users) won’t do.
The point of post-PC devices is to actually be post-PC. For many, futzing around with files isn’t the answer.
For instance I gave up doing this to my email years ago. It was very liberating. If I want something, I search. I can save searches I frequently perform.
iOS’s Photos app isn’t perfect but it allows me to find stuff just fine. I can search for places (“Seattle”), for things (“bicycle”) or even combinations (“plants Vancouver”). It’s pretty neat. And you can actually add stuff to folders (‘albums’) if you really want to.
> local files
iOS has them too. There are apps which allow you to access and manage local files — including the built in file manager. It’s not as laissez-faire as Android, though. Even the file manager has come a long way, and it’s improving further in iOS 26.
tl;dr — iOS isn’t for everyone, but it’s not like it’s not well-designed with a certain audience in mind.
I recently switched to an iPhone.
I legitimately struggle to find anything better.
(Battery, perhaps?)
I like Pixels because I can put Graphene on them.
I never want to sort photos in folders.
They also screw up the hardware.
When I use a fingerprint scanner on other phones, it works.
When I used it on my last Pixel (6 or 7, I cant remember) it failed over half the time.
How does one screw up biometrics this badly? Lack of care/QA on a $1k device.
GL with your Pixel.
Note: I'm not an Apple fan boi. I swap every couple of years so I maintain skills in both OSes.
If it was the Pixel 6, I can attest that the 6 (at least the 6 Pro XL) had issues with the fingerprint scanner. I had no issues with my 5 series (when the fingerprint scanner was on the back) but the 6 series always gave me trouble. I'd wager a guess the reason why was because it was the first generation with an under-display fingerprint scanner and they hadn't yet worked out the quirks.
I've since upgraded to a 9 series and it works flawlessly so I can assume they've figured it out some time since then.
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1. You don't have a case???
>1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable. Because the backside is symmetrical. When I put an iPhone on a table, it wobbles
So? Big deal...
Frankly, iOS could be a giant turd of an OS, at least it's somewhat privacy respecting(for the time being), I would still prefer it.
As long as it's that, it's light years ahead of Android. Which is a vehicle for Google to spy on you so they can sell your data.
Nobody privacy respecting uses stock Pixel android. Check out GrapheneOS.
These are all extremely minor issues. 2 and 3 are not even relevant to 99% of normal users. Very few people want to spend time manually organizing photos like that, and albums do essentially the same thing. The wobbling thing is a non-issue. It doesn't even wobble unless you're pounding down on the phone on a table.
That fake zoom with AI is gross ugh
If I'm taking a picture of something I want it to be real light-to-pixel action not some made up wambo-jambo
I find it kinda scary that this is marketed as "zoom" and "recovering details", when the reality is that it quite literally makes stuff up and hopes you won't notice the difference. You and I know that it's completely fake, but we (or at least I) don't even know how much is faked, and probably 99% of people won't even know that it's fake at all.
How long until someone gets arrested because an AI invented a face that looks like theirs? Hopefully lawyers will be know to throw out evidence like that, but the social media hivemind will happily ruin someone's life based on AI hallucinations.
It becomes misleading to even keep calling it "Zoom".
More like "Interpolation" with a pinch of hallucination. I can see this becoming a thing though, it is after all the mythical 'zoom & enhance' from csi...
I actually think it's a cool feature, but it shouldn't be called "zoom". "Zoom & Enhance" would make sense. The UI should also have a clear visual indicator of which modes are pure optical zoom, which (if any) are substantially just cropping the image, and which are using genAI.
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> If I'm taking a picture of something I want it to be real light-to-pixel action not some made up wambo-jambo
Then don't take pictures with phones because it's been like that since more than half a decade at this point even on midrange phones.
Digital has never been light-to-pixel.
At a minimum, you have demosaicing, dark frame subtraction, and some form of tone mapping just to produce anything you'd recognise as an photo. Then to produce a half-way acceptable image will involve denoising, sharpening, dewarping, chromatic aberration correction - and that just gets us up to what was normal at the turn of the millennium. Nowadays without automatic bracketing and stacking, digital image stabilisation, rolling shutter reduction, and much more, you're going to have pretty disappointing phone pics.
I suspect you're trying to draw a distinction with the older predictable techniques of turning sensor data into an image when compared to the modern impenetrable ones that can hallucinate. I know what you're getting at, but there's not really a clear point where one becomes the other. You can consider demosaicing and "super-res zoom" as both types of super-resolution technique intended to convert large amounts of raw sensor data into image that's closer to the ground truth. I've even seen some pretty crazy stuff introduced by an old fashioned Lanczos-resampling based demosaicing filter. Albeit, not Ryan Gosling[0].
Of course, if you don't like any of this, you can configure phones to produce RAW output, or even pick up a mirrorless, and take full control of the processing pipeline. I've been out of the photography world for a while so I'm probably out of date now, but I don't think DNGs can even store all of the raw data that is now used by Apple/Google in their image processing pipelines. Certainly, I never had much luck turning those RAW files into anything that looked good. Apple have ProRAW which I think is some sort of hybrid format but I don't really understand it.
[0] https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-accidentally-a...
By my understanding, demosaicing almost always just "blurs" the photo slightly, reducing high-frequency information. Tone mapping is unavoidable, invisible to most people, and usually doesn't change the semantic information within an image (the famous counterexample is of course The Dress). Phone cameras in recent years do additional processing to saturate, sharpen, HDR, etc., and I find those distasteful and will happily argue against them. But AI upscaling/enhancement is a step further, and to me feels like a very big step further. It's the first time that an automatic processing step has a very high risk of introducing new (and often incorrect) semantic information that is not available in the original image, the classic example being the samsung moon.
It's just crazy that demo they show, imagine the vehicle is actually a truck but you zoom in and it becomes a porsche...
conspiracy tangent, try to take a picture of something you're not supposed to and your phone won't let you ha, well money could be an example which I get the reason (it's printers but that idea)
the car looks mutated and slimy. most stuff that's used computational photography before now didn't imagine things from whole cloth
Agreed, I was recently looking through photos from my Pixel 5 and realized that it had "helpfully" modified an image of a bunny, making the fur look wavy and adding a weird faded-out eye on the body. On top of that, it applies skin smoothing to every photo, even with the beauty filter disabled. It irked me enough that I'm looking for a new third-party camera app. Despite using exclusively Pixel/Nexus phones for the last 12 years, I might abandon them entirely once this phone dies.
Agreed, not a fan. The world has enough fakery in it already without people accidentally generating even more (I assume quite a lot of casual users will mistake this zoom for zoom in the traditional sense).
It's giving "Samsung fake moon". If generative AI is going to make up details why bother zooming in, you could just ask to make up a whole AI slop picture.
This does seem to actually, ya know, do the upscaling though instead of clumsily faking it. Like yeah it's AI with AI failure modes but upscaling models are quite good and have less 'weird artistic' liberties than imagegen models.
