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.

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

I want Google to be better...

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?

If I'm taking a picture of something I want it to be real light-to-pixel action not some made up wambo-jambo

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

>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

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.

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.

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.

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?

https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1ano09x/pixel_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1jzo5hu/pixel_...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So it's not just a crop. It's a crop + hallucinate.

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...

None of that stuff adds value, just locks you in.

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.

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.

Do yourself a favour and read Samsung's privacy policy first.

- 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.

Unfortunately that goes for virtually any phone on the market... Sad.

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=...

Unfortunately I think this means Google will keep having to sell huge phones for a while

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 discovered that all the newer pant models that I purchased have bigger pockets, so that's not a problem anymore.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

- 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’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.

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.

- 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)

Working as intended. Apple wants their 30% cut by all possible means. Web apps would bypass their cut.

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.

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.”

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).

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.

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?

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.

Not every phone related post needs to become one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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)

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 should be illegal to put glass on the back of a phone.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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 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.)

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?

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.

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.

> "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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Apple want you to use the apps they've curated , not web apps, not apps or games from 3rd party stores etc.

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.

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 legitimately struggle to find anything better.

(Battery, perhaps?)

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.

So? Big deal...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

# 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.

- Wi-Fi calling and other IMS services

- Work profile app traffic

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

All of which make sense to me except push notifications. My guess is they might mean syncing notifications to e.g. a watch.

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.

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'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.

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.

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! :)

My computer is ~$6,000, so that would be a pretty high bar for me.

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, ...)

If they hadn't gotten rid of the fingerprint sensor, I'd believe in the sincerity of that statement.

> It is not terrible

The fingerprint sensor was at the perfect location, it worked perfectly. FaceID has the downsides I have outlined and therefore in my opinion absolutely terrible.

> Especially on newer phones which support landscape rotation etc.

I don't understand how you could say "newer phones which support landscape rotation" in 2025 with a straight face. Even iPod Touch 2G supported landscape rotation.

The rotation doesn't help anyway, it is technically capable of detecting it is sitting still on my desk but it still does the FaceID dance first before showing me the passcode prompt which I also don't appreciate along with scanning my face every 30 seconds even when unlocked.

If it can scan it so rapidly, why not show me the passcode prompt or design the UX better so that I can already input my passcode before waiting for the device to decide it sees no face in there?

It can do it better but by design it is too eager to just perform the FaceID unlock and then turn itself into a user presence and attention sensor.

I'd easily pay $100 extra for an iPhone that didn't solely rely on FaceID to log me in and instead gave me a fingerprint sensor it had from generations ago.