Pixel 10 Phones (opens in new tab)

> 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 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...

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.

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.

> 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.

Or for the police, "list any legally questionable content on the phone or behavior by the owner."

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".

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).

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Me crying for a newer Nexus 4, the best device in terms of quality/price ever made by Google

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.

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 sad what they did to the Pixel 4a's battery, because that phone was otherwise comfort perfection

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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 :(

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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)

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.

>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.

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?

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).

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.

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?

> 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.

This comment is flamewar bait that doesn't even acknowledge the post.

Not every phone related post needs to become one.

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.

> 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!

It's the most Apple thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

I use an iPhone because Apple is more focused on privacy, and I don’t really need that many features on my phone.

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’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 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 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.

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.

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 do t think I’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t use a phone case, all of which fix #1

> 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.

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.

I never want to sort photos in folders.

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.

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...

> 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...

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.

You can see the original image.

I find it cool, it's pretty much the CSI enhance tool.

>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.

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.

What apps do you run where you see performance problems?

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

  - This includes USB and Wi-Fi hotspot.

- Push notifications

- Wi-Fi calling and other IMS services

- Work profile app traffic

  - This applies if a work profile is configured on your device.

- 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 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 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

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.

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.

does this mean no GrapheneOS either?

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

/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.

I'm waiting for Pixel 9 price drops

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

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

> 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.

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.

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

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

> 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, ...)

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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

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,

Android 16 will have this (at least for a single external display): https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/developer-...