The other thing that was annoying me with a cheap phone I bought, it was applying this generic surface to your face so your face didn't have pores but it looked wrong.
You can see the original image.
I find it cool, it's pretty much the CSI enhance tool.
Unfortunately these new phones don't fix the main issue with the Pixel: the hardware.
The performance is just unacceptable, it's already 50%+ slower than a snapdragon 8 elite flagship released in the same year.
This affects everything, pixels just don't last nor have great battery life for this reason.And the big issue is they aren't even much cheaper anymore.
I like GrapheneOS, but my pixel just randomly stopped working after being laggy and having the worst battery life on cellular (less than 2h SOT with a 5000mah battery)
It's hard justifying buying another pixel after such a horrible experience, were it not for GrapheneOS I would never consider buying a pixel in the first place.
Heck even the camera isn't that good anymore, most photos are just gray, and the hardware is also very lacking.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-image-processi...
I found Mrwhosetheboss overview really good, he explains how the pixel just comes short in every way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRegbipwCsc
>The performance is just unacceptable, it's already 50%+ slower than a snapdragon 8 elite flagship released in the same year.
This is the one thing I don't understand. How many people actually need the top end SoCs that other flagships come with. Phones have been more than fast enough for a long time now. Other than playing some games with tough visuals mid range SoCs are still more than powerful enough.
Complaints about battery life and the modems are fair (though I never had complaints about my Pixel 7 Pro battery life until it failed).
I also found that the photos from my Pixel were by far the best I'd ever seen from a phone. Every phone I had prior was only used for quick snapshots, if I was expecting to want to take something decent I would make sure to pack my mirrorless, with the Pixel I could actually trust it to take an acceptable photo.
It matters when the phone is supposed to last more than two years.
Poor battery life is a symptom of a slow CPU, things that don't require full performance on a snapdragon 8 elite take double the time in a pixel while needing full turbo performance.
Don't get me started on the terrible modem efficiency.
These issues are there since the Pixel 6, and Google clearly just doesn't care.
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I don't personally care about top performance at all (I've been a happy user of Fairphones for several years). But as phones start doing more and more AI tasks (from camera post-processing to computer vision tasks, and now LLMs) the added processing power does make a difference in how usable and snappy the phone feels. For most users it's not about being constantly fast (like for gaming or for long AI tasks), but for being able to handle peak load more smoothly.
race to idle, if your soc has the same power consumption, you want to finish the job as soon as you can and go to sleep.
My last two Pixel phones - 6a and 7a - were both "recalled" with battery issues. I got almost a complete refund for both, and got keep the phone (my 7a died a few months after the recall, 6a is still going strong).
I got a 9a to replace them just because I didn't want to have to deal with learning iPhone, but I'm fully expecting the 9a to fail with a similar issue so looking at buying an iPhone soon as a backup so I can get up to speed.
Both my 4a an 6a got the battery nerf update. I had no idea this impacted the 7a as well. I prefer Pixels for Android Development but my trust in Google is at an all time low.
At least you are buying the cheap A series, my experience was with the XL/Pro phones.
What apps do you run where you see performance problems?
The tech specs: https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_10_specs?hl=en-US Says it has vpn capabilities..But then there is a footnote:
>12. Restrictions apply. Some data is not transmitted through VPN.... See https://g.co/pixel/vpn for details.
Does anyone know what data doesn't go through the vpn?
On the positive side it lists a 24+ hour battery life!! This is huge for me!! ..but it has a footnote, as well
> 6. Battery life depends upon many factors and usage of certain features will decrease battery life. Actual battery life may be lower. Over time, Pixel software will manage battery performance to help maintain battery health as your battery ages. See https://g.co/pixel/battery-tests and https://g.co/pixel/batteryhealth for details.
Which I guess is understandable
The help section article lists
# Data that isn’t protected by the VPN
Not all network data from your device is protected by the VPN. Examples of data that aren’t protected by the VPN include:
- Tethering traffic
- Push notifications
- Wi-Fi calling and other IMS services
- Work profile app traffic
- Data traffic from an app that routes traffic directly over the Wi-Fi or a cellular connection
All of which make sense to me except push notifications. My guess is they might mean syncing notifications to e.g. a watch.
I think it might be because push notifications use long-lived connections that are already open when the VPN is turned on.
I wonder why tethering traffic doesn't go through the VPN. I could be wrong, but I think it works the same way with iPhones.
I might test that later, but this (old) SE question seems to confirm my memory: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/266871/is-there-a-...
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I bought a Xiaomi 14T and bought my gf a pixel 9.
I like my phone more, but battery life on hers is way better to the point I regret buying mine, it barely lasted a day out when on vacations, and I'm not a super heavy phone user, but look for restaurants, open maps, take pictures, ask Gemini stuff and I'd be at 50% by the time she was at 75.
> Does anyone know what data doesn't go through the vpn?
I can't speak to exactly what data doesn't go through their VPN but I know carrier apps tend to not play nice with VPNs, especially the Google Fi app (as it relies on its connection and what IP its on to coordinate switching between their various carrier contracts and that seems to break under a VPN).
And also seemingly Wi-fi calling has been problematic over VPN for as long as I can remember so that's usually a safe bet for exclusion.
I am considering switching to Google, I am getting annoyed by Apple more and more, but the critical feature for me is AI assistant.
I am the first to criticize the LLM hype and I do not expect much out of them - but the fact that I cannot get Siri to turn a single light in my room instead of all of them is just FUBAR from my perspective. Siri is such garbage at this point that the gap between it and ChatGPT app is unbelievable. I can't even get it to reliably call people in my contacts, meanwhile my 4 year old can talk to ChatGPT in Croatian. Google Gemini seems to be on par so their assistant should be at least semi competent.
I switched to the previous google phones (9) for the folding phone, even though I'm not too much of a fan of the android experience I cannot switch back to Apple right now because:
* the AI integration on google phones is just amazing
* the folding phone has insane screen estate on-demand anywhere any time, I wouldn't be able to go back to a single screen
> the AI integration on google phones is just amazing
Genuinely curious, what's your favorite aspect of AI on the Pixel? I'm on a 9 pro, coming from a Pixel 6 and a Pixel 3 before it. I don't think I'm ever using AI on this thing, so I'm interested in hearing where it turns up for you.
What do you like about the AI integration? I'm considering leaving iPhone just to have basically native chatGPT integration, assuming gemini works that way, and assuming it can read and write to my calendar and access other personal data.
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Well if you switch to Google you can enjoy a timer app that takes between 12 and 16 repetitions of "Stop!" before it stops beeping!
Have you tried using a light switch?
The lack of a physical SIM tray is just one more way to lock users in Google's walled garden. eSIM support is not implemented in Android itself (AOSP), but part of the proprietary GMS package. This means Google-free Android forks like LineageOS will be unusable on the Pixel 10 series :-(
>The lack of a physical SIM tray is just one more way to lock users in Google's walled garden.
Seems to be US only? iPhone also has the same thing, so it's probably something that US carriers are pushing, not something from OEMs.
>eSIM support is not implemented in Android itself (AOSP), but part of the proprietary GMS package. This means Google-free Android forks like LineageOS will be unusable on the Pixel 10 series :-(
OpenEUICC works fine
If this is real then it is very unfortunate as multiple countries use crypto SIM cards as national identity, a popular more ergonomic alternative to a separate identity card that need a USB reader and computer. They play themselves out of markets.
better than what they did with pixel[6-9] where they shipped a dual injection crap to save 0.00001c on production and if you traveled 5x and swapped local SIMs, the tray just crumbled and you had to buy another for $20 on ebay because they don't stock it or replace under warranty.
Similar experience with my Pixel 5 but different outcome. My SIM tray crumbled and they sent me a new phone under warranty.
does this mean no GrapheneOS either?
GrapheneOS found a way to provide eSIM support, but it depends on installing a patched version of Google's proprietary LPA app. I don't know how future-proof that is..
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GrapheneOS support eSim : https://grapheneos.org/usage#esim-support
Graphene supports eSIM https://grapheneos.org/usage#esim-support
It supports eSIM. Two months ago, I bought a Pixel 9a, immediately put GrapheneOS on it, and registered an eSIM.
> Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL are all available for preorder today starting at $799, $999 and $1199.
Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
Also, what is up with that camera module? This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets. At least round the corners or add little ramps. I guess this is what happens when design folk are allowed to trump engineers.
> This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets.
I'm interested to hear more about this, because it's always interesting to understand how other people interact with things who have different use cases or usage models.
How tight are your jeans, and how do you fit anything else in your pocket if something ~1in thick doesn't fit comfortably (without having to force the pocket open in a way that would require a "ramp")?
Are you using your back pockets? I have never once understood the utility of those; I have no desire to sit on anything in my pockets.
A lot of people buy clothes for their looks with minimal weighting towards functionality (or rather that is the functionality). If you've got a body in reasonable nick then tight pants can look good.
The traditional solution to poor pockets is a purse or bag. Phones are interesting in that they can demand attention and that they are probably the most used item that people carry around with them. Thus people compromise their lines/comfort to actually use the faster accessibility of pockets. Probably explains the popularity of ridge wallets and key wallets too.
I don't wear tight jeans and I've come to loathe having to put my phone in my pants pocket. If you're walking around a lot, the feeling is just annoying, you can feel it pressing on your leg the whole time. When I sit down, the bunching feeling is even worse, so I immediately put the phone on the table.
This wasn't an issue when phones had 4.7"-5"-inch screens. Nowadays the phone goes into the cargo pocket if I'm wearing shorts, or back pocket if I'm walking.
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Not that I'm trying to justify the prices, but I'm interested by the take that a phone should cost less than a computer. To me, the phone has an actual camera and is significantly smaller (and, if you are talking desktop, has a screen) so should cost more for the same sort of power. Of course, there are phones and computers at all different prices so it's hard to compare.
It's smaller, so it should cost less, not more. It's 2025, miniaturization isn't that expensive. It's less screen and less battery than a laptop, cooling the CPU can be done passively because it's so low-powered, it has less RAM and less flash and fewer ports and a simpler mechanical design, no keyboard or touchpad... it's a slab of glass with a plastic/aluminum case containing a PCB, battery, and camera.
Written on my $250 Motorola
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>Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
As much as I loathe the consumerism of buying the latest phone every year, I realized that if the trade-in value is good enough, it's a pretty good strategy in terms of overall technology spend.
With iPhones, I upgraded every third generation. With Pixels, I went from 3 to 6 to 9, but given that I'm on Google Fi, I get a $450 discount on the phone, and I can get a base Pixel 10 Pro for $217, after trade-in. I got a surprisingly generous trade-in on my Pixel 6 when I bought the 9, and buying the Pixel 3 with Google Fi was pretty cheap too.
The last computer I bought was an M1 Max Macbook Pro w/ 36gb of RAM and a 1TB drive, for $2499, in 2023 (thank you B&H). Hopefully it'll be a long time before I'm paying that much for a phone.
> _starting_ at $799, $999 and $1199.
At 126GB storage, which is basically unusable in 2025 and it's a phone you want to last to 2030. This storage bait needs to be made illegal, it literally costs almost nothing to manufacture and exists purely to punish and trick the consumer.
If you don't have multiple 10g+ games or hours of video on your phone then 128GB can easily be enough.
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I feel the same way about paying more for a phone than for a computer, but is it rational? I'm not sure. Sure you get a smaller screen and a smaller battery, and the phone doesn't have a keyboard and a trackpad (assuming you were referring to a laptop), but does the militarisation make up that difference?
Disclaimer: I'm not really invested in thinking about it carefully. I don't like any of the huge phones available now, and so far I'm getting by with the small phone I have, and buying into the idea of the Framework laptop either means I won't have to replace the whole thing or that I'll just go back to buying refurbished enterprise laptops.
Edit: I see other people have already picked up on the computer/phone cost thought more productively than I did! :)
Pro tip: Buy the second-to-latest generation. Costs half as much and it was literally the best that even billionaires could have purchased just a year ago.
I always amortize the coat of the phone over the months of security updates remaining. Sometimes the last gen is a better deal, on a per month basis, sometimes the new one is only a couple bucks a month more. i dont mind a few more dollars per month.
/s: B-b-b-but if you buy the Pixel 10 Pro Fold you can pay $1799 and, assuming your bank account can only hold amounts $1699 and lower, the amount needed to purchase will overflow at some point in the purchasing process, making it SEEM like you only pay $100 for that new phone!?
> Sigh, still not going to pay more for a phone than I paid for my computer.
My computer is ~$6,000, so that would be a pretty high bar for me.
Few people are paying those prices. Cell providers sell these at far less: on the order of 60% of Googles retail price.
Well, minor nit- cell providers offer it for 60% Google’s price to start[0], while locking it into a phone contract that subsidizes it. This is effectively bundling a loan for the hardware with your data plan. That price is more of a down payment on said loan.
[0] actually in the US at least they’ll frequently offer it for “free” with a new plan, that of course locks the phone to said plan.
Yeah, I bought a Pixel 10 Pro 256 GB yesterday. Should have been $1,099. But Google e-mailed me a $150 off coupon code, I got $450 off for being a Google Fi subscriber, plus $100 as a trade-in for my Pixel 6. My actual price for the 10 Pro was $399.
I'm waiting for Pixel 9 price drops
Have they fixed the ability to easily transfer your existing Android data to the new Android phone? I find that every time I upgrade, despite choosing the options to transfer apps/settings, that 90% of the apps I open just greet me with the login screen and I have to set everything up completely from scratch. I remember maybe a handful of apps, I think one was Uber, that were able to transfer everything including the login session. That was truly magic. That's how it should be for all apps. I understand banks might have special security requirements and I already know for Google Wallet, your cards need to be reactivated even if they transfer over, but most apps are not banks.
Blame the app developers, not google. They specifically added a backup/restore mode for device to device transfer, that bypasses backup blacklists[1]. However apps can still opt out by registering a backup agent, and returning no data.
[1] https://developer.android.com/identity/data/testingbackup
Google actively avoided providing a local, secure, and seamless backup or even an interface for 3rd party backup services to make users more dependent on Google cloud services. Of course many app developers decided the Google cloud is too insecure, being not end-to-end encrypted. And Google enables them by not giving the users ways to override those stupid decisions. This wouldn't have happened on PCs, where you can mostly just copy over the application's user directory.
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Pixel to Pixel has been smooth for me since the Pixel 4. Haven't don't cross manufacturer for a while.
i don't think they're ever gonna fix that
[flagged]
> For instance, when you're calling an airline, it can automatically find your flight details from your email and display it during your phone call.
Is this really the best example usecase they can think of? How often does an individual call an airline? I'm sure in aggregate they get a lot of calls, but I don't think I've ever had to.
It just seems really weird that this is the top example of on-device AI. The other examples mentioned, like "finding the right photos to share with a friend", seem more relatable.
> How often does an individual call an airline?
It's a very simple example that people can see the value for right away. It also acts as a good placeholder for hotel, car rental agency, restaurant, etc. Any place you'd have a ticket/reservation for that you might need to call.
Like parent, I did not "see the value" "right away", but on the contrary, I am more confused about what the phone brings.
It is odd that they considered that a common usecase.
Perhaps they really wanted to show a good looking widget and I suppose flight info was the best candidate.
I have had some calls with family or friends about an upcoming flight where this could've saved a few seconds.
Would I want to save a few seconds in exchange for their processing of my whole conversation even if offline? That's another story.
To me it's a solution looking for a problem. Just revisit Microsoft's marketing material for their Copilot products. Bizarre use cases one after another.
https://imgur.com/a/sDJTiyK
That 100x zoom looks a bit... sloppy...
The car has one wing mirror and the rear tire is wider than the front. Edit: this might be real, see child comments.
Is there someone who knows more about cars who can confirm that this is in fact, not real?
This looks to me like something resembling a 65 mustang.
If you look at some 65 mustangs they only had a driver side wing mirror as that was the law back then. The wider rear tire also makes a lot of sense, as it's a RWD car that needs wider rear tires to support the traction.
If the car in the photo is a 65 mustang, I think the AI did pretty good.
This is like using a 6-fingered person in an AI imaging advert.
This is an old classic car/truck. Only one mirror was somewhat common back then. Also, wider rear tires are not unusual. Especially on anything with a bed, since you want additional loading capabilities in the back.
What looks off the most is the fact that the blinkers under the bender aren't even remotely close to looking similar. The rest of the car could pass as a restomod, but the fact that so many things are asymmetrical between the two sides just looks completely wrong. Blinkers, hood clips, mirror-no-mirror, etc.
That looks vaguely similar to a 60s Mustang (although also has a lot of details that are wrong) and old muscle cars like that often have wider rear tires for better traction
The bigger issue I have is that when they change from 1x to 5x - car changes its location and angle a bit.
I think the rear looking bigger is an artifact of the zoom, where your brain expects it to look smaller, but it's actually the same size due to the extreme cropping
No, it's definitely wider in the photo. The rear tire is about double the width of my mouse pointer while the front tire is about 1x the width.
That said, as other commentators have mentioned, it might also be wider in real life, so not necessarily an artifact at all.
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If you own a pixel phone remember to do regular emergency call tests. They have a bug that has stuck around for generations but for some reason they get a pass.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1ano09x/pixel_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1jzo5hu/pixel_...
> regular emergency call tests
This sounds like a huge waste of time for the dispatch operators if everyone starts to do such tests regularly.
On a similar note, it would be great (especially for these tests) if carriers provided a non-emergency / echo number that gets treated the same way as an emergency call (works w/o SIM card, gets preferential treatment, ...)
When phones are no longer considered reliable to make emergency calls in certain places, what alternative is there?
Sure it sucks for the operator to get a call, "Sorry, just testing to make sure emergency calling works, thanks, bye" and it would also suck, probably even more, for an individual to not be able to make an emergency call. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, hopefully someone improves the system, lol.
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One of the most important features of the phone. A huge reason to not buy if there is any uncertainty. You might die if it is not working.
And here i was thinking it was irresponsible to have a decorative phone in my house because someone might try to call 911 with it in need. but these guys are selling phones that randomly may or may not? and people are still like but but apple?
AI assisted zoom is interesting. Will it invent license plate numbers, guess what faces look like, or just output high resolution blurs?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the AI is using video (i.e. multiple frames) to put together enough information for the zoom to be as accurate as possible. That said, I don't know if there's enough information to do 100X.
They already have this on the pixel 9s with their 20x super zoom. I haven't noticed any weird artifacts like this from my usage. It just appears as indistinguishable camera fuzz - hard to describe.
> It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
Unclear what "intelligently recover and refine" means here, and I'd like to make a request of people who might also be unclear yet influenced by this idea...
If you build features that sound like this into the image-capturing stage (from the user perspective), and your target users include serious photographers who care about authenticity, please be sure to make any kind of "generative"/inferencing of image details be optional.
And fall back to nth previous generation of sensor processing, autofocusing, and anti-shake technology -- where the compute still influences the images, but errs on the side of missing/fuzzy detail rather than fabrication.
Imagine the priorities of photojournalists as a category of user -- not only users who want appealing snapshots, selfies, or professional editorial fashion/lifestyle shoots.
There's still a place for consciously fabricating/enhancing/fixing in interactive post-processing, when you you choose to do it, and it's clear to you what is being done.
> Unclear what "intelligently recover and refine" means here
Obviously genai upscaling. The details are not there on the original photo.
Because of course "serious photographers" use their smartphones at 100X zoom. Please.
Looks like a minor improvement to the pixel 9 series. Honestly, that's fine, I'm pretty happy with my Pixel 9 Pro.
The built-in magsafe charging magnets are a nice addition, although a case with magnets in it works for me for now.
Of course, the #1 feature I'd like to see is expandable storage, which Google seems to be strangely against. #2 would be a headphones jack - Google has already reversed course on that one once, but another reversal seems unlikely.
Oh, and it's too late to edit, but I just noticed they removed the physical SIM and force you to use an eSIM now. That feels like a significant downgrade.
Yeah, I am on Pixel 9 pro too and quick trade in check shows that upgrade would cost net ~500$(256Gb). Arguably ~250$ if buying 10 would extend the gemini subscription for a year -- not sure about the verbiage of the terms here.
100x "composite" zoom is nice but not sure if it's worth it.
As much as I'd love if phones still had headphone jacks, the inertia sure seems to be going the other direction. I fully anticipate the power port will be the next to go and wireless charging will be the only way to charge (and I don't want that either).
I haven't noticed a major difference in any phone I've owned for 6 or 7 years at least.
I have the pixel 6. It's still fine. This looks like a very incremental update to me as have the previous few editions. Same with the OS. I can barely tell apart Android versions these days. And since most of the value is software based, there isn't much practical difference between different generations of Pixel phones.
My pixel 6 has the same 48 megapixel sensor in the camera as they still appear to be using. It seems camera sensors plateaued about 4-5 years ago. It's a great sensor; the raw images are pretty amazing given the form factor (tiny sensor and lens). And I expect it still is. People confuse the AI capabilities (removing subjects, adding missing detail, etc.) with simple operations to make the photo 'pop'. Boosting the contrast, saturating all the colors, applying some aggressive smoothing (noise) and sharpening, etc. Doing that manually on the raw files yields very similar results. It's good and convenient. But most of that is just the sensor being awesome and some tasteful defaults for these edits. Adding optical zoom is impressive. The digital/AI zoom is not something I'd use. They still seem to use different sensors for the different cameras; which is something Apple stopped doing with recent iphones. So, you have to choose between the right lens with lots of noise or the right sensor with the wrong focal range.
The AI stuff is interesting as a gimmick but not something I use a lot. It seems to be the main differentiator for Google these days but I just don't see that being worth hundreds of dollars. It's a bit of an artificial differentiator and a race to the bottom. The advantages tend to be a bit hand wavy and other phone manufacturers of course copy them.
I might go for the 10a when it comes out in six months or so. My Pixel 6 won't be getting major updates anymore and the battery is starting to deteriorate. The difference between a 500 euro phone and a > 1000 euro one are not worth it for me. And with the 9a at least it even had a slightly bigger battery.
> I can barely tell apart Android versions these days.
Is that bad really? I can tell iOS versions apart and I don’t like it. I believe design should converge on some ideal (even if an unreachable one) so at some point updates ought to get very “tweak”-ish.
My dream is to have a phone like this that supports thunderbolt host mode, runs grapheneos or similar and can drive a couple of displays via usb-c docking station. With the memory and CPU this phone could easily replace my work laptop (vscode and ssh for the most part). Sadly I haven't found any phone that would make this possible (Samsung Dex doesn't count because it's proprietary)
> My dream is to have a phone like this that supports thunderbolt host mode, runs grapheneos or similar and can drive a couple of displays via usb-c docking station
Sounds like you're thinking of the stock Pixel 10. Google worked with Samsung to bring the Dex experience to upstream Android, and their Linux VM work is almost fully baked in Android 15. Running VSCode and ssh can be done today with a Pixel phone plugged into a USB-C hub, keyboard, mouse and a monitor. I don't know why Google isn't promoting this capability yet,
I think they're waiting for the the big point release this fall.
When they rolled out 16 earlier this spring almost nothing changed from the user's perspective because it was just shipping a lot of the underlying supporting apis that aren't exposed via user accessible things at this point.
I guess that's better than nothing! Still, it wouldn't allow connection to a thunderbolt dock with 2 displays, network and peripherals I guess.
Ideally it would run stock Linux with Android apps via waydroid.. reliance on banking apps makes this fully converged experience using only open source a bit of a pipe dream :(
Android 16 will have this (at least for a single external display): https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/developer-...
I want to know how the TSMC-manufactured Tensor processors compares to Samsung-manufactured Tensor processors and also how TSMC-manufactured Tensor processors compare to TSMC-manufactured Snapdragon processors. Samsung's Tensors (also Exynos) had the fame of getting superhot. I want to know if these problems persist in new Tensor chips.
Don't hold your breath, the tensor g5 is slower than a snapdragon 8 Gen 3
> Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
Reminds me of https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...
I guess we'll never be able to trust any photos taken with a Pixel 10 or above.
Yeah.
So basically the trend now is to stop actually improving things and have AI make shit up to fill the gaps and pretend we're improving things.
"Smoothing" of photos has already been on by default in Android and iOS for years at this point. You'd need to go way back to "trust" any of them.
I look forward to the news stories about people getting lost because they used 100x "zoom" to read a distant sign.
Getting confused by distant street signs with a $1K GPS device in your pocket. Come now.
Really hope that can be disabled.
So far all the camera features are available through the API (and not hidden behind drm), so you could potentially use something like ProShot.
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12 years later and still no availability in Middle East or Africa. Only available in 30-something countries. Google can't figure out retail, while upstart Chinese companies hit the global market immediately.
If you buy it in a country that's not officially supported you don't get 5G, most unique features, and of course no warranty, support, or repairs.
I've got a 7a International version and 5G works in my unsupported country (New Zealand). Not sure what other unique features don't work.
However it is nuts how they just can't be bothered supporting so many countries.
It's disabled geographically, not based on band compatibility or carrier or anything. Not sure about New Zealand because I heard it's not consistent.
It'd be 5G, VoLTE/Wifi, VPN, call screening, OTP autodelete, crash detection.
Google is being deceptive with their zoom demo.
They zoom from 100x to 0.5x and present 0.5x as "what it actually looks like."
They're making 100x zoom appear twice as impressive by using ultra-wide (0.5x) as fake 'normal' vision.
Kind of moot anyway; 100x zoom is equivalent to a 2400mm lens (with no stabilization assist). If you can hand-aim that on target, you're an elite marksman.
I'm pretty sure that was just an accident, if you pinch all the ways out it goes seamlessly to the wide angle lens.
0.5x is 0.5x, not "what it actually looks like."
The deceptive part is using AI to creatively fill in gaps in the picture, and saying "recover and refine intricate details" when the details are actually hallucinated, making that blue car look like a drawing of a toy.
You can't install any of the AI models on the Pixel 9 if you have the bootloader unlocked. Wouldn't be surprised that Gemini Nano or Pro Res Zoom didn't work, either.
> Exclusive to the Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, Pro Res Zoom captures astonishing detail at up to 100x zoom. It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
So it's not just a crop. It's a crop + hallucinate.
I really like their AI strategy. It’s much stronger than Apple’s, which seems to be nonexistent. The problem I have is I really like my Apple Watch Ultra. There is nothing like it in the android space and I can’t rely on Google. Actually caring about building a great product the way Apple does. Googles hardware products always seem to be some strategic wedge play to keep the ecosystem in check. They don’t seem to exist because they really care about building the very best watch, or phone, or whatever and at any point they might just cancel the effort.
I really wish they'd upgrade the Pro Fold to have the Pro camera system. :(
I don't know why they assume that someone buying a $2000 phone doesn't want the best available camera.
Agreed - it's surprising to call it Pixel 10 PRO Fold, when it is lacking one of the "Pro" features.
Seems like a DISCOUNT is in order.
I don't want a discount; I want a better camera.
Looks slick.
> automatically find your flight details
I appreciate this but can they please go beyond search and instead legitimately find me cheapest price and overall best time to fly? Or strategies to find cheaper fight using different plans or maybe integrated credit point I have, coupons?
I'd love to see AI saving me big money and doing all the hassle for me.
Google launched a new tool for finding flights: https://www.google.com/travel/flights/deals.
More details at: https://blog.google/products/search/google-flights-ai-flight....
If you mean impossible to hold without the silicone case (not included) then I concur based on my experience with the older Pixels :-]
Unfortunately both Pixel 10 and Gemini is unavailable in Hong Kong. I have been trying move off Apple iPhone for a long time and Pixel is the phone I wanted to go for within the Android ecosystem. And I simply dont have that choice.
Wondering if anyone on HN could shine any light as to why.
I wonder how they'll screw it up this time. I have to deal with a pink line down my Pixel 8's screen, because while there is an extended warranty for that issue, you need to flash the stock firmware (wiping the device) to put it in "service mode" so uBreakIFix can do their thing.
That's the problem with pixel. Everytime I try to switch from iPhone, ever year's line up has some glaring GC issue. I've tried every year since the 2XL. Most recent is the 9 Pro XL (only the XL size) the camera bar falling off.
The pixels could be amazing phones if Google could fix their crappy QC and invest in some actual customer support.
People like Apple - you can go to a physical store and get support. You can get AppleCare+ and have accidental damage replacements, battery replacements, etc just take it to the store.
Google doesn't have that, they don't have a physical presence, and it's nearly impossible to get a human and if you do, they are really stingy about RMAs.
You have bought and returned new Pixel phones every year for the last 7 years due to QC? That sounds like a tall tale.
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Wow. Either you're extremely unlucky or I'm extremely lucky.
I'm still using my Pixel 6 pro and have had zero hardware issues with this phone or my previous pixel 4.
The hardware and features seem great, but I'm not gonna buy another pixel phone. I've had a pixel 8 for 2 years the stability of the software has gone down so much. I frequently have an unresponsive UI, requiring me to turn off my phone with the side buttons. I also have had many issues with the keyboard and it not responding when using chrome, requiring me to kill chrome and restart it.
It seems like Google only tests on their latest device when releasing android because people I know who always get the latest phones don't have these problems. It's a very poor customer experience. It's the phone experience of an old super car. It's fast and does lots of cool things, but it feels like the wheels are gonna come off at any minute.
Same here (on a Pixel 7). Apart from there being absolutely no reason to upgrade, really, even with the generous trade-in values offered by Google around the time of release. I kind of miss the time when a new smartphone release was exciting.
Phones are not the hot commodity they used to be anymore and that's a good thing IMHO. I just bought a Px7 after breaking my 6a that I had for 3 years. I did look at the Px10 specs but with the price/value it was an easy decision. I'm now expecting the same 3y worth of battery I was getting out of my 6a (a day started getting tight at the end). Bigger still seems to be the definition of better but I had a CAT S60 for a while, so it's still small compared to that brick.
Overall very happy with the Px series and I'm happy they keep making them. On the software side it runs Graphene OS just as well as the 6a. Setup was super easy with the Chromium WebUSB based installer. I expect the Px10 to be supported soon too.
I'm curious what kind of performance the Tensor G5 would have with llama.cpp, compared to a 16gb desktop gpu.
If we can somehow put AI agent locally on a phone that could use tools (cough: APIs) I think it will be the wildest revolution after the invention of a smart phone. How about a truly smart phone!
Yay, it has native wireless charging via Qi2, AKA Pixelsnap. The rumors on the internet were that you needed a special case to use the wireless charging. But that is not true after all and those rumors were false.
You can just plop a Qi2 charger right on your phone and it will charge! Only bummer is that the 10 pro charges at 15w while the 10 pro XL charges at 25w. And I really prefer the smaller phones that fit in my pockets. Not some huge monster phone.
I recently discovered Pixel 7 (maybe older too, I dunno) is actually Qi compatible it just doesn't have the magnets to lock in place.
But if you have a case with those magnets in, it works great. And it turns out QuadLok cases (which I can generally recommend for cyclists) are compatible.
So now I just plonk my phone against the wall and it charges on an Apple MagSafe charger I mounted. This is actually really nice, turns out it's really convenient to have your phone in a fixed position, also not taking up any surface space!
Always thought wireless charging was a bit of a gimmick but with the magnets it's genuinely useful.
It's a shame the Pixels don't have IR sensors. One of the most underrated features that some Androids have - I was in a hotel in Poland this year and it had Aircon in the room (and was rather warm), but there was no remote. The IR sensor on my phone saved my butt as it could turn on the AC!
There's no end of times that the IR sensor has come in useful one way or another.
All I really want to know is CPU/other efficiency and battery life.. If I use G1-G5 with exactly the same app that G1 CPU was adequate for the theoretical efficiency for the CPU is maybe improving 20% a generation but that manifests as some worthwhile (battery time) result or is drowned out by stupid features like even higher screen refresh?
> Tensor G5 and the latest version of Gemini Nano work together to run Magic Cue privately and securely on your phone.
YES! Here we talk.
The fact we can now host a version of an AI model, and make sure everything is processed locally and is not sent to the cloud is the best feature of those phones. I just hope that data do not leave the phone OR are encrypted to be stored in Google servers...
That camera bump is huge. I guess that's how you get the great zoom?
Phone cases are doing heavy lifting to smooth out the back of this phone.
On the other hand I much prefer the full-width bump than a corner bump. It helps when holding your phone (a ledge for your fingers) and means that the phone doesn't rock around when used on a table.
I made a leather pouch with a belt loop for my Pixel 6. Great when travelling or hiking. The camera band sits above the edge of the front of the pouch with the 'lid' covering that when the pouch is closed with a tuck lock.
The full-width band is just perfect for grabbing the phone and lifting it out of the form-fitting pouch, and doubles as a sort of safety preventing it from slipping from your grip.
Atleast these type of bumps don't cause the phones to wobble.
I'd be curious to know if they did any surveys/research on how many people use a case or not. If the vast majority do (my anecdata-based hunch), why not just thicken the phone to add battery and use a thinner case rather than just having the case space the back of the phone out to be flat?
My partner got a Pixel 9a and it's nice that they went completely flat on that one, though it's obviously almost a straight rip-off of the recent non-pro iPhones aesthetically (not a bad thing imo).
> why not just thicken the phone to add battery
Weight. Many people already don't like how heavy their phones are.
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Too bad it can't be smoothed out (with more battery or something) to start with.
That bump is more than 1/4 of the phone's total thickness. This is becoming comical.
The camera bump (rather than a full-size thickness increase) makes the phone feel less massive, especially in your pocket.
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I hope there's an improved screen. I bought a 9 Pro XL with hopes of running GrapheneOS but the PWM on the Pixel was terrible. Instant headaches. I can more or less get by ok with recent iPhone screens but the Pixel screen didn't work at all for me.
Heard a rumor that Google was going to take eye strain seriously for this version. Hope that's true.
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I'm delighted to see that they don't make you get the biggest phone in order to get the best cameras. I've been using Pixels since the Pixel 3 and always feel like I'm making compromises in the camera department in order to get a phone that will actually fit in my hand/pocket.
> Magic Cue ... to proactively offer the right information at the right time
That's one way to justify a permanent snoop on everything you are doing and saying in all your messages and calls.
Even if your data is kept on device, their telemetry could still reveal your activity and patterns.
> Also, what is up with that camera module? This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets.
Pixel phones have been that way for a while now. Phone cases usually add the missing part to make it flat, e.g. https://www.spigen.com/products/pixel-10-series-case-tough-a...
I understand this might not be the best place to ask, but I have to: I'd like to try and switch from iPhone to Pixel (maybe different Android phone?) but there is one app that I can't find anything close to: Drafts.
Maybe I'm missing something? Any ideas?
I don't really need all functions of Drafts but the whole experience of adding notes with this app is something I haven't experienced with anything else.
PS: naive question: is there a way to "integrate" Pixel with macOS? At least to have common clipboard.
For that sort of integration I would use KDE Connect[1]. It works great between my phone and laptop. I can send the clipboard, files, notifications, media controls, etc between the devices. It has a MacOS version but it currently only has nightly builds (potentially a downside).
[1] https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
It works great with iOS and linux desktop (in fact even better than the original sometimes). Thanks!
Waiting for Pixel 10a. Pixel 10 is so expensive.
Interesting phones, but the snark in the live video wasn’t that amazing. Aren’t the products enough in and out of themselves to be attractive?
Complaining about Apple walled garden, but only able to pull off their AI help if you are part of their Google garden and a lot of it on the cloud.
Same for Pixel Snap being MagSafe (sounds like a camera feature at first).
7 years of software updates promised, that’s actually nice.
After trying out 6000/7000mah phones, I'm never ever using any phone with a smaller battery. Especially not the 3580mah or whatever pixel phones. I like pixel otherwise, but it's just impossible to revert back to a smaller battery once you've experienced the truly multi-day -- even for a unhealthy screen user like me -- battery life.
Pixel 10 has around 5000mah batteries. Sadly that does not meet your 6000mah requirement. Everybody makes choices ;)
Yeah. I can't wait for a "flagship" phone with 6000+mah. Provided it's not one with bloatware (xiaomi et. al) I would buy it immediately.
I just want a little phone that I can use with one hand and doesn't stretch out my pocket...
Hi pixel users, can we configure the phone to get more privacy ? Primarily looking for disabling complete location tracking, photos processing, app interactions and local ai interactions
I wonder if these new devices will finally have support for the elusive APV codec.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Professional_Video
The link you posted says Android 16 support. Why wouldn't Pixel run it?
This codec needs hardware support to be practical (ie recording live video rather than just transcoding). So far, I think that's only available on certain Samsung models.
I wonder will this make some of the older Pixels (say 7-9) cheaper on eBay. I have been toying with the idea of replacing my Samsung S10 for ages now, and the battery life is really starting to degrade so I might pull the trigger soon.
After they stopped releasing the device tree, there's really not a lot that will hold ROM developers to Pixels. I'll definitely wait to see what happens on that front before buying my next phone.
Insanely hideous.
They look like Bender from the back. "Bite my shiny metal phone!"
the camera bump you mean? otherwise they're almost identical to iPhones, sans dynamic island.
Does the camera module still fall off like on the Pixel 9?
https://www.google.com/search?q=reddit+pixel+camera+falling
I love Android, besides a few accessibility issues, especially when typing to Gemini and TalkBack not speaking the reply, but I don't like how sluggish TalkBack is on Pixel phones. I had the 8 and hated that.
Meanwhile my Pixel 2 is still rocking after 7 years of daily use.
You are also rocking a bunch of security vulnerabilities then, because this thing is EOL for a long time.
I have the latest LineageOS version and the 4.4 kernel will be EOL in 2027. So no.
my pixel 2 is still rocking too, what an amazing device! (although it now I only use it for flappy bird..) Highly disappointed that Google stopped updates a long time ago.
All I ask for is a slightly smaller phone or a thicker phone with better battery life. Why are manufacturers so intent on not doing that?
I'm sorry, is that car in the 100X zoom even a real model?
The phone is larger, not to mention ridiculous size of camera shelf. What happened to decent industrial design?
Someone needs to use Veo to make realistic ads for this. Majority of people don't go hiking and biking and kayaking, EVER.
Only one question. Can you disable the stupid date on the home screen. No I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a phone and then load another launcher on it. Just hire someone competent at programming to make this an option.
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/132929200?hl=en
Why do we need brand new models every year?
So that people that buy that year can get the latest improvements
They're not releasing them on your personal upgrade schedule
Because even if your phone only breaks every 5 years on average do you want to get a new 5 year old phone because your last one died right before the refresh cycle? Having regular releases means that when you do get the phone you have a relatively up-to-date device with latest hardware improvements. You don't need to upgrade yearly because they release a new phone yearly.
You probably don't, as your current phone ought to last for years. But hardware manufacturers, like software developers, benefit from faster release cycles.
People are on different phone cycles. Even if most people update once every 5 years, it only takes 5 distinct groups to warrant a yearly new phone.
So, any of these features gonna be available for non-US regions/system region settings?
can these guys now actually make phones that don't overheat or have battery problems ?
What is the best way for a Brazilian to trade in a pixel 8 pro for the newer model?
Did some marketing person really write "cutting edge" into the headline?
I would to try Pixel phones. But it's simply not available where I live.
AI times make me change my iPhone to Pixel. may be it's the time.
Which of the AI features can you use without a Google account?
Where do you think it's supposed to get the data from? By digging through your trashcan? No access - no data - no feature.
From the on-device memory, UI, camera etc.
Also: "Voice Translate allows you to break down language barriers during phone calls. Through Tensor G5, our on-device AI translates your call in real time in what sounds like each speaker’s voice"
They advertise on-device AI functionality quite a lot.
I know it's a petty thing, but I quit using the Pixel when they forced an unmovable and unhideable search bar onto the bottom of the homescreen.
Can anyone report if that's still the case? I know custom launchers exist, but I'd really rather not go that route.
You can just use a custom launcher.
I've been using Nova Launcher for so long I couldn't tell you what the normal homescreen looks like right now.
its still there on my pixel 9 in the stock/default launcher, but you can still use an alternative launcher if you like. many of those do not have the bar or let you toggle it off.
> I know custom launchers exist, but I'd really rather not go that route.
If you switched to a different phone, it is using a different launcher. If your only complaint is the launcher, it doesn't make sense to change the whole phone.
I was gonna say it's definitely not there on mine but I just checked and it is.
Amazing how good my mental adblocker is for things I've been looking at every day for 2 years.
Nova launcher is fantastic.
I'm not an Android user, so pardon me if this is a stupid thing to say, but it's weird to me that these phones apparently have some new UI unique to them. I thought Android was just Android. Won't other Android phones get this update?
Android is not just Android. The device vendors have to customize it to fit their devices by including drivers for example. Device vendors have the option to change the look pretty heavily, Samsung TouchWiz was infamous, Chinese vendors also offer very customized versions, including making it look like iOS. What you are seeing is material design 3 "expressive" which will be rolled out in the next minor Android version and Google apps
Not all phones capable of running Android (everything?) have the hardware to host the local LLM models at a useful level of performance.
Battery life looks great
> They feature our biggest batteries
That's the only thing I found on there. Doesn't even say if it lasts longer than the previous generation.
I hope they stop superglueing the batteries inside the phones.
The look of the phone reminds me of Bender from Futurama.
I still have a Samsung Galaxy S8. It runs fine. I don't really need more from a phone. Maybe I am missing something but I really cannot see myself getting a new phone.
anyone who knows about cars is pointing at that last demo video and going "What the fuck is THAT."
Yet again, Google announces another lineup of phones where a vast majority of the announcement is about software features that could be implemented on existing devices, highlighting the wastefulness of the yearly release cycle.
still a low frequency pwm phone.. what i would give for a modern no-pwm / high frequency pwm phone
So 16GB of Ram will be the norm from now on?
LGTM
meta: It's getting to the point where I need to pay for The Verge or stop reading it. Every one of their Pixel articles is behind a paywall.
archive.org
That 100X zoom example is pretty amazing
Yes, but hard to know how much detail is hallucinated out of thin air.
The famous "enhance" of CSI is finally here!
Judging by existing implementations, all of it.
It's probably impossible to use as well. Just a 10x is fairly difficult to control.
Plus AI upscaling. Fuck no.
Shouldn't be impossible. Samsung already offers Space Zoom which has a good UX and a LOT of image stabilization so your hands shaking isn't magnified by 100x.
As far as AI upscaling though, agreed. At least make a setting so we can do our own A/B tests.
Ever since magic eraser we've been slip-sliding down the slippery slope that ends with all our picture memories being half-AI-generated with the same "look" based on whatever flavor generated them at the time.
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In fairness it's AI "upscaled". What kind of car that is isn't actually present in the original image's data, it's a best guess from the AI.
I was surprised to see "more helpful support than ever" listed as a top line feature. Google actually offering good support to their customers?! I was impressed until I got to "Magic Cue isn’t just a single app or feature, it’s proactive support". Ah, so it sounds like the helpful support is just more AI slop.
> A camera with Gemini
and im out
> Exclusive to the Pixel 10 Pro and 10 Pro XL, Pro Res Zoom captures astonishing detail at up to 100x zoom. It isn't just a simple crop; Pro Res Zoom uses Tensor G5 and an all-new generative imaging model to intelligently recover and refine intricate details.
bro in your demo the car is a half el-camino half mustang
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Still boring, indistinguishable from the rest, and still hideous. Hire a proper designer for fucks sake. Ridiculous everugly phone.
God, what an ugly device.
Don't all phones look extremely similar today?
Maybe I'm old but no two phones today seem as different as e.g. Nokia 8800 was from Motorola Razr
Yes, I don't know why they bother showing the phone turned off anymore. They all look the same.
The materials might be different, and that's where a lot of companies go wrong. The Pixel 10 uses polished glass, which is too slippery. It slides off uneven surfaces and is harder to hold.
> all phones
Eh...
https://www.samsung.com/ca/smartphones/galaxy-z-flip7/buy/
https://www.samsung.com/ca/smartphones/others/galaxy-xcover7...
Both from the same company and I think about an equal distance between them as the Nokia 8800 and a similarly dated Motorola Razr.
The only downside is that all of these new features will be supported for about 3 weeks, and then rapidly turn into another Google abandoned strip mall.
Fooled me once, shame on you, fooled me (hundreds of times), shame on me
Bet the people who launched these are already interviewing for their next gig.
.. as I sit here with my Apple devices that are 90% abandonware.
I feel your pain.
samsung is a lot better with keeping products staffed at least
> Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL are all available for preorder today starting at $799, $999 and $1199.
No Pixel 10a was announced, and frankly Google's track record with hardware is a bit discouraging for someone thinking about spending a grand on a phone.
The -a models are typically released in the spring, the Pixel 9a was only just released in April of this year, so I wouldn't expect to see a Pixel 10a until March or April of 2026.
I got my entire family Pixel 4XLs when they were new. Every single one had the battery replaced once under warranty, and then they denied more batteries (it was actually the fragile connector). So I started replacing them myself. I even slightly modified the connector mount so it would stop failing. The third batteries ended up lasting years because of my modification. Finally, all 3 died around 2023 from motherboard problems apparently. Otherwise great phones. Sad that some weird hardware problems killed them all for most people.
No fold phones???
EDIT: https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-pixel-10-pro-fold/...
^ this should be the main post
Hardware: looks nice. Software: big NO. Anything from Google is a red flag for me.
If there was a hypothetical phone with this hardware with iOS, that would be really nice.
Try Pixels with GrapheneOS. Most of that software is still "from Google" technically, but it's reworked in some important ways, especially on a service level. For example, by default it has no Google apps or services, you can install Play store sandboxed, etc.
What about a degoogled OS? Whenever my current pixel phone dies I'm going more private.
The "magic cue" sounds like Windows CoPilot but isn't getting the same backlash for some reason. Why would I want AI tightly woven into everything I'm doing on my phone?
Seems like a privacy nightmare.
They said Magic Cue is done entirely on device and as far as I can tell does not involve saving screenshots of your activities to the device like Windows Recall* did- rather it can look at things like your email and other data that is on the device to determine what to suggest
* Windows Copilot is different from Recall, which is the one that saved screenshots of what you were doing periodically
I would guess because the windows recall stores screenshots of everything you do forever while this just watches and pops up without storing information that could later be used against you. Of course, it could be secretly recording but if you are concerned about that you need to install grapheneOS or something.
Not that I like this feature or think there aren't privacy concerns.
Its a google phone. Wouldn't be surprised if this one too forgets the WiFi credentials every second day.
That's likely your unreliable AP dropping offline and coming back frequently. Pixel thinks this is an attacker and stops joining it until it can hear the SSID consistently.